A Collaborative Nativity Scene

Recently, Kara and I decided to combine our classes to make a special Nativity scene! She teaches the 11^th grade Bible class and she was trying to decide what her plans for the class would be since we are getting so close to Christmas break. I suggested that my 3^rd graders collaborate with her class to make a Nativity scene. My little ones love drawing and coloring and I figured it would be a good opportunity for the older kids to teach the Christmas story to them. Our date with the two classes was set, and we were ready to storm the school with a magnificent mural!

It worked out perfectly to pair two 11^th graders with one 3^rd grader, and then we assigned each team a different part of the Nativity to draw. Without a doubt it was so much fun for everyone to work together! The 11^th graders fell in love with my energetic munchkins, and of course my students loved having someone new and bigger to play with. I will let the pictures speak for themselves (with a few of my own comments) for how this project turned out. I am especially fond of the craziest ones because it was those groups who really embodied the idea of letting my kiddos put in their own ideas and creativity to the drawings:

Edan, Nelson, and Marco drew the star and the stable. I’m not really sure we could fit our nativity scene in this stable, but it sure looks nice!

Kevin, Juan (not pictured), and Elman drew baby Jesus. If you look very closely at Jesus, we all think that he looks like a teenage girl on her hospital or death bed.

Mery, Yeni, and Keidy drew Mary. We’re not entirely sure why she is crying.

Berenice, Nelson, and Yeri drew Joseph. He looks like they found him in Jamaica relaxing on the beach and playing the bongos.

Darwin, Ricardo, and Rolando drew the angel. This angel looks like he walked right out of the 60’s with his neon highlights and beard. Also take a look at how tiny those hands are…

Alejandra, Nelsy, and Juan drew this (very eclectic) Wiseman. I love that the girls let Juan do most of the coloring… notice the different colored teeth?

Ada, Lucely, and Hegna drew another Wiseman. This one looks like a Samurai solider with a curiously small head.

Eli, Adan, and Gabriel drew the final Wiseman. Oddly enough he also looks like an Asian solider of some kind. Where do these students get their ideas of Wisemen?

Delmer, Omar, and Geovanny drew a shepherd. If you think this shepherd looks a little pregnant, you should have seen him before I said something to the boys about it.

Cindy, Ruth, and Wendy drew the other shepherd. Doesn’t he look like something you find straight out of a Precious Moments catalog?

Sara, Sandy, and Julio drew this cute little sheep.

Alexandra, Maribely, and Kensy drew another adorable sheep.

And for the final touch Roberto, Edgar, and Darwing drew this stunning cow. There is a great debate on whether or not it is actually a cow or a creature from “Where the Wild Things Are.”

Here is the finished product! It is adorning the walls of our school with pride. I hope you all enjoy this masterpiece as much as we do. Merry Christmas from La Unión’s Abundant Life 3^rd and 11^th graders! 

Thanksgiving in Tegucigalpa

Originally we were only supposed to get Thursday and Friday off of Thanksgiving week, but I’m pretty sure God knew that we all desperately needed a solid break so he sent us another day off. The school in Tegucigalpa was holding a benefit concert for all the sponsor students and seeing as the majority of students on scholarship are in La Unión, we got to leave a day early to go be a part it.

Wednesday: Staying true to traveling in Honduras, we had some minor difficulties on our trip. Our initial plans were to have someone drive us in their truck to Santa Barbara where we would catch a direct bus to Seguatepeque to meet up with a private bus carrying all the teachers from Gracias. Oh how smooth of a trip it would have been if everything went according to this plan. Less than 100 yards after picking up the Brits from their house, so just on the outside of town, the truck started smoking profusely because the engine was overheating. There was absolutely no hope of us continuing on this way so we had to stand on the side of the road for about 45 minutes waiting for the next Santa Barbara bus to pass through. [Which also meant that consequently we missed the direct bus to Seguatepeque.] The bus that we caught is the one with all of its seats uncomfortably close together so even my short legs could not fit nicely in the space provided between each seat. Once we got to Santa Barbara we got on an over-crowded mini bus where we had to stand for the whole hour-and-a-half ride to Pito Solo.  Then we smashed into another mini bus, with some of us sitting on each others’ laps, which took us to Seguatepeque. There we finally met up with the teachers from Gracias, but our hopes for comfort were still not to be achieved. They left very little space for us in their bus so, again, we crowded in together and had to get creative with our seating arrangements to find any ounce of comfort. Cranky does not even begin to describe our moods that day.

