Serenades

Friday was Women's Day in Honduras, and most schools make a big fuss about it. At my school, we have about 15 women on staff, and an unbalanced 5 men. There were flowers and cake and speeches. Earlier that morning, I got up at 4 a.m. to meet two other teachers, Rodrigo and Ronmel, in a borrowed taxi cab. It rained the night before, and leaving my house in a hurry, I slipped off of my porch and fell into a stack of roofing tiles down below, breaking a few. I was fine. Ronmel brought his guitar and lyrics to songs with him. Our mission was to sing serenades to all the women from school.

It was a silly affair, due to our lack of sleep and tiptoeing around houses. We ruined some perfectly good songs that morning, but I think that's part of the fun. Spanish love songs are ridiculous by means of exaggeration, and it's hard not to laugh when you're singing about roses at dawn. We would serenade outside of the gate, and then run to the cab, giggling and dodging puddles.

I really like all of the teachers at this school. They are impressive people, and it's exciting and different to share these times with them.

Returning to Honduras

My plane flight back to Honduras didn´t go as planned. I made the mistake of flying late on the Sunday before classes started. The schedule said that I would be in San Pedro Sula at 12:40 AM. As it turned out, I walked out of the San Pedro airport terminal at 4 AM. Never trust Spirit Air to be punctual.

My hostel was a tremendous help, however. The owner, Luis, picked me up at the airport at 4 o´clock and didn´t complain a bit. He and his wife Blanca run the hostel. In the morning, they made me coffee and got me to the bus station. San Pedro Sula is the city where you don´t want to be lost or alone, and I am incredibly grateful for Luis´help. I imagine he slept a few hours that night on account of me, and they only charged me $16 for the airport pickup.
The busride back to Siguatepeque was arduous... it took about 4 hours, and I would drift in and out of sleep, waking each time to some new eccentricity. One time it was a man standing in the aisle making a long sales pitch about some miracle vitamins that cure high blood pressure and body odor at the same time (only 100 little Lempiras!).

I succeeded in missing the first day of school, and took a short nap that afternoon. But I have a class assistant now! No more 27 vs. 1. Really, two teachers are so much better than one.
This past Saturday I went on bike ride towards La Esperanza with my friend Carlos. It is a difficult ride, with steep and sustained uphills, but we rode back down to Siguatepeque in a quarter of the time. The downhills were of the sort that make tears stream out of your eyes. ¡A la muerte!

Later that night, I rode out to a party at a discoteque/ cafe to meet some friends. The guards wouldn´t let me chain my bike up inside the front yard, so I chained it to a metal post just down the street. Later that night, I went to get it, and there was nothing on the post. I frantically searched, as if it could be somehow hidden in the shadows, but it was gone. I came to Honduras expecting to be robbed, but all the same, it came as a shock.
The walk home was about 50 minutes. 15 minutes out from my house, a thin guy, maybe 25 years old, ran up to me. I thought this was strange, so I asked ¿Qué tal?...What's up? He said, after some small talk,

"My two friends back there want to rob you."
"What? Are you serious?"

The strange thing was how he was telling me about this. Was he trying to warn me, or what? I tried to stay calm, but it was an uncomfortable situation. I told him that I was going to a friends house, and cut down the next street close to where Carlos lives. The thin guy said something like "No, walk with me," but he didn't follow me. One of his friends threw a rock, which bounced off the ground and hit me in the leg. They all ran off giggling. I think they were drunk and wanted to play around.
It was enough to shake me up emotionally. And if my bike wasn´t stolen, I wouldn´t have been harrassed. Oh, well, new lessons and new stories to tell.

Feel free to keep in touch!
Email: brett.bort@gmail.com

Letters:
Brett Donahue
Del Sol Montessori Bilingual School.
Calle 21 de Agosto, Aptdo. #194
Siguatepeque, Honduras, C.A.

I will try to upload a video from the bike ride soon.
It was great to see some of you in December!

Climbing Walls

It's been a while since I've written. The inspiration comes and goes.

The school starts slowly on Fridays. The buses arrive a little late, and kids trickle into first period with groggy eyes. I arrived at 6:50 this morning, which for a normal day is on the late side, but today only a handful of people stood outside. The main door was locked, which meant that none of the directors were there. Quite naturally, I set my bike against the outside wall, climbed up until I was standing on the top of the frame. It was an easy mantle move up over the wall, and then a drop into the empty courtyard. I opened the doors, and the day continued as always, with the struggles and small victories of teaching and learning.

I've seen this stunt before, at a soccer game. I was sitting on the the top bleacher, at the edge of a high cinderblock wall, and a head pops up from the other side. Looking down, I saw a lankey Honduran tiptoe-ing on his parked bicycle. He waited for a moment of distraction, and in one rush of movement he was sitting, relaxed, on the bleachers. He had clearly made a habit of watching soccer games for free.

