A morning at the mall

Sundays are becoming my luxury days: I’m sitting in the mall in San Pedro Sula using their high speed wireless internet and drinking a latte, and I’m in heaven… or, at least, as close to heaven as you can be when sitting in a mall food court next to a play area full of screaming children. Oh, the things I’ll put up with for good coffee and fast internet!

The start of the morning was a little less luxurious: casa grande flooded again. It’s amazing that our house that rarely has running water has flooded twice since I’ve been here. On top of that, our sink fell off the wall last week. There has been progress in the kitchen, however: we moved the non-functioning fridge along with it's rotting contents outside where it’s now been sitting for nearly a week waiting to be picked up. Check out the attached pics for a glimpse at what was creating the god-awful smell in our kitchen.

It would seem that winter struck Honduras during the past week. Not that it’s necessarily cold, but it’s chilly enough that I am using a blanket at night and really have to pep talk myself into my nightly cold showers. In fact, I’ve been going days without showering often due to lack of water, but sometimes simply because I can not bring myself to step into the ice cold stream of water that flows (or trickles) from the PVC pipe in my bathroom. It doesn’t help that the water in our house only seems to function after 10:00 or so in the evening. An icy shower right before bed is just not appealing… though it certainly is refreshing once I get up the guts to brave it!

This week was the first “full” week of school since I’ve been here. Monday through Wednesday I had my typical schedule: first grade English in the morning followed by middle school Reading and more first grade after lunch. It went rather smoothly, although I’m starting to recognize areas where there is a lot of improvement to be made in the way classes are conducted. Due to our sporadic copier and broken printer, we are often forced to teach directly from the whiteboard… which is more or less impossible, especially with the first graders. The influence that teaching from the board has had on the kids was evident when I subbed for the 2^nd grade teacher a couple weeks back: copy copy copy. That’s all they know how to do. They copy exactly what you do from the board without absorbing any of it. If we’re going to make this work, we must find a way to give them worksheets to work on, so my roommate and I are going to try to get the school to give us some money to go to an internet café and prepare as many copies as possible from some of the books that we’ve found lying around campus. Hopefully that should help the kids actually learn how to spell and read rather than simply regurgitate.

During the latter part of the week we were short 5 teachers due to a “miscommunication” between the school and some of the other instructors. Mirna “miscommunicated” that this weekend was a 4-day-weekend, so they planned a trip to Antigua. Then, due to the many days of school that we missed last week, she changed her mind and claimed that there has never been a long weekend on the schedule. Ah, such wonderful management. So, we compromised and had half-days Thursday and Friday. Thursday I took over for the absent 4^th grader instructor… never have I seen such unruly kids! She left me things for them to work on, which many of them refused to do. Rather, I spent the entire morning screaming at them and struggling to maintain control. It was awful. On Friday I traded my roommate for 5^th grade… he’s been a teacher for a while and has a way of forcing control over the kids. The 5^th graders were a breeze! There are only 9 of them in the class… it was such a relief. Next week, I think, I should be starting my remedial class… hopefully. We shall see. As far as I can tell thus far, things rarely go “as planned” around here.

The majority of my time the past couple weeks has been spent lying on my bed studying for the Chemistry GRE Subject Test, which is now less than a week away. I leave Friday for Guatemala City where I will be taking the exam. I’ve been studying like crazy and still have 5 days and a loooong bus ride of study time left, but I’m starting to get nervous. So, keep me in your thoughts! I really want to ROCK this test!

I finally took some pictures of casa grande and of my first graders. Enjoy!

I hope you’re all doing well! ¡Les quiero y les extraño mucho! ¡Besos y abrazos a todos!

1. My bedroom. 2. The view from my bedroom of the pila... and Dave showering in it (it's the only fairly consistent water we have). 3. The view from our balcony. 4. The kitchen. 5. The source of the stench. :p

1. The first grade class. 2-5. Some of my students.