So now what?

I'm home. But that's not what it feels like at the moment. I remember my first days in Honduras and how difficult it seemed. In many ways its different and the same the other way around. I got use to a lifestyle over there, and now I have to start on square one here. That feeling of being uprooted kinda lingers both ways. I'm sure that in a few months I will not be missing Honduras so much, but I do at the moment and if you know me, you know that given the political excitement...I rather be there right now.
I exited the country the day before the "coup." I felt like how many Cubans might have felt when they were leaving their country in new year's eve of 1958. In many ways, its a similar story. I called the US embassy the week before where they assured me that my visa was ready, and could come in the following week to pick it up. I asked for closer dates since by then everyone in Honduras was bracing themselves for a political catastrophe. The embassy accommodated my request and I found myself with the visa in hand on Friday. By that night I had a printed ticket with Saturday morning as the flight date.
My goodbyes were in a rush. I think I got to everybody, except my poor aunt Elsa in Rio Lindo who I never saw the whole year I was there. By the time I was running around picking up my visa, I had been in Tegucigalpa too many times and so had wore my welcome with the Bermudez family. Jesus de Otoro was a letdown. Nobody was around, only cousin Carmen and Jaqui. Out of all of them, Carmen was the most welcoming and accommodating- a little too much sometimes. She made it a point to cook me my last Honduran meal, which I had to wait a couple of hours for. I had no time to waste then and was anxious to leave waaaay before she started the rice. I ate that meal in a hurry and jumped on the first bus back to Siguatepeque. I did not have much as far as furniture or other household items go. In the end I left the apartments with my carry on and my laptop. I donated many things to El Alba School so that another teacher might use them, and threw away most of my clothes. Kept a few things to remind me of Sigua, and did not pack any liquids. My last stop was San Pedro Sula on Friday night.
My cousin Denis picked me up in Sigua. He thought I had a lot of things, and brought a pick up truck to help me- of course, that was not necessary. I gave him all my dvd's and Cd's. On the three hour drive from Sigua, we played Nirvana (Nevermind) over and over because he had me translating the songs and was amazed at Cobain's mentality. He was a little concerned for his psyche and warned that the guy might end up killing himself....... Had my really last meal in San Pedro at my favorite place- Power Chicken (if you go to San Pedro, you have to go there!!), with my Aunt, Uncle and Denis. Left them all Honduran currency that I carried, and was gone the next day.
Entering the US legally for the first time in my life was no sweat. All the time that I'd lived in the US without papers I was always afraid of immigration. Not this time. It feels liberating when you have all the paperwork necessary to enter. I even spoke with the agent checking me in about the Honduran situation (I'll get to that on my next post). Was led by another agent to offices where I was processed and told "Welcome to America." Now that's something nice hear. I thought to myself at that time, "the world is mine." So I signed up for the army...just kidding...seriously some "people" will not let me make that decision, but I would go. The next thing is sign up to be a cop...kidding?
Out all of this, leaving Sigua was heart wrenching...I will never forget that place.

Classes are over

(This flag hung over campus this whole year, it was given to me for keepsake)