Maybe I am becoming Honduran.

I can't figure these kids out. They are uncontrollable at times, and then all they want to do is hug their teachers. If they see my on my bike, I take on an image beyond school. I am not just their teacher, but the teacher with a bike. It's really encouraging to see my students pressing their noses to the car windows and waving urgently, yelling ''Mister!''. Maybe most flattering of all is a quiet kid, Edgar, who came to school with a haircut like mine. Hopefully, I am affecting them in some quiet part of their childhood.
The kids bring me fruit. They want to share with me. Today I got three licha, which are spiny, red casings with grape-like meat inside.

Children's books always end with some whimsical high-note. Like in the story with cats trying to cook, the messes are happy learning experiences. I think that part of the goodness of childhood is seeing the world as neat and orderly, authored with a happy ending in mind. We don't like to talk to kids about the terrible nature of the world, and for some good reasons.

My experience is at times bright and joyful, like a book for children, where all the appliances in the kitchen are labelled, and the explosions in the oven are invitations to laugh.

• The Mister climbs the wall, now everyone can go to school.

• The Mister rides his bike! Ride, Mister Brett, ride!
  

The opposite is, of course, true. My class has grown from a full 25 to 27. I remember guiding river trips on the Ocoee, and some days I would have a seventh person (from the usual six) in my raft. The weight, apparent in every turn, was exciting and above all stressful. The paddle would bow under the pull of the water: the strain of a small rudder directing the mass. Class is indeed stressful. In order to check on all the kids, I can spend 10 seconds with each one and then move on.

And yet, the fruit and waving kids are simple enough. The world can be good enough, if I stop thinking about the difficulties so much. Children's books are true in their own way, because they have faith in the simplest things: sun-lit kitchen windows and cups of tea.

See some pictures here:
http://appstate.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2115209&l=08892&id=29705820

Settling In, Part 2

Life, no matter how strange, becomes normal. The colors that at first were vivid cease to attract the eyes, and new routes between school and home don't grab the imagination. I've seen quite a bit, so how different could a new path be? Of course, we work ourselves out of normalcy and find new adventures. We try to keep life exciting and new. If life never settles out, though, how can it ever be exciting?

Siguatepeque feels so normal now. It isn't too odd to be the extranjero, to use new words for fruits at the market, to be a teacher.

Getting comfortable here is not necessarily blending in, but accepting how slow my adaptation will actually be. I knew that my Spanish wasn't especially great coming here, but now I understand that I didn't know the language at all- I could only translate English words into their nearest equivalent. Spanish and English are not the same language with different vocabularies. Phrases that feel so natural and obvious to people here make little sense back in the States, and (of course) the other way around.

My point: I'm beginning to learn Spanish as a language in its own right. It is a slow change from stiff and grammatical phrasing to something sorta colloquial.

I used to think that I could go anywhere in the world and call it my home. I could resolve any cultural differences and survive happily. I'm not so flexible. I have been shaped quite obviously by the world I lived in for 20+ years. Hondurans, and their country, present some interesting and frustrating differences. They have a sturdy simplicity about them. They grow up fast, much faster than I did. I've heard that where there is more technology, children mature at a slower rate, and that seems very accurate right now. Sometimes when I teach, I imagine I'm teaching middle-aged men and women in clumsy little bodies.

They know things, just as simple as that. I don't know if I know anything, and here I see people that know everything that they need to know or possibly will ever know by their high school graduation. It's not ignorance or stupidity; they know who they are, and will grow old on the same sturdy feet planted on the same sturdy soil. In the States, there is a cloud of anxiety that hangs over our heads... insecure side-stepping, constant grabbing for a new image or a new cool. But here people search through different means. They are inundated with the knowledge and identity of their country. It's amazing, school's go all out for the independence parades. Kids have to memorize anthems and dates and symbols and a national heroes.
They precede their knowledge, written or simply understood, with bullet points.

• Cana de Azucar



• Arroz y Frijol



• ...
  



• and that's all: sugarcane rice beans
  



• as if there is no need for further explanation.



• Honduras is



• what it is, unexplained and unexplainable.
  

An example: one of the teachers, Mr. Rodrigo, loves Honduran coffee. He pontificates on the health benefits, the rich flavor. But the coffee is stale and burnt to ash here. Mr. Rodrigo will always think the coffee, among many other things from Honduras, is "siempre rico," because it stirs more than the tastebuds. It stirs his patriotism.

• It's not bad, it's just different.

