El Probema con la Escuela

The problem with school is simple...you have behavior problems. The problem is that these not being my own kids I can't spank them, take away dinner, make them finish homework before playing, take away tv, take away video games, etc. So a kid misbehaves, we tell the parents, and then it's out of our hands for the most part. What are you going to say, "I'm going to give you double the homework!" the kid doesn't do it anyways. "I'm going to take you out of the classroom!" He would prefer to run around outside.
The real problem with it though is that the vast majority of kids that I've seen problems with the parents have come in at some point and you realize, "that explains so much about your son!" You may tell the parent that the child is constantly picking on other kids and the response may be something like, "well it's cause other kids pick on him first." Or maybe, "your son never comes to school with his homework completed." And the quick response is, "Well he doesn't understand it." The response should be simple, "Your kid is in first grade! He's drawing squares! Help him with it!"
If only I could be the parent of all the children....I could spank them, take away their tv, and solve all the problems of the world...maybe not.:)

¿Por Qué Es Todo Mejor en Español?

This week has been just another uneventful week down here. Things that seem out of the ordinary to folks back home happen all the time here and I think nothing of it. So when I schooled a couple first graders in soccer the other day, or chowed down on some baleadas, or drank my granita de café they all seemed like such normal things. I think that the reason I blog so much at the start of the year is because after being in the States I notice all the funny things and write about them. Now, just a couple months into this whole librarian thing and everything around here seems normal.
Speaking of librarian, I made it through a whole week with just working in the library and not substituting! I was super excited about that. I enjoy subbing, and I enjoy working in the library….it’s like two favorites, but library is slightly more favorite than subbing. I was thankful to get a little rest from subbing. Library work this week involved finally starting on cleaning up our “resource room.” It is a mess of books that are mostly junk, with some awesome keepers in their! I threw out about 9 huge garbage bags full of books as well as 4 or 5 boxes….and I’m only part way through. We’re talking about encyclopedia’s from 1974, science books from the 60’s, copies of half of a literature book, and many other useless things for our school. However, in the keeper pile I have more copies of books like, Number the Stars, Danny: Champion of the World, Before we were Free, etc. and Madlibs! What person doesn’t love Madlibs? Right now I’m feeling all in tip top “library shape” and I hope that this continues throughout the whole year.

Ojala Siga Lloviendo!

I show back up at school today after a week of vacation and I'm thinking..."ugh, back to the grind." I show up and notice that there doesn't seem to be as many students as I previously remember. Turns out the highways around here are TERRIBLE! The highway between Copan and Santa Rita (where we have about 50 students) has always been terrible, but with a tropical depression passing over the past week or so it's now worse than ever. There are highways down by Tegucigalpa that are totally wiped out with rivers swollen more than Hurricane Felix last year. Some say it's worse than Hurricane Mitch in some parts....but I think that they've forgotten already how bad that was. Anyways, with all this rain and 50 students missing we only had classes until 9am! I was very sad....but after I mourned for a couple seconds I had an extra spark in my step.:)
Now here we are wondering if we're going to have school tomorrow. It hasn't rained much today but it hasn't heated up to clear out the old rain. I'm hoping that it rains tonight to have one extra day off. Some schools are canceled through Thursday due to bad weather. You can probably look up pictures and stories and stuff online...probably not CNN as this doesn't pertain with the US or a Leftist ruler...but other news sites might have it.:) We'll see what happens...

Gana Honduras!

Last night I went to my second ever futbol game here in Honduras and my first of the National Team. It's the fourth game in the second round for the World Cup '10. This game was vs. Canada (which we beat 2-1 in Canada). I was one of some 35,000 happy fans at kickoff...do you say that in futbol or is that a football term? I think it's both. Maybe I should go back to the start. I went with Graham (teaches at Mayatan) and Teresa as well as 25 or so Honduran folks. We were going to meet with David and Cody (and David's sister) at the game but they came late, at halftime. We took a bus at 2pm, got to the game at 6pm, left at 10pm, and got home at 2am!
The first half was fairly uneventful. Honduras scored a goal 8 minutes into the game, I jumped up, screamed, yelled, clapped, and then sat back down. I wanted to sit in the middle of our Honduran group but got stuck on the outside without anybody near me that I knew. The second half I went and got David, Cody, and his sister and then got a seat in the middle of the Honduran crowd! Canada scored a goal quickly in the second half to quiet us all down and sit us down. But just about 8 minutes after that Honduras took the lead on a sweet goal! We all jumped up, clapped, yelled, gave high 5's, and cheered. One of the guys in the group, being completely smashed, told me "Fijate que pareces Catracho!" (look dude, you seem Honduran!). We stayed standing the rest of the first half singing, yelling, shouting, and of course shouting at the ref. Honduras added on one last goal at the end to make it 3-1 final. The same drunk buddy who told me that I seem Honduran then told me on the way out that I was Honduran...several times. Once again proving the theory, alcohol ruins your judgment.

Rainy Season

Rainy Season
Originally uploaded by hoofter24

Remember a few blogs ago I said something about posting pictures of the rain...well I finally got around to it on flickr...this is one of the pictures outside my house with the pouring down rain. It's eased up now though and is more like a Seattle drizzle when it rains...

Brigada Medica Part II

Thursday at the medical brigade was a long and relatively uneventful day as not many people passed through. One of the girls that passed through made a sad impact on me though. She’s pregnant and when I first saw her I thought, “wow, she’s really young!” But of course here in Latin America family takes care of family so I figured her parents would probably be helping. Turns out that she’s 14, boyfriend got her pregnant and then dropped her like yesterday’s newspaper, and now her parents are telling her, “If you keep that baby you are never to come back to us.” How’s that for a support system? This is not like the States or another developed country where she then runs to a support shelter, there has never been such a thing even heard of around here. So what will she do? Who in the world knows? The lady from the brigade who was helping her began to cry about the whole situation. I didn’t want to then tell her about Dr. Maritza’s story. She used to work at the same clinic we are at this week and one day a girl arrived of about that age and gave birth. She was going to keep the baby but her parents came and said, “If you walk out of this clinic with that baby you are never seeing us again.” Long story short, she turned the baby over to a family near the clinic and went back home to her parents. That kind of leads you to think that this isn’t the most uncommon of situations, eh? The lady in the brigade says, “I would never let that happen to me!” But there are several huge differences in culture here. The girl here will at best have gone through 6th grade (maybe a little higher), be working, be dating older men (20+ years old), and she lives in a society where men dominate every part of the relationship. I don’t mean that in a sense like we think about in the States, I mean it in a much more extreme sense. You could gather some big differences I think from that list compared with most cases in the States. There’s no real moral to my story here, I just wanted to share a sad case in our brigade…we have pretty good lives.
Just a slight add-on to the previous story: The same pregnant gal came back in on Friday with the complaint of a “worm in her leg.” She lifted up her pant-leg to show me and it looked like a mosquito bite, but I thought since I’m no nurse I’ll pass her on to the nurse. The nurse said, “You know, I’m no doctor, but this looks like a mosquito bite.” We pass her onto the doctor and he says, “Why did you send her to me for a mosquito bite?” Oh the worries of some people over simple things.:)