When we got to the hotel our situation did not get any better when we were told that all of the girls, teachers and Gracias students, would have to share a room together – 24 girls living in a crowded room with bunk beds and only one bathroom. Oh, heck no. Although I am not proud to admit it, we may or may not have thrown a slight fit and begged Jake to get us our own room. Thankfully, he did. We instantly laid down for naps and felt infinitely better when we woke up! We had a spectacular dinner of Pizza Hut delivery and then got ready for the night. It was fun to finally have an excuse to look elegant and not feel like a total goober or completely impractical for wearing a dress. The concert was beautiful! The musical guests were an acoustic band of guitar players that took us on a journey through Central and South America by playing all the typical music of each country. There were also a few songs that included dancers performing the traditional dances. I am very certain that I would have enjoyed the concert much more if I hadn’t been past the point of exhaustion and falling asleep in my chair. Regardless, it was a fun night and I did not want to complain about getting that extra day off.

Thursday (Thanksgiving): We spent the morning getting a tour of the Teguc Abundant Life facilities; there is the headquarters for the whole system and we got to see how it all works. They showed us around their school and the health clinic. The school is beautiful with a covered play area, a cafeteria, a big auditorium, brightly decorated classrooms, and clean bathrooms! I had forgotten what a normal school came equipped with until we wandered around there. At the clinic, we were given the opportunity to get an eye exam instead of going on the tour of the whole place. Now, I did get an eye exam right before I left and my contacts are all up-to-date, but my glasses are not so I decided to get some new ones. The eye exam, frames, and lenses all cost me less than $50. That’s a deal even Black Friday can’t handle!

We ate lunch at an amazing Italian restaurant where we stuffed our faces with delicious homemade pizzas. Afterwards we switched hotels to a nicer place. This time Jake split us up in a more comfortable fashion – I shared a bed with Cassidy in a room with Harriet, Beth, and Lori. The beds were magically cozy, I took hot showers (although with a cockroach), not only did we get to watch tv but it was on a flat-screen, and we were in a quiet location. Hallelujah! We got to dress up again for another night of feeling fancy. Our Thanksgiving dinner was being hosted by a woman and her husband who do a lot of work for Abundant Life, so we drove about 40 minutes outside of Teguc to their house. This night made the entire trip worth it. Their house was stunningly beautiful, even by States standards. They had dinner on the porch out back and it was nicer than any Thanksgiving set-up I have ever been a part of! (No offense to my family or anyone else I have ever spent this holiday with). They did their research and served us a meal of turkey, gravy, stuffing, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, a fruit and nut salad, and wine. For dessert we were delighted with pumpkin flan. Our spirits were so high all night! We were surrounded by good food and good company. That meal is one of my favorite memories of all us together. Everyone looked beautiful in their snazzy clothes, big smiles, and full bellies.

Friday: We started out the day going to a children’s museum which was a blast! It was a solid morning of letting our inner child out and just playing – and Lord knows that after all the time we spend with the little ones, we sure know how to be kids. We visited exhibits about machines (pulleys, radio, tv, catapults), equilibrium (inside a house that was sure to make you dizzy), the atmosphere (the flow of rivers, the water cycle, giant bubbles), the human body (the ear, nose, bones, organs, digestive system), humans through time, and energy (electricity, wind). The whole time I was laughing and having a ball, I kept thinking about how cool it would be to somehow get my students here! Unfortunately it is too far away… My favorite part was the human body exhibit because of how gross it was. Inside the ‘nose’ there were nasty hairs hanging from the ceiling and the nose would sneeze on you. You got to crawl through the digestive system ending through the poop shoot. There was a station of pushing buttons to learn about all the different fart noises (designed especially for little boys). You could learn all about why and how your stomach produces vomit. There was a room for dancing that showed the heat map of your body moving on the giant screen. And of course there was a large game of ‘Operation’ to play. Seriously, so much fun!

