I made it!

...well, almost. We have one more half day of school tomorrow -- which consists of a Thanksgiving celebration (assembly) in the morning, followed by "Thanksgiving" dinners in each of the classrooms with the homeroom teacher. I say "Thanksgiving" dinners because each class got to decide what they wanted to eat (it's up to each homeroom teacher to coordinate their own class -- the tenth graders invited me to eat with them)...so, for instance, seventh grade chose Chinese food...not a bad choice considering that Chinese place is $$$, but not exactly Thanksgiving. Well, whatever floats their boat I guess. 


So you might be wondering why they are celebrating Thanksgiving...well, since it's a bilingual school, they try to celebrate the Honduran holidays and the American holidays. Shockingly, they put me in charge of the whole Thanksgiving celebration, so it should be interesting. I think it'll be okay (I'm learning that things always seem to come together here even when you think they won't) -- I'm having some of the eighth and tenth graders give little speeches about things they're thankful for (real creative, I know), and then the ninth graders are doing a skit about the Mayflower and the Pilgrims and Squanto etc., which I'm a little nervous about. We "practiced" today (they weren't really paying attention) and they didn't know any of their lines...so it should definitely be interesting...I decided I'd be an awful play director. Anyway, I'll be relieved when it's over and I'm on my way to Tegus -- I decided I'm not bringing any schoolwork!


Anyway, to switch the subject here, I decided one of the things I do love about Honduras is that you just never know what’s going to happen on any given day. Of course, that can backfire (ie: see last post), but mostly it just makes life pretty interesting and unpredictable (for better or for worse). Saturday morning I woke up to a girl yelling “Buenas!” through the gate…I debated getting up but she wasn’t stopping so finally I let her in. Turns out she was one of Marialouisa’s fifth graders who was coming over for extra help. I guess she failed math this year (the school year for the public schools just ended last week—now they’re on summer break). Anyway, so she has to go through some “recuperacion” classes. So who knows where the rest of my family was—who leaves before 8am on a Saturday morning?—but no one was home so I just kind of sat there and chatted with her for a bit, and then another student came over too. So it was super random, and finally I decided to go eat breakfast, and I offered them some corn flakes too…so there I was just sitting at the table eating corn flakes with some random fifth grade girls. And here I thought I didn’t have any plans for Saturday but I ended up spending four hours doing about a zillion long division problems with them until they finally understood (I think)…and who knows where Marialouisa was this whole time…she came home and acted like it was nbd that she had been gone. I guess she was up at school finishing something.

Anyway, the two girls seemed to think it was really funny that I just gave them the bowl and spoon and milk and corn flakes and told them to serve themselves. And I’m realizing that that’s not really normal here. For instance, Marialouisa always just serves me food—never asks me how much I want, what I want, what I like on my food/sandwich, etc. I think that’s a big cultural difference I’m just starting to really realize. In the states we are always concerned with pleasing people and making people happy—I would never serve a guest in my house a hamburger with tons of mustard and ketchup and lettuce and onions and tomato and everything on it (like they do to me) without asking the person first if they liked all that. I mean, I didn’t know how much cereal or milk the girls wanted! Why would I pour it for them? And well, I can’t really explain it but it’s not like that here. It’s not that the people here don’t want to make other people happy, but this culture is definitely more of a cultural where you have to ask for something if you want it (and it’s not rude). You have to be a lot more forward, which I’m just not used to. People don't often offer you anything unless you ask for it -- or, on the other hand, sometimes it's the other extreme: they just give you something without asking you if you want it. (Which was maybe why the girls didn’t know what to say at first when I offered them cereal.) I think that’s one of the things I struggled with the most when I first got here too—the other teachers were nice, but no one really offered me help. No one told me how to put in grades or the specific format I had to have in my grade book, how to get copies, how the discipline/demerit system worked (really how anything worked), or even gave me a place to put my zillion big language and spelling books and curriculum guides since I don’t have a classroom. They literally just handed me the books and left me standing there, and I had no idea what to do or where I was supposed to go with them. And I guess I’m used to people just offering to help, or, probably more likely, being able to do things by myself without needing help. But here it’s not like that, and I can’t do things by myself because I don’t know how anything works (and I don’t have a car either). You have to ask people for things—or even just command them to do things for you. But, like I said, it’s not rude to do that. Teachers all the time hold out their hand for students to give them some of their cookies or food or whatever, which I remember thinking was kind of weird at the beginning. And even the way people ask for things here, directly translated to English, would be “give me” (without please). And my students command me all the time: “Meeees, come!” They never say, “Can you come here?” or “I have a question,” like students would do in the states. I didn’t get it at first but I’m realizing that they are just directly translating.  I think I’m starting to get it now, but I’m still not used to it—I’ve noticed that I still ask people, “Can you please give me a ride?” (directly translated), while I don’t think anyone here would eeeever say it like that—they say, “Give me a ride.” It just still feels rude to me to say it like that. But, well, I guess I’m just gonna have to get over it. 

Lastly (this blog is really disorganized and full of random topics without transitions and I'd probably give my students a bad grade on an essay if they wrote like this, but anyway), I was reading my seventh graders' journals and came across a few interesting entries:

• "If I could live anywhere in the world I will choose Spain because in Spain is the Tower of Pizza."  (Are they thinking the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy, or is there really a Tower of Pizza in Spain? I'm not sure.)
• "I like the guns, animals, flower, butterfly, the girls, and money." (Rather interesting juxtoposition of things to like.)
• "I’m afraid of being alone in the Earth with zombies." (Playing too many games of plants vs. zombies? Or just watched the movie Zombieland?)
• "What would you change about the world to make it better is the electricity doesn’t go out and in the forest have more trees and the people don’t get killed." (I think every single student mentioned the electricity going out...after living here for only a few months, that would be on the top of my list too. It's funny because I never would have thought of that a few months ago. Most mentioned the forests too...for some reason everyone here is really concerned about conservation. You'd think there would be less trash in the streets then.) 
• And, lastly, my favorite: "Yes, it is hard to be a Christian because the things that are bads sometimes are more funny than the good ones." (Valid point.)