Getting situated

Written Tuesday, August 17, 2010

My life for the next year has finally begun! I am in La Unión in the department of Lempira. It is absolutely beautiful here! La Unión is a very small town up in the mountains. The town is so small that we don’t have paved roads, mail delivery or a post office. Despite the how small the town is I really haven’t found myself bored yet, hence the lack of blog posts.

I am living with a couple and their 3 children. Josselyn is in 3rd grade, Josue is 5 and Diane is about 6 months old. Needless to say it is generally pretty chaotic around here, but I’ve enjoyed it so far. Living with them has given me tons of opportunities to practice my Spanish and learn how to speak more like a “catracha” (Honduran). Their family is quite wealthy by Honduran standards and has actually moved out of their house and into an apartment they built beside the house. It’s small, but I guess it’s working alright for them. I am living in their 4 bedroom house with 3 other teachers from the bilingual school I’m working at, Vida Abundante. Life is good here! Our rent includes having people cook 3 meals a day for us and do our laundry. It’s better than home! As for my roommates, Amelia is from Michigan and Bryony and Holle are from England. Amelia and I each have our own rooms and Breony and Holle share a room. The 4^th room will be Bret’s room when he moves down here in October.

Bret is involved in the micro-financing group that started at the University of Michigan and is helping give loans to coffee farmers down here. There are 2 other guys living here that are involved in the group, Mike and Patrick, and Amelia knows them because she worked with them last summer here in La Unión and her boyfriend is working with them but he’s working back in the states right now. Mike and Patrick live with Jake, the guy who hired me to work at the school. He’s also from Michigan, but didn’t attend UofM for school. Basically it’s one giant Michigan party down here!

Monday we began working at Vida Abundante getting our classrooms together and figuring out our schedules. School actually starts on Monday the 23^rd with a parent meeting on Friday the 20^th, but, go figure, my classroom isn’t done being built yet. I am the homeroom teacher for 9^th grade, which is the oldest class they have right now. Therefore, they needed to build another classroom to accommodate another grade of students. You would think that this would have been taken care of during the ample summer vacation, but that’s just not the Honduran way. So, I’m unable to decorate my classroom this week, and probably won’t be able to do so until Sunday or quite possibly Monday after they finish painting the room. However, I’m just going with the flow and trying to figure out what I’m going to teach for the first week.

I am teaching English language classes and history to the 7^th, 8^th and 9^th graders and I will do devotionals every morning with my 9^th grade homeroom. I love the way classes are done here because you don’t have every class every day. The only class I have every day should be devotionals in homeroom. On Mondays I have homeroom from 7:20-7:40 and don’t have another class until after recess, at 10:40. Then on Fridays I am done with classes at 1:20 and school ends at 2:40. I have a pretty sweet schedule. It will probably change because that’s how things work here, but I really hope it stays as it is.

All of my classes will be taught in English. I have around twenty or so 7^th graders, nine 8^th graders and twenty-nine 9^th graders. The curriculum is pretty much laid out for us, so even though I’m teaching 7 classes I have plans I can follow that are already laid out. I plan on adding in some more fun activities, but at least I don’t have to kill myself planning for 7 different classes. It’s fun because I get to teach world history in 7^th grade, US history in 8^th and world geography in 9^th. I have a lot of variety in what I teach, which I think will end up being a good thing.

The power just went out, which is apparently a pretty common occurrence here, so I’ll wrap this up to conserve my battery. I will do my best to update more regularly. I miss everyone back home and hope all is well. Please update me on everything back home via email. The internet here is impossibly terrible, so even if I don’t respond to you right away I will definitely be reading emails. Thanks for all of your support!