From there we went to lunch at a quaint café, but it was the worst part of the trip. We waited for two and a half hours to get our food. I will give the restaurant the fact that we were a large group of about 25 people wanting to eat BUT they knew we were coming, we were the only ones in the restaurant, and there were only three menu options for us to choose from (and each one came with the same soup so they could have at least started preparing that far in advance). I was tired, frustrated, and hungry. Everyone was tired, frustrated, and hungry. Not the best mood for lunch. By the time it was finally my turn to eat, it was only Beth, Kara, and myself who had not been served yet. Not only were we the last three but they also forgot to make one of our sandwiches so we had to split two meals amongst all of us. Then as if we were not feeling rejected enough, minutes after getting our food everyone else got up and walked out of the restaurant! We were not feeling the love at this restaurant.

Thankfully we got to let out all of our frustrations with our next activity: paintball. Here’s the good news folks – we may be living in a third world country, but Honduras has paintball! All of the La Unión teachers definitely wanted to play but almost no one else wanted to (they were just scared of our intensity). We managed to get together two teams to play: all of the La Unión girl teachers and Lenny, and then a team of Jake with 6 other teachers (a total of 5 guys and 2 girls) who bravely stepped up to play. We decided to go for La Unión versus the world. The first round the other team annihilated us, but that was the only mercy we showed them. Our team proceeded to dominate for the rest of the matches. Muahahaha, victory! That team of boys was entirely mad that we (a group of beastly girls) beat them, and beat them good. This may be a bold statement but that may have been the sweetest victory of all time! I guarantee that Jake will never choose to be on the other team again.

That night we were treated to Thai food, and it was quite the feast. It was definitely Thanksgiving weekend because we stuffed ourselves silly for almost every meal. There was too much good food to enjoy! The activity for the night was bowling but the La Unión teachers decided we were too tired and had already spent a good amount of money on paintballing, so we retreated back to the hotel. The girls got together for our regular Friday night tradition of watching “Downton Abbey” together. A few of the girls decided to make the night extra special by taking a taxi to McDonald’s and bringing back ice cream for everyone. I thought it was a great night! We pushed all the beds together in our room and snuggled under the blankets to watch our girly tv show and eat ice cream.

Saturday: Saturday was our day of shopping, so much shopping! In the morning we went to Valle de los Angeles (Valley of the Angels) which is a very touristy town. The place is very similar to Copán in that souvenirs are the primary things sold. In this town you are guaranteed not to be the only gringo walking around, or the only one speaking English. I did most of my souvenir and Honduran-gift shopping in Copán so I spent the majority of my time just walking around, enjoying the sun, and window shopping. At one stand I was looking at an assortment of jewelry trying to pick out something nice for my mom, sister, and stepmom (and have it be something that they genuinely like and would want to wear) and I said to the girl who was shopping with me, “This is when I wish I could just pick up the phone to call my family and ask them so I could be sure that they would like these!” The vendor looked at me and asked me if I wanted to use his phone to call them. I couldn’t believe it! He said that it wasn’t very expensive for him to call the States so I could use his minutes. First of all, he understood me when I said something in English. Second of all, he was offering his phone to me for no charge. What a guy! Unfortunately I only knew my sister’s phone number by heart and she didn’t answer, but it was the effort that counts. (In case you’re wondering, after that gesture I could not refuse the man so I made a purchase.)