We have reached the end of the school year. 10 months flew by fast. The idea was to get a job that will keep me busy while I waited for my paperwork to come through and everything worked marvelously timewise. Frankly, it's been a little difficult now that I'm thinking of leaving. I finally found a job that I really like and fell naturally in. This is a job that I could do for a lifetime, how many of you can honestly say that about your work.
Most students were lovely, except for the few that caused havoc. I will not miss discipline, that is something that I detested but knew as part of the job. However, these were only the few, four at most per class, that had to be controlled. The majority were respectful and always on task. There will be no more "Marlo, sit down," or "Valeria, be quite," and "focus, Manuel, focus." Most memorable was when a couple of my students decided that they wanted to see what would happen if they threw a match in one of the trash bins in my class on their way out. I was mad, I don't think they had ever seen me this angry. I knew that no one would fess up to the crime and so was up front with them and said that we were in for a long while until we found the culprits. School counselors were always supportive of decisions made by me in the class and with their help manage to uncover the pyromaniacs to whom suspensions were handed out. Simple to say, that in the end my focus was not always on the problem ones, but providing for those that wanted to learn a learning environment. No matter how harsh I was with them by speaking in hard tones or sending them to the Counselor's office for punishment, in the end they all (except for Valeria) mentioned that they were going to miss me.
It is a push and pull with students of this kind, you are respectful to them, but they see that as weakness and try to manipulate. If you are flexible with them, they try to see how far they can go. If you run the risk of becoming a "friend" to them, then they think that no matter what they do you will not punish them. Its all in perspective I think, and in the end it was one-on-one conversations that really clarified how things should be in a Teacher-student relationship.
El Alba's Administrators took a risk with me. I had never formally taught before (only in afterschool programs: not the same), and I did not know how long I was available for the school year (promised six months in the beginning). However, I was available and ready to go at the beginning, and somehow in addition to other things, it was this quality that would define my endeavor at El Alba. True, I've never taught Life Science before, but I would never go unprepared to class. I would read up on the lessons and research on them more than needed until I knew them by heart. I was even stopped in the beginning and reminded that I was not teaching college level science and boggin down sixth graders with too much information. I knew I was being watched so I had to put on my best performance.
I'm going to miss El Alba, and will be back to visit.

Field Trip

After having good experiences on other field trips during the year, I promised myself to arrange an outing for my sixth graders. Originally, the trip was supposed to have happened a couple of months ago and not at the end of the school year, but when students learned the latest, they were ecstatic. It meant a day of being out of classes, more so that it came almost before focusing on our final exams. The plan was to visit a cave, visit the small town of Taulabe nestled in the mountains between Tegus and San Pedro, and finally stop at a butterfly reserves just infront of Honduras' largest lake - Yojoa and then head back home to Sigua by 1:30PM.

Mr Cierra and I departed from Sigua with 26 students and a couple of parents and guardians. Some school trip rules were explained, but I dont think they heard them in the excitement. Not that I needed to worry about this bunch. Along our way Mr Cierra decides that we might as well add fossil hunting in our itinerary. It was rather simple, just get off the side of the road where you see locals selling slate.
"Usually," Mr Cierra explained, "they find fish fossils in rocks that they keep to sell. The idea is to not pay more than 100Lps ($5USD), so we will have to haggle for less." We got lucky on our first stop, since that was the best fossil we found. We got a complete fish fossil that could have been more than a foot long. The kids and I couldn't believe that fossils could be easily obtained at so cheap a price. Turns out that these fossils are so common that rocks which contain fossils are used for construction and seen on house walls or floors in Taulabe. We tried other places but the fossils were either incomplete, misplaced, or had just been sold by a phantom buyer that was ten minutes ahead of us each time.

Next we stopped at the Taulabe caves after our little Indiana Jonesy fossil hunt. The tour was about forty minutes long where a guide explained what he probably says many times during a day. He monotonously explained the discovery of the caves which was by accident as they were building the main road in Honduras between the capital and San Pedro Sula during the 40's. Kids were a little jittery of the fruit bats that whizzed by, but seemed to enjoy the caves specially when it came to the story of the lost treasure. We had profound discussion such as "do bats piss on themselves if they are upside down?" and "why do the rock formations remind us about caramelized pastries?" "how deep is the cave?" and "is that a shark jaw I see on this rock?" I left the cave feeling a little insignificant timewise. The general rule is that a stalatite grows 10 cm per 1,000's of years, so standing next to a pillar that was about 10 meter high meant that I was standing next to 100,000+ years of geological history???!!!

Continued to Yojoa lake, only about 30 minutes north of the caves, and visited the butterfly reserve. We saw in full detail the reproductive stage of butterflies. Two were mating at the entrance (kids enjoyed seeing that), another was laying eggs on a banana leaf, they joked that a butterfly next to it was encouraging it to "push!, push!!, push!!!, and right on the same leaf we saw a caterpillar squirm out of an egg. Had lunch at the same stop where some decided it was the right time to take a shower. Mr Cierra and I knew it was time to head back before other bad ideas were mentioned. It was a great trip. I have decided to have all sixth graders sign the back of the fish fossil rock and donate it to the science lab for posterity. That way other science teachers can show their students the fossil when they reach that chapter.

