Teaching our English lesson (plus two photos from Punta dance lessons!)

Kayla, Ryan, and Emily with the students while they work.

Proudly showing off their finished products!

Jim and Peter joined us for Punta dance lessons.

The Beginning of Self-Directed Projects

All 15 of us trainees are required to complete self-directed projects during this second half of training.  These projects are for our benefit, to gain experience working with Honduras youth, parents, and teachers.  There are 5 different locations so we are in groups of 3 at each location.  One is an orphanage in the next town over and the rest are schools.  Emily, Michelle, and I are working at the school right in our town, so we can walk there whenever we need.  The school year in Honduras is from February to November and the students go to school from 7am-1pm each day.  We only have nine afternoons allotted to self-directed projects, entonces these will not be sustainable projects for the most part.  The three of us decided that we would like to work with special education students since they receive no individual attention of any kind. 

This afternoon was dedicated to meeting the students and hopefully assessing their needs.  We were able to speak with the school director yesterday (and in the process we got left behind at the school while the rest of our entire training group drove to a different town) and we told him our game plan.  Luckily, the director was very willing to work with us and ask the teachers about their students with the greatest needs.  When we arrived at the school today, there was a list of 26 students grades 1 through 6 with descriptions of what the need.  We had an hour to cement our preparation because the students eat lunch from 1 to 2, and then 17 students showed up in all.  We had a successful afternoon with them, going over the alphabet, singing some sings, doing a read-aloud, and working with vowels.  We had a few games and dinamicas planned to help break the ice and keep the students interested. 

I learned a lot from this afternoon.  The students were more cooperative than I expected, although one 15 year old boy who is in third grade brought in a giant water gun and was squirting it at a little girl in the class.  Other than that, the time went fairly smoothly.  Personally, I need to learn a lot more Spanish before I will be comfortable teaching alone.  The three of us work very well together, but next time we will split into two groups.  Both Emily and Michelle are fluent in Spanish, so Michelle will take smaller group of the fourth through sixth graders and Emily and I will teach a larger group of first through third graders until I am more comfortable on my own and we can have three separate groups.  I am very lucky to have such accommodating partners!  Those girls are my best friends here and it is even better that we are all in the same location for our projects!  Working together, these few short weeks should be as successful as possible!

Teaching an English lesson in Spanish

On Wednesday morning, we completed our second charlas in Spanish to the youth at the school in our town.  The point of this charla was to gain practice in teaching English.  We have been learning about TEAM (Teaching English and Methodology) which is a program that Volunteers usually work with in their sites in which they teach English to other teachers.  Our practice round was with students instead of teachers.

My group members and I taught a class of 13 fourth graders about the colors.  For the most part, we spoke in Spanish, but the point was for the students to learn the colors in English.  We had a lot of fun with the students and they were surprisingly cooperative.  We ended the lesson by giving them each a paper on which they had to write the English sentence “I like ____.”  They had to fill in the blank with a color and draw a few things of that color.  I took a couple of pictures of this end activity because the students were very proud of their work.  I wish I had remembered my camera sooner!  This was a very positive experience and the students were very open to working with us!  

Photos of hiking

At the movie theater to see Harry Potter 7.2!

We all made it to the end!

The view from my back door.

Walking along the road towards my house.

We don't yet know how different a 10K race in Honduras is going to be...

The Ghost Bus! 

Me, Sarah, and Natalie at the starting line/ghost bus.

The 10K race was basically up one side of a mountain and back down the other.  Great views though!

Yes, the second animal is a donkey carrying a whole bunch of what appears to be grass.

Me and Chris along the way.

An entrance to an old gold mine in the mountains.

There were a lot of cave (mine) entrances but most were blocked off.

Beautiful mountainous jungle.

A 10K race in Honduras is not as easy as we thought...

A few weeks ago, Julie noticed a poster advertising a 10K run/walk outside a mercadito in our town.  Most everyone in the group was interested in running or walking, and we figured it would give us a chance to see some sights or explore other areas.  The race was in Parque Nacional La Tigra and we decided that since we didn’t know what the road would be like, we would all just walk together to have fun, and not really try to race.  Well that was a good decision because there was no road, and in some parts there was barely even a trail.  And the first 6k of the 10k was straight up a mountain.  There were stretches of trail that were so steep they literally appeared vertical.

