After March 4th I will officially be able to say that I am "going into my 8th month in Honduras". Yes, I can't believe it either! I feel like I have matured and grown up in so many ways here and I've learnt about so many things that I never could have imagined. I remain very grateful for all my sponsors and contributors to my fundraising back at home, I couldn't have done this without you!
Our main project in the Miqueas children's home remains yet the same in main ways, however there also been new developments alongside normal classes. The children celebrated 'Robbie Burns day' in our holiday classes by learning about Scottish culture and traditions (they particularly loved watching videos of the Pipebands), designing tartan sashes, trying their hand at poetry and even having a mini-ceilidh with the dancing we'd taught. We even got the directors dancing and all in all it was a good morning!
Last week 4 of the bilingual school children who'd written to children in my old primary school in Aboyne in Scotland last year received back replies and I don't know who was more excited, them or me! The highlight for me was watching them read them for the first time and pointing out the similarities and differences between their lives. One of my girls Heidi, was delighted to hear that her penpal Cristina wanted to be a doctor just like her. Since this has been a success now all our kids aged 7 - 13 have also written letters to exchange letters with the full P5 class. Not only will the Scottish pupils get to practise their written Spanish and the Honduran children their English but it's also eye opening from a global citizenship point of view and hopefully all involved will learn that children even on the other side of the world are similar in many ways to themselves!
Due to a re-shuffle in school and after-school English class times, I have had time in my day to start an art and motor skills class for the youngest who don't yet attend school and those who finish earlier. This is proving stressful, not to mention messy when paint is involved, but some good work has also been produced and it's keeping me on my feet for sure! Ladybird headbands, monster faces, finger-painting, playdough, bead necklaces, puppets, you name it, we've made it! Miqueas art gallery coming soon...
Since all the children at Miqueas, exempt the 4 youngest, now attend school during in the mornings this has led to a shake-up in our routines! This change has allowed us to start a new project, working one morning a week at the village kindergarten and to expand on our English teaching at the school from 1 day a week to 3. Our work at the kindergarten is to teach English for 45 minutes and assist with the work they're doing - learning basic writing skills, playdough or other Spanish songs and games. We're definitely still finding our feet and we've discovered that working with a class of 25 (very cute) 4 year olds can be very challenging and hard work. As they have such short attention spans we've split our English into half an hour at the start of the morning and a 15 minute recap at the end. The kindergarten building consists of 1 smallish main room which is painted and with lots of posters and a few games, a bathroom and some tyres to play on outside. As with the primary school, the children have to bring all their own resources - writing books, pencils, glue, scissors, playdough etc. And like the school again, although we know that in our village there is a full range of children attending from very poor to quite well-off families, everyone is always immaculately dressed.
Being able to teach at the school 2 more days a week than before Christmas has been a great improvement, both for the pupil's progress in English which we're already noticing and also for our classroom relationships with them. We're both missing the English holiday club a little (our final week ironically had the highest turnout) but it's also been good to get back into our school routine. My classes have changed since I am now teaching the new 1st grade (34 5 year olds!) and I no longer teach my old 3rd grade as they've moved up to 4th and Innes teaches them. Since I feel like a bigger part of the school and that the school is a bigger part of me I thought it might be an interesting time to mention some of the biggest differences to Scottish primary schools. For Honduran standards I am told that our school is pretty well-off as it has enough desks, chairs and textbooks for the pupils, which apparently was not the case a few years ago. So, what are the main differences?
1. The school is made up of 3 buildings which house 6 classrooms, there's a tiny school office (that I've never seen anyone use), some toilets in wooden huts outside and a decent sized playground with football goals. There's no staff room or inside hall (in fact when a pastor came to do a bible class a couple of weeks ago all 150 children squeezed into the biggest classroom - I was super impressed), facilities for children with learning disabilities or even glass in the windows. The water fountain is a tap in the ground outside and although the school has the basic resources like textbooks the teachers or children have to pay for anything extra.
2. There is not a single computer or laptop, and Smartboard, you've got to be kidding! The electricity is only used for the classroom lights on dark days and to run the fans when it's hot. Saying this, a few of these are broken and when there's a power cut its all irrelevant anyway!
3. The school doubles up as a Secondary school on Saturdays. In many ways this is a great concept as it was set up so that young people who have to work to earn a living during the week can continue their education. Likewise if they can't afford a bus everyday to one of the neighbouring villages where there is a high school. However I am just a tiny bit dubious that for a minority of parents whose children have just left primary school it is a cop-out from looking into all the possibilities of the other local high schools where if their child went 5 days a week instead of 1 they would inevitably receive a better education.
4. The teacher/child relationship is a bit different from home which surprised me a little at first. All the children hug their teachers, the teachers will refer to them as 'mi amor' (my love) in classes (although that's quite common in Honduras anyway) and a child might even sit on his teachers knee. This is quite simply just a cultural difference, but at home in Scotland it would not be acceptable.
