Coming to a Close

Hola Amigos y Familia,

I hope this blog finds you well. Como siempre (like always) it has been too long since I last wrote, but at least I'm getting to it now. You may have concluded from the title that my second year is coming to a close down here. That being the situation I have a lot on my mind: future plans for myself, the future of these students and this organization, leaving friends...changes. As of now I see myself on the 90/10 plan. 90% I am coming home on June 28 and 10% staying. I can't wait to see family and friends (you!) after all this time as well as live in the States again. There are foods I want to eat, places I want to see, and things I want to do again that I haven't been able to since I got down here. Also, I feel like I am ready to move on to the next chapter of my life. As of now, my most likely future seems to be returning to Santa Rosa for a few months and then hopefully moving back to San Luis Obispo to teach high school math and live with my old college roommate and good friend Michael Brew.

However, 10% still wants to stay. It is hard to leave the students, even though often times they seen to be the bane of my days. I love working with the people of OAF, the fellow volunteers and living with Mario. Also, I worry about the future here. As of now there is no one to take my place next year, as the junior high math teacher. Furthermore, looking at how much help is needed as the foundation grows makes one question how it will get done. Like always though, things seem to work out. Finally, I find myself wondering about the future of Olancho and Honduras in general...

One day, I took this photo from in front of my house. It is a little girl poking a stick in burning garbage on the side of the freeway. It made me sad and made me think about the poor state this country is in. After going to Mexico to the immigrant shelter I realized that even though I am living comfortably down here there are many people that are not. People are leaving by the thousands to go to the States where they hope for a better life. Also, lately, the violence here has gotten bad. The killing between people involved in drugs is very visible: hearing gun shots, seeing killings on the news, hearing about a friend of a friend being killed, being informed that a family member of one of our students was shot, or even the casual acquaintance suddenly having a funeral. Recently a Japanese volunteer organization, JICA, pulled their volunteers out of Olancho. Also, Peace Corps, pulled their volunteers out of the next town and don't plan on sending any more volunteers to Juticalpa after the current ones finish their time here. This is what I hear anyway. All of this makes me sad and makes me wonder about the future. Will OAF continue? Will Santa Clara have to shut down if volunteers can't keep coming? Just to keep things in perspective, I rarely feel unsafe down here and I have confidence that OAF would pull us out if they felt it was getting to dangerous for us. Also, like I said, the violence really only pertains to those in drugs. So don't worry about me, but this place could use prayers.

HOWEVER, if you sit around and think about the bad for too long you'll miss the good stuff that is also just as real.
And what better place to look for the brighter side of things than in the people that are right beside you in the fight. As you know Prince William recently got married, and with Andrew being English, he insisted we dress up and have 5:00 high tea. Long live the queen!
We recently had Dia del Trabajo (Labor Day).

Students can be a real source of joy if you step back for a moment from hounding them to pay attention or stop throwing their pencils at the ceiling fans. Here are my 7th graders thinking it is all too funny that they locked me out of the classroom before class. I'll see you all at lunch, ha!


We had Mother's Day.
Carlos Moreno, a familiar face around OAF, and a natural motivator came and did a dynamic workshop with the students about being unafraid to express their passion for God.

They got a real kick out of it...
and who couldn't with the activities like the human knot,


improvisational singing,even though some were more reluctant than others to perform,

and a 50 person congo/massage line.

I brought the old guitar one day and the students joined right in. Here is Francisco, aka Pancho, filling in as back up singer/drummer for La Bamba.

Then, Andrew came up with a great idea. Breaking away from the normal class routine, he decided we should have an Open House, where the students would put projects on display and invite the parents to come to see them. Being that we are at the end of the year, we definitely have some students who completely "checked out" academically and just want the year to be over. This Open House, however, seemed to spark something in a lot of them. I had kids who haven't given a hoot about school for months suddenly getting excited.

For Andrew's classes: history, art and activities (the equivalent of a home economics class), he had his students put up projects they had been working on all year as well as recently. These included:
Mayan calendars


Oriental writing


and Oriental paintings,


and four color paintings. Can you believe an 8th grader made this!

He asked us other teachers to come up with projects too, and so after consulting with the my salva vida (life saver) Cathy Brew, who is a veteran junior high math teacher in Santa Rosa, I had an idea for what we could do for math.

The 7th graders, since they were studying fractions, had to come up with a real life situation/problem that involved fractions. Then they had to visually and mathematically show how to solve the problem. I was really proud of Allison's Cookie project. She struggles a lot in math, but she was really proud of herself for doing this.


8th grade was required to take a recent topic we had studied in math and creatively present it: through a picture, song, poem, comic strip, etc. I liked this one (Buzz if you're reading this, this idea was thanks to you!)
square roots

negative fighting positives

I like this one a lot... the "Zero Zorro" (zorro meaning fox).