From there we headed to a shopping mall. Curiously malls are a huge deal in Tegucigalpa and they are absolutely everywhere! And they’re not just ordinary, small malls, they are big malls. We picked one that had a Walmart in it. I never thought I would be so excited about going to a mall, but I had been anticipating this particular stop for months! With our shopping lists in hand, we hit the stores. Admittedly Walmart was not all it cracked up to be and it was underwhelming. I was picturing my neighborhood Walmart back home but this one was not as well-stocked. I did manage to buy a few arts and crafts supplies, decorations for my classroom, and special food items that I simply cannot find anywhere else in this country. Most of the time I wandered around staring at my list or staring at the signs with my mouth wide open trying to navigate the store and find everything. To say I was feeling frazzled would be an understatement. I spent most of my time in there so I had to speed-shop through the rest of the mall for anything else. A group of us girls bounced between a few of the clothing stores with a strong desire to spice up our “La Unión” wardrobe. It may not be practical to own nice things in our little town, but after getting the chance to dress up here we were inspired. I bought two new dresses and a skirt. Can you blame a girl for just wanting to look and feel pretty?

After shopping we got dinner at T.G.I.Friday’s but I have to admit, I did not like this meal. After all the delicious food we had been feasting on, this was greasy and fattening and just made my stomach turn after taking a few bites. I have become too used to homemade, fresh, non-processed foods I suppose. (But I am not complaining!) Then, as our last hoorah in Teguc, we went to the movie theaters. I don’t even know what movies are out in the States anymore because I am so isolated, but we could not resist the thrill of the cinema. Lucky for us 007 was playing! A lot of the girls, without hesitation, chose to see the new Twilight movie, but you could never convince me that that movie is a better choice than James Bond. I loved the movie! It was awesome! It ran in English with Spanish subtitles so I didn’t even have to struggle translating it to soak in all its awesomeness. I’m sure you all have seen it already, but we felt like we struck gold when we found out that movie was playing and we got to see it.

Sunday: All the fun had to end at some point and we had to head back to reality. We woke up nice and early to catch a bus that would start our long journey home. We left the hotel by 6:15 – even the continental breakfast wasn’t up and serving food! Interesting fact: a ‘continental breakfast’ here in Honduras does not consist of the same foods you would find at a hotel back home (which I may or may not have been severely disappointed to find out, but I should have known that). Instead we were treated to a breakfast of beans, plantains, (funky) cheese, tortillas, and eggs. Anyways, off we went. Remember how we started the journey with a little adventure because of our vehicles? Well, my story comes full circle: more bus problems. Thankfully this time it was just one, simple, minor problem. Jake was told that the direct bus from Tegucigalpa to Santa Barbara leaves every day at 7am. While this is true, there is one exception – on Sundays, the bus doesn’t leave until 8:30am. So we got there a little after 6:30 and had to wait almost 2 hours before our bus left… oops! However, once we did leave everything was smooth sailing and we made it back to La Unión just fine.

I am so thankful that we were given the opportunity to take this trip. It was also a huge blessing that the school paid for the majority of our trip – our hotel, all the good food, the transportation. It was nice to be treated to a weekend of ‘luxury’ after working so hard in our rural school. I got to see a different side to everyone; one of no worries, no school, and pure joy as we simply enjoyed each others’ company in everything that we did together. Thank the Lord for giving us this amazing trip together and re-energizing us for the final, long haul to Christmas. Happy belated Thanksgiving to everyone!

Thanksgiving in La Unión

I feel like Thanksgiving snuck up on me this year because I wasn’t home to see all the decorations filling the aisles of stores, the commercials on tv for Black Friday, or watch the Charlie Brown special on CBS. It just hasn’t quite felt like the holiday season down here, but nonetheless we are finding ways to celebrate! It wasn’t a built-up or prolonged celebration but I got to celebrate Thanksgiving with my students and coworkers from school with lots of crafts and good food.

Crafts: If you know me at all, you know that I am obsessed with arts and crafts and will take any opportunity to do something crafty. If I could manage to convince the administration to let me have Art class every day, I would. So naturally this has been a very exciting time for me perusing Pinterest and Google for cute craft ideas that I can pull off with my students. These are what I came up with (everything is slightly, heavily, very ‘turkey’ oriented because I didn’t plan in advance or think to teach the Thanksgiving story).