A Honduran Science Class

Reviewed my class one morning,and it occurred to me that we could have the class outside. The topic was plant tropism, and what better way than having my sixth graders wonder around outside our Honduran nature. So we went to look at sunflowers. Kids wondered what exactly made them move, so we discussed phototropism. Along the discussion, I remembered that song that Methodist missionaries taught me a long time ago: "Like a sunflower that follows every movement of the sun, so I turn towards you to follow you my Lord..," there was no need to get into that with my kids but they wondered about my sanity in my humming.

There were the "dormilonas" (mimosa pudica;sleepyheads;tickle-me-plants) waiting to be touched so that they could hide within themselves, the simple explanation is that they do that to protect themselves from foot traffic (cows, goats, humans etc.), there are bunches of them on campus and merely considered weed, I imagine that people actually think of these as special plants elsewhere. The kids were running everywhere touching them as though they had never seen them before, they had, but not in a science class context.

On another day we discussed rocks. I gave them an assignment, to go outside and look for sedimentary rocks and other types if they could find any. I warned them to leave big rocks alone, I didn't want them bitten by snakes or dangerous insects. They were all excited to be outside once again, but this time hunting for rocks. In the end I had a bunch of rocks brought to me with different explanations as to what they were. Amazingly someone found a magnetic rock with bits of shiny gold look-alike pieces (fool's gold we are guessing).

Next up - clouds. We went cloud spotting. We found them around. Cirrus, stratus and cumulus. We also found dragons, sofas, a nose, a bear and someone farting in the skies.

Recently, chicharras (cicadas) began singing their mating songs, and how convenient that we are currently discussing animal behavior and mating behavior specifically. This time there was no need to go outside. I asked them to be silent for a minute and to just listen. The sound had been there all this while, its just that we were not attuned to it. It washed over us increasing in sound gradually. A jarring noise that at first seemed a cacophony became a uniform intoxicating sound, a symphony of maracas. I think that I'm becoming addicted to the sound of these insects. I respect these creatures that spend 17 years underground developing and growing to come out this once and sing for a few weeks to attract a mate.

Off topic - Dulce is Sweet

Dulce - the perfect student. Always two chapters ahead, demands that I check homeworks that I have not assigned yet. Always on time, asking questions that stump the teacher and best of all - always with a contagious smile. She is the leader of her class, intervenes for other's grades, constantly reminds her peers about due homeworks or upcoming tests. In a way, that's what differentiates my sixth graders from my seventh graders. The absence of a peer that reminds, advocates and keep others accountable has drastic academic and behavioral effects.

In turn, and making a huge leap in comparison (if the reader will allow me), but in the spirit that a class is a microcosm of society, the same consequences brought upon by the absence of good leadership fall on a nation as a whole. Take for example, our Honduran President Mel Zelaya.

He lacks foresight, has no accountability and cares less for the Honduran worker. Hondurans are being hit hard by the United State's recession. Just take a look at the labels of your favourite t-shirts or underwear or other garments to figure out that many clothes that Americans wear come from third world countries like Honduras. Heck!!! China is outsourcing its sweatshops to Honduras. If Americans are not buying as they did before, then Hondurans are not producing, and if there is no production then therefore there are no jobs here. 133,000 jobs lost so far (33,000 from garment factories). Mel Zelaya has gone rogue like Venezuelan Hugo Chavez. Trying to be populist, he has exarcebated Honduran economy by instituting an unbelievable minimum wage increase (40-60%). I'm all for more pay for workers specially when it involves international sweatshops that exploit workers, but given the global crisis, this is wrong timing and way too high of an increase in a too short period of time. It's having catastrophic effects for a country where 28% unemployment rate is the norm. At 10%, California should consider itself lucky and for many reasons I rather be unemployed in the States than in Honduras. But I digress, and way off topic and could go on and on about Mel, but for fear of losing your interest let me finish.

My teachers always said that their greatest joy came from knowing that some of us would go and be productive citizens. They felt that they had taken part in developing us as we turned out to be successful in whatever field we chose. I'm starting to experience that as I look at Dulce and others that are similar to her. I can only hope for a better future for Honduras and hope that future leaders like Dulce do not decide to live elsewhere besides her home country. I'm being egoistical and hypocritical, because Dulce is who she is way before I met her and will probably be the same as she goes forward, and I can't wait to go home!!! I'm glad to have taken part in her development. Even if only it means to only have taught her a school year of spelling and science.