This one, however, took the cake. I was absolutely blown away by Rony's poem about adding negative numbers, not only because it was totally mathematically correct, but also because it was written by someone for whom English is a second language.

Here it is:

The Adding Negatives Poem

When adding to numbers
its usually done
to make things grow bigger
like flowers in the sun.
But adding has ways
to get smaller too,
like going from a larger
to a much smaller shoe.

"How does that happen?"
you might wanna ask.
Isn't adding things up
a "get bigger" task.
Usually so,
and that's what they've said,
but if you add negative numbers
you go down instead.

That is you get lower
on the old number line,
going straight left
all of my time.
Adding negative numbers is a "get smaller" art!
You end up smaller than you did at the start!
You still see a plus sign, +.

by Rony Wilberto Castejon

Incredible!


We also had a science fair.


It motivated the students to do some good projects,and really push their brains....yes, someone actually brought in a cow brain for their project.
This project was a real hit. Gerardo, Tony and Edgar did their project on non-Newtonian fluids, which, and I don't totally understand this, apparently defies the normal laws of viscosity. In laymens terms, they had a bowl of corn starch mixed with water, that when you put your finger in slowly, your finger would enter normally. However, if you tried to put your finger in quickly or punch the liquid with you fist, you could not break the surface....good job guys.
I can't see real good, is that Albert Einstein over there...no just Alejandro, but looking just as scientific.
This group, which did theirs on electro-chemical reactions won first prize. On the right were our guest judges, Heather and Eyal, peace corps volunteers here in Juti.
Besides all the school work, we are finding time to descansar un pocito (rest a bit). Anne and Carrie, two other volunteers and my neighbors decided we should go out to the Catholic Unversity for a picnic last Saturday and chill out. This is what the new part of campus looks like. They really friendo y comiendo (getting 'er done) with new classroom buildings and field/track.

Here they are.

I thought we volunteers were asked to come down to teach the core subjects: math, english and science, but Andrew seems to see things differently. Here he is showing the kids how to rave at school dance we had recently.
They were into it!

Well that's all for now. I will get another blog up before I come home, maybe two. As of now, I have exactly one month left and as Aerosmith says, "I don't wanna miss a thing."

Cuídense (take care).

Semana Santa 2011 part 1

Hello,

It has been a little over a month since my last blog and life is anything but dull, and for that I am grateful. The big thing that happened recently was Semana Santa (Holy Week) vacation. It is incredible how time passes because if you look through the archives of these blogs you will find a Semana Santa post from one year ago. Actually another tidbit of history repeating itself is that I went to Tapachula, Mexico, just like last year's Semana Santa, this time, however, for a very different reason.

Last year, myself and three other volunteers went to Tapachula because the second highest volcano in Central America, Tacaná, is just outside of it. You might remember us getting lost while hiking up it and finding ourselves in Guatemala...good times. This year's trip to Tapachula actually developed its roots back in August of 2010.

The new Santa Clara Escolar directora, Peggy, asked all of volunteers to read the book Enrique's Journey over the summer, well during June, July and August, before we started the new school year. This book is about a boy from Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, whose mother leaves him with his grandmother to go and work in the States. She leaves him because they live in poverty and by going al norte she hopes to find a job and send money back to support him. This is a real and common story of people here in Honduras. The book is about Enrique, the boy, growing up without a mother present and finally his decision to illegal travel to the USA to find her, via traintop through Mexico, an incredibly dangerous journey. Children making this journey to the States to find parents that have left them is also not uncommon. In fact, annually, at least 48,000 children enter the States illegally without parents with them. Enrique's Journey is an incredible book and I highly recommend it to anyone. This book especially hit me though because it really gave me perspective on why I am here in Honduras, to try to help improve this country so that families don't have to separate due to poverty. How does this relate to Semana Santa though?

Well, it turns out that a major artery that illegal immigrants take on their way to the States is through Tapachula, Mexico. This is because the trains that they ride begin there and then travel north. When I read this I couldn't believe it. I had been in the very same city where Enrique, his mom, and thousands of other immigrants have passed through on their way to, ironically, where I have chosen to take leave from for the last two years, California and other US states. The book mentions one place in particular that immigrants might visit while in Tapachula. It is an immigrant shelter called Albergue Jesus, El Buen Pastor de Pobre y el Migrante and it provides help to immigrants who have been injured on their journey al norte, like I said, these immigrants travel on the rooftops of trains, which often results in injury or death.

So, after reading this book, I thought to myself that it would really add to my Honduran experience if I went to this albergue (shelter) and see what was going on there. As the year continued and Semana Santa drew closer no other plans took me away from this idea and so Mario, who seems to be able to put up with my crazy ideas, and bought our tickets.

Mario wasn't the only one I shared my idea with though. I think I have mentioned that in addition to teaching math, I am teaching geography (and pe for that matter). One of the benefits of teaching in a developing country where there are not a lot of administrators on your back about educational standards (the required material), is that you have a lot of liberty to teach what you want. So I decided to take the entire 3rd quarter of geography and dedicate to looking at immigration between Central America and the USA.