The first little guys we made are what I call our “potato turkeys.” For art class we traced our feet and our hands various times on brown, green, gold, and red paper. We angled the feet and pasted them together to create the turkey’s body, and then taped the hands all over the back to create the feathers. They looked rather convincing as turkeys at this point! It’s when I told the students to draw faces that the turkeys began to lose form. My students have no concept of what a ‘Thanksgiving’ turkey looks like so they drew very generic faces. The end result: potato turkeys. You decide for yourself, but not very many of these scream ‘turkey’ to me – at least they are innocently cute!

On Tuesday of Thanksgiving week, every class I taught was centered on Thanksgiving and turkeys. In fact, I gave out so many turkey worksheets, one of my students was convinced that I had a serious obsession with turkeys; I overheard him say to another student in Spanish, “Wow, Miss must really like turkeys!” My students colored multiple coloring pages that featured turkeys, turkeys dressed like pilgrims, and more turkeys. In Reading we read the story, “Thanksgiving Helper,” as a class. They wrote their own “I Am Thankful” books to tell and illustrate everything they are thankful for. In Math, they completed addition and subtraction facts that were positioned inside turkey bodies, and they did a color-by-number turkey multiplication worksheet. They cut out turkeys and feathers, wrote what they are thankful for on the feathers, colored everything, and glued together the parts to create ‘thankful’ turkeys. And what is Thanksgiving without the infamous hand-turkey? We traced our hands and wrote the one thing that we are most thankful for underneath it. I took a series of pictures of my students because a) they’re really cute, b) they’re extra cute with their turkeys, and c) it warms my heart to see their cute smiles and the things they are thankful for.

  

   

Food: Also on that Tuesday we celebrated Thanksgiving by eating together as a class. The office actually sent home a note the day before telling parents that we would be eating ‘Thanksgiving’ together so they should a ‘traditional’ lunch with their student of chicken, potatoes, vegetables, and fruit. On top of this I decided to share a little of my idea of Thanksgiving with my little ones. As much as I would have liked to make pumpkin or apple pie, cranberry sauce, or sweet potatoes, keep in mind that I live in rural Honduras and almost none of those ingredients are available. Instead, I compromised and got creative! I baked a loaf of bread since I love the crescent rolls at Thanksgiving dinner; and I made apple sauce to get as close to apple pie as possible (Lori and I peeled, cored, chopped, boiled, and smashed 34 apples to make our applesauce, and it was all entirely worth it!). About half my students liked the applesauce and they almost all liked the bread.

We topped off the festive day with a Thanksgiving dinner for all the teachers. A few of the Honduran teachers did their research and spent all day cooking up a traditional Thanksgiving meal for everyone! We had a turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, garlic bread, green bean casserole, stuffing, pumpkin pie, cheesecake, and chocolate cake. Talk about a feast! And it was all absolutely delicious! I would have never bet that we could have had that great of a meal in La Unión. We showed the Honduran teachers how you are supposed to completely stuff yourself with all the tasty food – we would not let them get away with eating just one plate of food. It was also the first Thanksgiving meal our two British volunteers had ever eaten. Imagine that mixture of cultures: coming from England, celebrating an American holiday (for the first time) in Honduras. In was an excellent meal and all of our bellies were quite content.

My prayer request this week is a praise and is what I am thankful for here: my La Unión family. We have all grown extremely close these last few months and have built our own little family. I cannot imagine this experience without them by my side or with a better group of people. We support and love each other, play, eat, work, and hang out together. I am so thankful for my new friends and family in all the foreign and Honduran teachers that make this place feel like home! 

Miss O the Chaperone

This past weekend I was elected to go with the 11^th grade students to a camp about politics for a short retreat. Why would they send me, the 3^rd grade teacher, to chaperone this rowdy bunch of 11^th graders? Great question! It was a last minute decision to let the students go (and when I say last minute, I mean very last minute: the school decided to give the students permission on Tuesday to leave for the retreat on Thursday morning) and my classes are the easiest/most convenient ones to cover. Now, Jake did tell me that I could decline it, but I wanted to help make the trip as least inconvenient for the whole school as possible so I agreed to go. I joined a team of 3 other teachers (from various schools) to chaperone 53 students on the trip.

