Getting Settled

This is a picture of the road in front of our house.

Here is our nice blue house, soon to be named "Cielito Lindo" a la the Beverly restaurant.

Just a little note before we get started. We’re going to try and be as candid as possible in our writing to really let you know what is going on with us. We don’t want to offend anyone with what we write, so please understand this is just what we think. This especially applies to our thoughts on the school.

Alright, we’ve been in Gracias for 10 days now, and we’re adjusting to life here pretty well so far. We finally moved into our house 2 days ago, after a good amount of run-around with various people in charge of our housing. We got the go-ahead to move in last Wednesday, so we brought all of our stuff up via a very bumpy pickup truck ride up the dirt/rock road, only to find that we had no water here. So, we brought everything back down to the hotel for a few more nights. I guess the hotel owner finally lit a fire under the seats of the school administrators to get us out of our hotel and into our house, because we got to come back and move in on Friday. During those two days, the school sent some people in to paint the interior, so now it’s just blue on the outside, and white on the inside. We weren’t thrilled with the white because compounded with the lack of furniture, we’re living a pretty ascetic lifestyle up here on the mountain. Luckily, accumulating stuff is one of our specialties, so I’m sure we’ll make the house our own in no time.



Actually, we’ve already gotten a table from the school, some chairs, and Aaron put up some shelves in the kitchen and bathroom today with just boards and rope. If you’re thinking of writing to us at any time, we’d love to have any kind of pictures, magazine clippings, postcards, cards…anything colorful that we can stick on the wall! Oh, and along those lines, our address here is:

(my name and/or Aaron’s)
Guancascos
Gracias, Lempira
Honduras

Honestly, that’s it! No zipcode or anything, and since there are no road names or house numbers here, they just send all the mail addressed to Gringos to the same hotel, and we pick it up there. Everyone assures us that their mail (packages, too) arrives there pretty reliably.

Yesterday we went into town to pick up some things…it’s easy to get into town because it’s all downhill and sometimes we get a ride in a pickup going that way (we’re learning how to hold onto the sides to keep from bouncing around in there like popcorn). On the way back, though, we either have to walk uphill for 4 miles, or get a motortaxi, which takes about half an hour or more to go the 4 miles because of the rough road. We’re hoping to make it into town at least once during the week, and on weekends. Favorite stores so far: place without a name that is packed full of jars of every kind of fruit, vegetable, pickled stuff, jam, and fruit wine, with a couple freezers full of homemade popsicles in back (just pureed fruit in frozen dixie cups with sticks…sooo good), Jugos Y Mas—place that makes fresh juice, smoothies (called licuados here), and this bread place owned by this tiny lady that makes fresh wheat breads and sells yogurt (supposedly…we have missed it every time we’ve gone). There is a market with all sorts of odds and ends, and tons of minimarkets, stores that sell just plastic items like tupperware and dustpans, hardware stores, and little businesses that people run out of their houses.

Today we just spent some time at our house, cleaning up, walking up into the park and swimming in the river, and I had a 2-3 hour laundry adventure outside at our pila, which is a big cement tub with a built-in kind of washboard. Washing clothes here is a pretty big ordeal…soaking overnight, 2 kinds of detergent, scrubbing on the washboard, rinsing in a bucket and with the hose, wringing everything out, and then hanging it up. Well, I guess we won’t be washing things too often. And I won’t take washing machines for granted when we get back!

Technically we also started work last week. Thursday and Friday there was a kind of orientation for all of the teachers that are here so far (5 Americans and 2 Hondurans.) Normally it would just be for the foreign teachers but the school has changed ownership/management in the past month so this is a pretty big change and I’ll try to give you a brief background. So 7 years ago a Dutch woman named Frony (also owns the hotel we’d been staying at) started a bilingual school in Gracias to serve the local population with both paying and scholarship students. Over time the school grew and she secured money from a Dutch foundation to build a bigger school in Villa Verde, up the mountain from town. Besides being bilingual Frony instilled the school with an ecological mission, hoping to establish a connection between the students and their environment. In short the school grew a lot, parents wanted lots of different things, the foreign teachers didn’t always live up to expectations and there was a principal who didn’t get along with anyone. This all was very stressful for Frony and after an especially rough year last year she decided to sell the school. She sold the school to a large Honduran organization call Vida Abundante (Abundant Life) which is based as a huge church in Tegucigalpa but has many different service branches including 6 Christian schools.

We found out that the school was changing hands about a week before we were coming down. It definitely made us a little apprehensive and changed things for us and I’ll try to explain how it has affected us by giving some pros and cons of the change.

Pros:
1. Abundant Life is a large extremely organized organization that does a lot of good. They have started and support orphanages and medical clinics in some of the poorest areas of Honduras, all done for Hondurans by Hondurans.
2. In a country where timelines and schedules don’t really exist, they can make things happen quickly. The school officially changed hands two weeks ago and they have already completed some large construction projects finished and have found housing for all of the foreign teachers.
3. The structure of the school will be very helpful for a lot of the children. It sounds like last year consistency and structure were some of the big problems at the school with lots of discipline problems and no real set curriculum. With foreign teachers changing every year no one ever knew what the students had been taught and what they should be taught. The curriculum is very set and will give new teachers a lot of guidance.

Cons:
1. Its not what we signed up for. After teaching at Landmark we both have gotten really good at coming up with curriculum out of thin air. We were both looking forward to the more relaxed atmosphere and learning how to teach younger kids. Also the religious focus of the school trumps the ecological mission. The fact that the school was not religious before is one of the major reasons we chose it. Melanie and I have both had some negative experiences with evangelical Christianity and so it is difficult for us to work for this type of organization. It isn’t an ideal situation for either group involved, us not being what they want in Christian teachers and it not being the school we signed up for, but we both want to make it work and I think it will.
2. The school is extremely strict. Teachers and students have to wear full uniforms (blazer, slacks and tie for me) and students have to stand up in the classroom to talk. Its not that it is totally bad, but it is not really part of either of our educational philosophies.
Here are a couple of the things that students can get demerits for:
a. Use of fingernail polish or makeup
b. Being a nuisance
c. Inadequate posture
d. Having a challenging attitude towards the established order.
I don’t think the demerit system will come into play that much with the elementary kids but I sure know that I would have gotten a lot of demerits in high school.
3. A huge difference in philosophy. The whole religious differences issue bleeds over into a lot of other beliefs that contradict each other, from evolution to homosexuality to how history is recorded. The school uses a Christian curriculum called Abeka books which looks very well organized but which contradicts many of the things that are part of who we are and what we believe. It is going to be difficult to reconcile the differences between what we believe and what the curriculum says we should teach. The curriculum already has daily lesson plans for every subject for the entire year so most of our actual planning time will be coming up with a compromise for some of the more controversial material. Luckily, we are mainly teaching 3rd grade (Melanie) and 4th grade (Aaron), so the controversial issues probably won’t arise in the curriculum as much as they would in higher grade levels, since we’re pretty much just covering plants and animals and the water cycle in science class this year.

All that being said we’re both really looking forward to the school year and the challenges it holds. Working with younger students is going to be a nice change of pace and the school is in an absolutely breathtaking setting (when construction finishes up we’ll post some pictures.)

This week we have to be at school, I guess sort of like teacher workdays. It seems to be the common syndrome of there is too much to do and there is nothing to do all at once. Mostly what we’re doing right now is decorating our doors and porusing the curriculum. Apparently the textbooks aren’t going to arrive for a couple of weeks so that will give us a welcome opportunity to improvise.

We are both looking for suggestions so anyone who has some favorite books from 3-4th grade please send them our way.