Needless to say, it was unlike anything we were expecting, but we had fun!  For a while, there were great views of the valley below us and the mountains in the distance, but as we climbed higher, it became more of a closed-in rain forest.  The air got really cold, the ground was wet everywhere, the trees were covered in lush, green moss, and the clouds descended around us.  It was unlike any hiking I have ever done before.  We also passed a bunch of cave entrances.  Only the first one was really big enough for us to feel comfortable climbing into, and we didn’t think it was safe to explore too far into the cave.  These tunnels actually lead to the old mines where people used to mine silver and gold.  The mountains between San Juancito (where the race began) and Tegucigalpa (the capital city) are full of abandoned mines.  We never saw any big waterfalls or cool animals, but the trees were still worth looking at.  It was a difficult hike, but a great experience!  The race ended in a “town” called Jutiapa and we waited there for a few hours for a bus to come pick us up to take us down the mountain to Tegucigalpa where we had to catch a different bus to our town.  This bus ride down the mountain was another experience in itself.  The road was tiny and worn out and there were hairpin turns where we though the wheels would slide over the mountain side.  It was bumpy and a little bit scary, and very slow, but we made it safely.  We now understand why bus traveling in this country takes hours longer than it would in the states.  It could also have to do with the fact that the buses are ancient school buses driven down from America.  The bus we happened to catch was actually from a school district in Indiana that one of my group members lives near.  How is that for weird?  I will try to put up some more pictures from our hike!

Our first charla!

On the morning of Friday, August 5, we successfully gave our first charla in Spanish to the young students at Israel Muñez, the elementary school in our town.  The day before, my fellow trainees and I had received instructions on how to implement the program Colgate, a dental hygiene awareness program.  It is not a difficult program to learn because it focuses on teaching children the proper way to brush their teeth and helps them to understand the importance of dental hygiene (which is severely neglected in Honduras).  90% of people between ages 6 and 15 have cavities, so hopefully this program can decrease that amount.  The 15 trainees in my group were broken up into groups to be able to work with different grade levels.  Chris, Kayla, Julie and I were assigned to kinder, which included a very basic lesson for the students since they are so young.  We gave a poster to the class about dental hygiene, as well as a packet to each student with toothbrushes and toothpaste.  Our actual lesson consisted of an opening game, a few songs, and an activity with questions.  The children each got a paper bear whose mouth opened up to show its teeth.  They colored the bear but the objective was to count the teeth and talk about how we use our teeth and the importance of keeping them healthy.  The students were really cute and excited to learn.  Most students already brush their teeth at home, and hopefully the others will begin to now.  It was a pretty simple first assignment, but we are all pleased that it went well!

Landslides won't bring us down.

We have a busy week ahead of us and the first day has already been crazy.  This morning we went out to San Juacito, a small pueblo about 35 minutes away.  The drive was gorgeous with incredible views of the valleys.  The roads in the area were not very good however, and even worse since it has poured every day for the past week.  But we made it safely to the Magic School.  This is a high school that specializes in the arts and we currently have a volunteer living and working in this site.  He is currently COSing (Close of Service) and leaves in early September so a trainee from my group will actually take over his site in September after we are sworn in as Volunteers.  We all think it will be Michelle, who specializes in art, or Chris, who specializes in music.  Anyway it had a nice atmosphere but we did not get to explore much since we are on a tight schedule.  Ronaldo, the Youth Development project manager, spent some time sharing workbooks with us that contain possible curriculums.  We were really there to watch David, the volunteer, conduct a class/session with his students.  It was supposed to begin at 10 but by 10:40 not even half the students were there.  This is a common frustration for volunteers becaus as we have been told repeatedly, Hondurans do not care much for calendars or appointments.  He finally began at 11 with the students who were present.  We were no able to see much since we needed to leave around 11:30 in order to make it back to our town by 12 when our lunch break starts.  Students in David's class were still arriving by the time we left.

It was interesting to see hm interact with the students and gives me hope that I will be fluentin Spanish one day!  The drive home was eventful. On the way there we had passed a bunch of rocks and boulders on the road at one point and later a crowd of people lining the rod.  Well upon our return, the crowd of people and cars milling in the road turned out to be  funeral crowd.  They were all gathering outside the house and since there are no road laws in existence, people and cars were all over the place.  A while after we passed that, we had to stop suddenly around a band in the road on the moutain because a bunh of men were standing there with shovels.  All around them were huge boulders, way more than what we had passed the first time.  As Ronaldo was asking about the hold up, more rocks and water came tumbling down across the road, scattering the men in all directions. We sat in the car for about 15 minutes, watching a landslide in progress.  It was fascinating but a ittle scary.  Finally an impatient truck behind us seized a moment and plowed through where the rocks were smallest.  The remaining cars followed suit and we made it home safely but late.  It was an unusual experience for me and made me think about how different my life will be here.  Different but rarely dull!