We left Thursday morning and right away things got interesting. They had to shove all of our supplies onto the bus so we were finding every nook and cranny to lodge suitcases, food boxes, and tents into; it would have been entirely ok if we got into an accident because there were mattresses surrounding us everywhere and cushioning our bodies on that bumpy ride. The bus overheated twice on our way to the camp. The first time we stopped it was only for a few minutes while the bus driver dumped water into the coolant hole trying to cool down the engine. The second time we had to really stop and brought our bus party out to the street while the bus driver and some of the boys decided to fix a part in the engine. We managed to push through and make it to the camp after that… but that wasn’t the last we would hear from the bus.

We were given tents to sleep in – they were Coleman tents so rather nice and not questionable or falling apart in any manner. I got my own tent and I could not have been happier about that outcome. Logically the best time to set up the tents would have been as soon as we got there so we could do it while the sun was out and put our suitcases away instantly, but this is Honduras and no one thinks ahead like that. It wasn’t until nighttime that we put the tents up. To make matters worse, all but one student had never even seen, let alone put up, a tent before. The majority of the girls just sat on their piles of tent and tarp until the boys helped them, and you had to do your best to feel out the ground for the best spot. Unfortunately, I put my tent right over and ant hill. Thankfully I only put the outer edge on the hill so they didn’t totally infest the inside, but they seemed too comfortable in that corner of my tent.

Since we were camping, we didn’t have the nicest conditions. Add the fact that we are in a rural part of a 3^rd world country and you have the makings of an interesting campground. There were toilets to use, but in order to flush them you had to fill up a bucket of water and dump it into the bowl. There were no showers (except for a single outdoor one that was reserved for the boys) but rather pilas. A pila is essentially a cement tub that everyone in this area has for laundry and/or bathing. You fill the pila with (very) cold water and then use a bucket to turn it into a shower. That was definitely an experience that I don’t need to have twice. We ate the same food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day: beans, rice or egg, and tortillas. I will find a way to survive if I don’t eat another corn tortilla from now until 2013.

Their time there was pretty evenly split three ways: discussion groups, playing games, and dancing. Their primary reason for being there was to learn about politics. They were being educated on what it means to participate in politics, how they can be active, what is a political party, what it means to have power, etc. I believe they were all very good discussion topics and learning points for the students, especially since they are younger and live in a country where the government desperately needs to change. Before each talk they did have to complete a team-building, cooperation task. Those were fun to watch! Some of the challenges I was glad that the students, not me, were the ones being asked to tackle it because I would have been very lost and confused. My favorite part of the learning that was done at the camp was the mock elections that they ran. Three students were chosen as ‘presidential candidates’ for the camp and they had to campaign to win the votes of their peers. They gave speeches, made signs, and made radio announcements to be played over the stereo. Then all the students got to vote for the next ‘president’ of the camp. It was all very realistic! The only girl candidate won, talk about girl power!

When they weren’t in session, the kids were either playing or dancing. They played a variety of group games and I took notes for future camp activities. There was also a multitude of soccer and volley balls lying around. A few brave souls dared to swim in the pool on the campgrounds. (Interestingly enough a good amount of the students don’t know how to swim and most of those are girls.) And there was always music blaring which meant someone dancing. Here, it is frowned upon by the church to dance (essentially, if you are a Christian then you don’t dance) so the students hardly ever get the chance to. But here, all inhibitions were set aside. This was probably my favorite part of the whole weekend because they absolutely came alive when the music was playing. Boys who I had never seen show any kind of emotion before were suddenly full of joy and life and became kings of the dance floor! They were grabbing any and every girl in sight to dance with them and they danced for hours on end. The beat of the music just hypnotized everyone and you couldn’t help but sway your hips with them. One of the other chaperones is deeply religious and said he never had and wouldn’t dance, but a few songs into the first night he was light on his feet and moving around. When I asked him what happened he said, “I don’t know! The music just bit me or something!” as he did a little jig. I loved it. I got many dance lessons from the students and camp directors (because let’s be honest, what is more entertaining than trying to teach a white, stiff girl how to dance like a latina?).