Check out a few more pictures at: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2110028&l=eb769&id=29705820

Settling In

Del Sol Montessori just wrapped up its tenth week today. Life has settled in many ways, and the oddities of not-quite-third-world living feel normal. My job puts routine in my life like I've never known. Sometimes I go for night strolls (my neighborhood is really safe) and I'm surprised by how different the streets look. Streetlights with spiderwebbed powerlines dot the cobbled streets. I like sitting in the park and watching the town close down. The town drunk tucks his bottle in the waist of his dirty pants just in time to take his dreamy sidewalk dive.
I've been taking Spanish lessons at another school with a few other North Americans. If for nothing else, it gets me away from overlong days at school. I was helping my students make up sentences one day, and while writing "The boy rides his bicycle," I realized that I wanted to ride a bicycle. Two days ago, I found a cool old Magna 10 speed road bike, the kind with the foil logo on the head tube, and I just had to buy it. I feel like I'm flying to school in the mornings, weaving throught traffic with my right pant leg rolled up.
Riding is one of those little flings of freedom that keep life a little interesting. I miss all the flexiblility of college and climbing whenever I wanted, but structure is good too. Growing up is good.

Cow Cow Cow.

A story:
I worked at a Jewish summer camp a year ago. I remember the Challah chant, where someone would yell "Cha!" and little kids would finish with "lah!" Then it gets silly, like "Chaaaaa, cha, cha.....Laaaaaaah, lah, lah." Get it?
I decided, in an effort to kill a little time on Friday, that we would do the "vaca" chant, which means cow. Simple enough. I say va, you say ca. But when I say va-va, the response takes on a slightly different edge. An online translator defines it like this:
caca f familiar
1 (excremento) poo: el niño quiere hacer caca, the boy needs to have a poo.

I lead over 20 second graders in the chanting "crap! crap! craaap!" and boy did they like it.
I was totally unaware until i noticed a few wide-eyed kids with their hands over their mouths. I'm still waiting to see if angry parents call me about my "teaching methods."

I've been reading in a book on how to teach the second grade, and one idea really made sense to me. There are two different classrooms. One has a teacher that stands at the front and because of some sense of authority or control, he or she demands that the kids work. Copy this, be quiet, read your book. Or, the teacher and the students can work on the same level, because everyone agrees that they want to learn. This allows the teacher to be a helper, moving about the classroom. This is what I want to do, but it is difficult. My class is cramped, and the students want to break free from their desks. And I only confuse them if we try to do an activity that doesn't involve copying from the board. I've heard that much of education here is copying and more copying. If I write fill-in-the-blank sentences on the board, many of the students copy the blank line and think they completed the task.
I'm realizing that much of the chaos in the classroom happens because they just don't know english. It's very discouraging to have most of your classes in a foreign language, I'm sure. I have to admire their creativity, though. They have mastered the technique of destroying pencils so they won't have to write. One kid even pokes holes in the screen wire windows and pushes his pencils out into the street. If they could just apply their creativity in other ways...
In order to build up their english, we're backtracking. This past week we did a lot of work with the ABC's and basic sentences. I feel like I'm making ground, because they are losing their inhibitions towards reading out loud and writing. I've made many mistakes, but another teacher here said hiring underqualified teachers is the only way that bilingual school's can run.

ps- Somewhere between the United States and Siguatepeque, suspended in mid-air, is a copy of radiohead's new album. I can only hope it will land in my mailbox.

Darwin

A few highlights of the past week:

1. A kid peed his pants in class, I think on purpose.
2. Bravo was stolen, or miraculously escaped from his leash.
3. I discovered mangos.

If the list above is any indication, there is a sweet ending to my problems. School is relentlessly long, and I'm utterly tired at the end of the day. And yet there are little things that keep me going, like mangos: somewhere in between the shape and density of a swollen fist and an oblong softball, they are meaty and heavy. It's common to eat them with salt and chile sauce, which makes for a sweet, sour, salty, and spicy taste.
There are experiences, weighty and complicated in taste, that also compel me. One of my kids, Darwin, is reckless and pushes girls instead of working. But he also carries my books for me and shines with the slightest compliment. I had to put Darwin in the "Red Zone," which means he behaved badly. I told his mother after school, and her eyes got sharp, and Darwin began to weep right in front of me as she scolded him. "Discúlpame!" Tears were now streaking his face. His mom made him say it louder. "Discúlpame! Discúlpame!" I had to stand, shoulders straight and no emotion, watching Darwin in his shame.
Discúlpame loosely translates as un-fault me or un-guilt me. It seems that this is how we might approach God with our failings, soft and confused. Discúlpame for the religious sentiment. I won't indulge myself by concluding the mango metaphor, as sweet and salty and sour and spicy as it is. You can do that yourself.