Here are some of my 7th grade geography students. Now, I like math because it really comes alive for me, but this topic REALLY came alive. I had students telling me, " Yea, my mom made that journey." I felt like I was preaching to the choir half the time, in fact it was their stories that made the class interesting.

Sometime during that 3rd quarter, we decided to do a "solidarity walk" with the immigrants, sort of like a Relay for Life, for cancer patients. We decided to "walk" from Tegucigalpa to Nuevo Loredo, Texas. We planned to split up the distance, roughly 2,850 kilometers, between students and teachers and try to cummulatively reach Nueve Loredo before Cinco de Mayo (May 5). Above, the students are standing next to some of the posters they made for the the walk, that we posted in the school's hallway.

our route

our distances

Sadly, we only completed about half the distance from Tegus to Nuevo Loredo.


Well, shortly after the 3rd quarter ended, Semana Santa arrived and it was time to head to Tapacula to see the real thing.

As soon as school got out on Friday, Mario, myself and a number of other volunteers, starting their own spring break vacations, jumped on a bus and headed to Tegus.

We stayed with Mario's cousin's and aunt. Here Mario's niece, Katy, a vaquerita (a little cowgirl).

Mario's cousin's had a friend also staying with them from El Salvador and so she taught us to make papusas, El Salvador's trademark food meal.

The next day we go up early, jumped on the bus and headed toward Mexico, first passing through El Salvador.

Next we went through Guatemala. Here is Mario on the Guatemala, Mexico border, major landmark that Central American immigrants must pass through on their way to the states.

and how do they do it??? notice the wood/inner tube rafts

Finally, after two and a half days on bus we arrived at the Albergue in Tapachula. The staff were super friendly.

We immediately started meeting the people at the shelter, which we found out not only offers assistance to injured immigrants, but also acts as a sort of nursing home for elderly who have no where else to go. This is Luis, who was always asking for a cafecito (a little cup of coffee). He was one of Mario's and my favorites.

They had lots of things that needed to be done there. Here I am sorting boxes with an immigrant/shelter worker who, ironically, is from Juticalpa, Honduras.

Mario organizing

They also make manualidades (handicrafts) at the shelter which they sell to help support themselves.

Here is an El Salvadorian who had been making his way north but had fallen off the train and lost his leg. One of the major services that the shelter provides is obtaining prosthetic limbs for this sadly common case.

There were some other immigrants there with sad stories too. Here is a lady from Guatemala who chose not to talk to anyone. No on really knows why.

This man was an interesting case. He was a Chinese man, who everyone called Chino, and hald been at the shelter for over a year. He only spoke English. Upon asking how he ended up in this albergue in Southern Mexico, the staff said they knew very little bit about him because he had had a stroke and couldn't remember anything. He wasn't able to remember names or contact information of friends or family members. The albergue said they knew he was originally from Canada and they were in contact with the Canadian embassy trying to locate people who knew him. More than this, Mario I and were the only ones at the shelter who spoke English. I couldn't imagine how lost and alone this man must have felt and is still feeling! I tried to have a chat with him as often as I could because it was the only conversation he would have all day.

Upon further conversation with some workers at shelter they said he had been living in Tapachula before his stroke with a group of Chinese people, that may have been related to drugs. We speculated that he possibly was rejected by his group because of bad decision and so they have left him at the shelter in his incapacitated state. Really though, who this man is and what he is doing the albergue is a mystery to me.

Some of the other volunteers told me I was crazy to go the shelter for spring break instead of going somewhere like the sandy beaches of Costa Rica, but Mario and I got out and had some fun too. We helped at the shelfter in the day and at night we went out to enjoy ourselves. Here is downtown Tapachula when a cultural festival came to town.

Helping at the shelter also had its fun moments. Here I am learning how to make bread in the shelter's panadería (bakery), which is another means of income.

































I think they liked Mario better as a worker than me, because I kept asking if I could eat the bread,

but do you blame me!

Here's Mario with a shipment of bread ready to go out to be sold. Behind him was an immigrant/worker, who also was our roommate. We stayed in a little house about a mile from the shelter with her. She told us that she was from El Salvador, but was trying to make her way to Los Angeles, CA, where she has a daughter.

On the last day we said thanks to the directora, Olga Sanchez, and said goodbye.






































After that, it was time to start heading back to Honduras. Like last year though we had a day layover in San Salvador,

so we met up with our friends Rebeca and Alba, who graciously hosted us.

Again, like last year, we saw the Good Friday, alfombras (literally "rugs"), but actually, they were huge street murals made from colored salt.

We got up-close to see how they were made.

(ok, this blog had so many pictures I had to split it into two parts...see Semana Santa Part 2 below)