5. Despite there being 6 grades (P2-7ish) in the school (and apparently there always has been) the government only pays 4 out of 6 teachers to work here. They believe that 4 teachers is sufficient to teach 6 big classes and so in 2 of the classes the parents have grouped together to pay the salary of the teachers who otherwise would be unpaid. Needless to say i was shocked to find this out, it makes little sense to me but at least the parents in the village have a decent enough income to make this possible!
Both at Miqueas and at the school I feel like I'M still learning every day as well, I suppose that can only be a good thing, there's just so much to soak up and take on board in the role of a teacher! In the school we're hoping to set up a small library corner of basic English books over the next month, and if anyone from home would like to send out second-hand books to contribute, these would be very gratefully received! (Address : Miqueas 6:8, Aldea La Colorada, El Progreso, Yoro, Honduras, Central America).
We spend Friday mornings in Miqueas doing organisation or tidy up work that needs to be done. A new house is being built next door to the current building in which 25 of the children will live (as they are currently outgrowing their shared rooms) so there's lots of things to move over from the current house and everyone is very excited.
Outside of work has seen some other interesting adventures including a long weekend trip to a lake a few hours south called Lago de Yajoa. Here myself, Innes, Gaby and Jen went kayaking, walked up to a ridge to watch the sun rise over the mountains and the lake, visited and swam above a stunning waterfall, relaxed, met with Maia and Alice (2 other PT volunteers) and tried 'Spelunking'. As it turns out this is effectively caving and in the caves we saw some amazing stalactites, stalagmites and other rock formations (I sound like such a geography nerd but it was cool ok). We had to crawl along, climb up and scramble over a lot of slippy, slippy rocks and although it was actually quite difficult it was a really enjoyable experience and so different to anything else I've ever done! Once we were in the cave as far as we could go, our guide instructed us to turn of our torches and it was the darkest, most silent place I've been in my life - which was really quite weird, it's such a different world in there.
January also saw the slaughter of our chickens. For the past 3 or 4 months we'd been keeping 4 chickens and a rooster (yes I was extremely glad to see him go!) in our garden but when they stopped laying enough eggs to pay their keep (and not wanting to attract more rats) we decided it was time for them to go. Whilst Gaby sold hers Innes and I got the help of one of the Tias to help (and by help I mean do everything) to kill them. First Rubi and her son Manuel (one of Innes' 5th graders) ran around the garden catching them (because we were so intimidated by them that we couldn't even touch them) and then began the process of the actual slaughter, the plucking of the feathers and the cutting up of the meat. It was a surprisingly complicated process which aside from helping pluck the feathers the most I contributed was a lot of 'ooh'ing and 'ahh'ing! Since meat is more expensive to buy here the chicken has been a treat and so far it has been in fajitas, soup and rice and stir fry!
Since I've been to meetings with a scout group in the nearest city to where I live in the North of the country I was invited to attend an event for 'Founders day'. This is is a big event in the Scouting calendar as it commemorates Baden Powell (who founded the movement)'s birthday. This was an event with an attendance of I'd guess 200+ scouts aged 7-20 + leaders and made for a really interesting and sociable afternoon and I met a lot of really nice people! What's also relevant to note is that the scout community of Honduras is only made up from the middle and upper middle classes and I don't think I met a single person my age that day that didn't speak fluent English. If you have money here the done thing is to send your child to private (mostly English bilingual) school. The wealth disparities here will never cease to blow my mind, whilst some people have so much others have so little. I've been wondering if the higher social classes perceive the profound poverty in their country as irrelevant or as something they want to help address. And then it occurred to me that although our poverty isn't on the same scale, is it fair to say that our middle and upper classes in Britain pay a fair amount of attention, respect and willingness to help our lower classes? The politics of the situation are definitely different but it made me think, a lot.
I'm in there somewhere...
Over the weekend we had our Project Trust desk officer visit which was fun for many reasons and I think we both enjoyed getting to 'show off' our project. One of the final thing I thought I to mention was the 'Zika' virus. Whilst it blew up on the news at home, we've heard only a small amount about it here despite being in an at risk country. The truth is that people here just get on with it, they have no other option. We've known one person who's had it but I've interestingly come across numerous articles that claim that the link between the virus and microsephely is a media cover up for something else as plenty of healthy babies have been born in Latin America to mothers who experienced Zika symptoms. Government officials came to our school and went around the village with the 5th and 6th grade pupils giving out bags of solution to every house to put in their pila (outside water source) to kill mosquito larvae, I have received 2 texts from Zika@HN and we've seen a couple of signs and newspaper headlines about it but aside from this it's generally not a hot topic. 
So that's February been and gone! It brought with it some very cold weather (there was even rumoured to have been snow in one part of the country) which was not appreciated and one evening I was even wishing I had my thermals whilst hiding under an extremely thick blanket! The sun is back for now and we hear that it's only going to get hotter until our leaving date at the end of July. Roll on orange and mango season and let's pray for some bananas and avocados on the trees before before this day.