Off Topic - Teaching at El Alba #2

I consider myself extremely lucky to have landed a teaching job here in Honduras a couple of weeks after I got off the plane in Tegus. After our tearful goodbyes, I perused the newspaper I had grabbed earlier in the day and looked up potential jobs. Saw an article calling for teachers in Siguatepeque and here I am.

Teaching, is what I had wanted to do for a long time. I still remember that day that made me seriously think about teaching. It was a video on PBS about a teacher who unconventionally taught his classes with very good results. The video must have been made in the fifties or earlier because I remember the film being in black and white. The way he took his students outside and interacted with them and the results he got by teaching differently than his peers made me think that the profession was worthwile. I am sure things are different nowadays what with "teaching to the test" and things of that nature and such (as Arnold will say). I am sure I'll be somewhat disappointed to teach in California specially given this first year experience teaching in El Alba.

First of all, I found that teacher that inspired me to teach, here in Honduras. Well, not exactly him, but he reminds me a lot of the teacher on tv. Mr Cierra as he known by all, is a caring individual, knowledgeable, patient and loved by all students. I remember the first day that I met him. I was given a few books to teach from and was pretty much told "go teach." You can imagine how I felt, but there have been many "sink or swim" situations in my life so I knew how to respond - I needed a guide and I needed someone right away because classes were waiting for me! Of course, I began asking around for the previous science, reading or spelling teachers and no surprise! I had taken their place so they were gone! Who to turn to? Who?

At first, Mr Cierra just brushed me off. I was told to go to him because I would be teaching his homeroom classes and I needed to talk to the guide teacher. My first days were hectic, the same for Mr Cierra back-to-work preparations and so he was too busy for me. Somehow, he gathered that I really needed help and recanted. He sat in my few first classes and gave me pointers. I was nervous throughout this scrutiny. Told me that I was not teaching to college kids and needed to tone down the science for the sixth graders. He showed me how to prepare the weekly and term plans. Taught me to look ahead upcoming months and take out holidays or event days and that I will never finish class books given to me but to go ahead and give it a try. When it came to dealing with parents he said "Think of the conversation like a sandwhich. The soft part comes first where you applaud their child and then you get to the meat of it where you discuss the reason for their visit, lastly you leave the parent with additional praise for the kid." This last advice has come useful since I've had many visits from parents or sibblings throughout the school year. It's not that they do bad (some do), but it's because here at El Alba most parents are concerned about how their kid is doing and drop once in a while to check in - I know! Concerned parents are hard to come by in California public schools.

One last thing that he said lately is "have fun, it's a job but you should be having fun doing it." He'd caught me scolding my class for their refusal to work, I was probably too upset to notice how I was behaving, but that comment pulled me out completely. He was right, so far I'd been having fun, but you know how it is. Some kids get you riled up and the majority pays. In summary I've tried to be understanding with them like I've seen Mr Cierra does, but when they misbehave I've to be strict with them. And in some situations, I know that it's a daily struggle but if you know me you know that I only see it as a challenge to look forward to.

Taking a break from the Story

To all my readers:
Thanks a lot for following my story and for your comments. I know that its disappointing coming to my blog and finding bi-weekly updates. I follow a few blogs myself and there is an unsaid demand that bloggers have to blog before losing people's interest. Those that know me personally will probably keep coming, but for those that don't, then I have to deliver. I've been busy at school and my memory about Belize is now fuzzy. I think that my memories as a kid in Honduras were allowed to be grainy but now that I have arrived to the Belizean part - I have to be more accurate. So, I'm taking a quick trip to visit my "adopted" country (Belize) during Easter week and will now write a few stories about teaching in Sigua. Therefore, my Belizean stories will be more descriptive and include other people in my life. Just picture me going around Belize with a handheld video camera and pen and paper.
Please, do not be confused: I'm taking a break from my immigrant story (25 years ago) and now telling about my current experiences, AND these stories are not going to be chronological but more of a summary of my past 7 months of teaching.
Saludes a tod@s.