We left to return to La Unión after lunch on Saturday, but that meant we had to face our on-the-fritz bus. Sure enough, fifteen minutes into the drive the bus overheated. We stopped at a creek to fill up the water jugs and pour them into the coolant valve again. We didn’t get much further than that when the bus really gave up on us. We had crossed a river (yup, drove right through the river because there was no bridge) and were starting to go up the mountain when the entire bus starting smoking – the engine and the complete underside of it. No one hesitated to get off this time. When they went to lift the hood up, it actually fell off and just lay in the middle of the road. Without a doubt the engine was not happy and smoking profusely. Our bus driver called the owner to have him send some trucks to rescue us. While we were waiting the driver tried to get it started again, but it made an awful noise and would not. He did manage to get it to start a little later with the momentum of rolling the bus backwards, but it instantly was lost in a cloud of smoke so no one dared to get back on. The trucks came to our rescue and all the students loaded themselves and their suitcases on. It was now raining at this point so while I got lucky and sat in the cab of the truck, my things were not so lucky and became soaked and covered in mud. The bus made it to the outskirts of town before breaking down again. Naturally you can’t just leave a bus broken down in the middle of the road so they attached it to the massive Ford F350 and began towing it. Doesn’t it make sense when I tell you that now the truck, weighed down with 15 students and their things, and towing a bus, began to overheat too? Who cares though, we kept going. The bus gained enough momentum to start again and drive on its own until it broke down for the final time in the middle of town. The hitched it back up to the truck and towed it the rest of the way. Nearly 3 hours later I finally made it home… wet, muddy, frightened, and kissing the ground beneath my feet… but I made it. What’s a trip in Honduras without a little adventure, huh?

this is a picture from inside the truck that was towing the bus

my oh-so muddy things when I got home

This week be praying for the patience of all the teachers. There are some frustrating changes in scheduling due to practicing and preparing for the Christmas performance, and standardized testing. We don’t really have a clear idea of when or for how long our classes will get cancelled, but we know that it will happen. Our job as educators is being put on the back burner and it’s not an encouraging feeling. Pray that we are able to persevere through it with smiles on our faces and be as patient with the administration as possible. 

Fingerprint Stories

We just finished up our Daily Activities unit in Basic English and I had my students do a fun project that I wanted to share with you all! The unit focused on vocabulary words that describe their daily routine such as “take a shower” or “eat lunch.” My students also practiced using sequence words such as “first, second, third,” or “first, next, then,” in order to put those daily routine words in an order to describe their mornings, afternoons, or evenings. So I gave them the assignment to write their own short story using their new vocabulary words and grammar skills, and then they had to illustrate it using fingerprint characters! Some of them turned out super cute and I was very proud of their creativity. Here are some of their finished products (I picked the cream of the crop):

                                                                                    

Keidy

Tinker Bell wakes up at 10:11. She brushes her teeth after she wakes up. She eats breakfast before she brushes her hair. She takes a shower before she gets dressed. She eats lunch before she watches tv. She plays after she studies.

Kensy

Panda wakes up at 5:30 in the morning. She takes a shower before she gets dressed. She gets dressed before she eats breakfast. She brushes her teeth before she goes to school. she goes to school after she plays. She eats dinner before she sleeps.

Yeri

Kensy wakes up at 5:50. She takes a shower at 6:00. She brushes her teeth after she takes a shower. She brushes her hair before she eats breakfast. She watches tv before she goes to school. She plays after school. 

Gabriel

Batman wakes up at 6:00. He wakes up before he brushes his teeth. He gets dressed before he eats breakfast. He talks every day. He eats lunch before dinner. He watches tv.

Rolando

One day one dog is in the woods the trees are giant and there is one big house. The dog goes walking slowly and goes in the house. First there are 100 people dancing. Second the people walk outside. Third he sees another tall dog. Finally the dog and the boy run to the city.

Cute and creative? I think so! This week be praying for my health. I am feeling a little under the weather but am fighting it with all that I have. I really REALLY don't want to have a cold out here, especially because I don't have my delightful mother to take care of me. Hopefully my immune system backs me up on my efforts to fight it off!