The President

Written October 8th, 2010

Today marks my two-month anniversary of being in Honduras. In order to mark such a momentous occasion, the President of Honduras came to La Unión. He actually came to hand out money, but a girl can dream, right?

I knew a few days ahead of time that he was coming, but this morning our principal told us that we would be taking the entire school to town sometime between 11 and 12 to hear Pepe speak. Of course, this being Honduras, there was no plan to speak of. Around 11:30 we were told that the kids should get their lunches to put in the classroom and then we were walking into town. The 7^th, 8^th and 9^th graders were to hold the hands of 2 elementary schoolers as we walked the 25 minutes to where the president would be speaking. No lists of which students were at school, who was paired with who, alerting the parents of what was going on, no plan, nothing. If you are a teacher you can only imagine how hard it was to just let this happen. But it did.

So we all walked into town, all of the high schoolers and teachers with two younger children in tow. We waited for about 30 minutes, and, finally, Pepe showed up in his helicopter. He landed in a field and then had a few Suburbans to drive him and his posse to where he would be speaking. The Honduras “Secret Service” and military were everywhere. When he finally arrived, he walked into the crowd of, supposedly, 2,000 people. I shook his hand, he asked why I was in La Unión, I told him I was teaching and that Vida Abundante is a fantastic school. Yeah, I’m kind of a big deal. Be jealous. It was pretty cool though, and it’s funny that I met the President of Honduras and I can’t foresee meeting our President anytime soon. It was pretty neat.

After he greeted people and the pastor of Vida Abundante Church and the Catholic Church in town both opened the ceremony some of our students led the crowd in singing the national hymn of Honduras. After that we decided it was time to take off, because the 1^st and 2^nd graders were getting really restless and hungry. So we started the long walk back, and I somehow picked up an extra child along the way. We decided it would be fun to let the kids go to the field where the helicopters had landed, which was also really cool. One of our students got to go into the President’s helicopter and sit in his chair. One of the pilots was really great with the kids and was asking them about their grades, what they wanted to do when they grew up, and even talked to some of our high schoolers about how most of the officers in the army have bachelors and masters degrees. He told them about the importance of studying, and even gave his email address to the older kids who were interested in becoming pilots. I couldn’t have asked for a better teachable moment.

Upon returning to school with three tired and hungry 2^nd graders hanging off of me, we ate lunch, and it was just utter chaos for the rest of the day. We only had time for one more class period, and luckily I don’t have classes the last two periods on Fridays. So, the day was pretty short and chaotic, but really great. I think that it’s funny, because none of this would have happened in the United States, but everything worked out fine. I can’t even imagine a student being allowed to hop into Air Force One just to sit in the President’s seat. I must say, it was a pretty awesome Friday.