Spelling, tree huggers, lemonade stands & other random observations

Note: Sorry this is so long. I´ve been adding to it on random days and haven´t been able to get on the internet until now.

I made it to Catacamas! On Thursday the principal of my school came to pick me up from Tegus, and after several hours in the car I finally made it! I’m staying with a family here in Catacamas—they are really nice, but definitely treat me as an adult and give me my own space – they have three older kids (only one is still in the house, and he graduated college a year or two ago I think). So I think it will work out quite well. Went up to the school on Friday all day and met most of the other teachers—they are all really nice and seem very willing to help me out! Turns out I don’t get my own classroom (here the teachers move from class to class to teach, and only those with a homeroom class get their own room), which I was probably more disappointed about than I should have been. But I’ll get over it. I got to help the kindergarten teacher decorate her classroom though, which probably would have been more fun to decorate than a high school room anyway!

Today the principal invited me to go with him to visit some kids’ homes for a scholarship program they are starting this year. (Which was really nice of him, because otherwise I really would have had nothing to do today!) Turns out all of the kids who can attend my school are probably the richest kids in Catacamas. It wasn’t really what I was expecting—because that’s not the case for the other two schools I visited in La Union and Gracias, where the majority of the students are sponsored because they can’t afford it. Turns out the majority of families in Catacamas can’t afford it either—so a lot of the classes hardly have any kids—the 11^th grade only has 5 students in it! So I’m not sure why they didn’t start a scholarship program earlier, like the ones at the other schools. Nevertheless, they are starting a scholarship program this year, and there are ten kids going into kindergarten who will hopefully receive the scholarship. So the principal and I went and visited all of their houses today so they could fill out a socioeconomic form and I could take pictures of their homes to have on file for the school. I guess before he asked the preschool and kindergarten teachers at the public schools to recommend to him the brightest and smartest students, who they thought would be great for the school but who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford it. So those are the kids we visited today. I loved visiting the houses and meeting these people, and especially meeting the kids. It made me wish I was going to be teaching them in kindergarten! (I say that now, but I’d probably go crazy if I had to do that…) They were all so cute—one came up and greeted me with a big hug, and you should have seen their smiles when the principal told them they were going to get the scholarship.  One little boy, though, lives pretty far away from the school in a smaller community, and they aren’t sure how he would get to school. It wouldn’t be safe for him to ride a public bus that goes by there very early in the morning, but there’s no other way for him to get to school. So I’m not sure what they’re going to do. This is one of those instances where throwing money at the problem just isn’t going to make any difference. All the people we visited were quite poor, obviously. One single lady said that she can only afford to feed her four kids dinner each day.

But now to explain my cryptic title.

First, spelling. So it was interesting to see the questions asked on the socioeconomic form. There were similar questions that would be asked on a form such as this in the United States, like monthly income and expenses, and the grade level reached by the parents. It was still shocking to hear the responses though, like families of five who lived on $150 a month whose parents hadn’t went to school past elementary. And then there were other questions on the form that I never would have even thought of. For instance, what do you do with your trash? The most common response was probably to burn it, because there was no garbage truck that comes. Another question was about bathrooms—do you have a shower or toilet, or is it simply more of an outhouse? I couldn’t believe the number of people who lived without a shower, and I saw one bathroom that was literally just a hole in the ground outside. But then there were those questions that I thought were the easy ones. For instance, what is the child’s birthday? But one lady wasn’t sure what her son’s birthday was. And then, the most shocking of all to me, was two parents who didn’t know how to spell their daughter’s name. How do you not know how to spell your own daughter’s name? They were looking through school documents and all sorts of things to try to figure it out. Then they looked through her backpack and found some papers she had been practicing writing her name on, but even then they thought they had spelled it differently than it was spelled there. But they weren’t sure.

Second, tree huggers. For some reason, the principal and I were having a discussion in the car about car washes, and I told him I usually just wash my own car at home, but he didn’t seem to understand how. I told him I just use the hose, but he was like, “Well who do you ask for permission to do that?” I told him I didn’t have to, and he just didn’t seem to get it because it would waste so much water. I told him the water never runs out in the United States, and so he had to tell me that of course it would one day run out. He’s a self-proclaimed tree hugger. Long story short, he wouldn’t let it rest until I promised him that I would try to conserve water better when I got back to the states. How I’m going to do that, I’m not exactly sure. They are just so much more careful with their water here, because it always seems to turn off. Even my family, who it seems are more well off (relatively) have bucket showers. I wasn’t expecting it, so you can imagine my surprise when I first went to open the shower curtain and found a large barrel of cold water inside that I had to shower with!

And, lastly, lemonade stands. This is a bit random, but on our drives out in these rural areas and through mountains, we encountered a few little boys on some bridges who would stand on either side and lift up a rope so that cars couldn’t pass through. Then, when we got close enough, they would let it down and run up to the driver’s window, asking for money to pass. Of course, we could have just kept on going at that point, but the principal give them each a lempira or two (like a nickel apiece). It was really kind of funny, and I couldn’t help but think to myself that this was Catacamas’ kids’ version of a lemonade stand.

So, all in all, a great day, and I definitely learned a lot.