Harrowing Passages

Laura and I had a taste of what our teachers experience on a weekly basis traveling out to the remote villages and towns to offer classes to seventh, eight, and ninth graders.  We normally wouldn’t have that opportunity as, with the teachers gone, we’ve been staffing the office on those days.  But the State Department of Education has mandated that we have photos on file of all our students.  We went out on Tuesday and Wednesday as official photographers of Maestro en Casa.  Tuesday’s journey brought us to Jesús de Otoro, a relatively large town just off the main highway that, like La Esperanza, serves as a commercial center in support of the smaller aldeas in the surrounding hills.  It only took us about an hour in the car.  It would be a little less for the teachers, who would generally travel by motorcycle.  It was a pleasant trip and we had the fortune of meeting more of our students.

 

Memorial Cross on the way up to San Isidro.

Wednesday’s trip was something altogether different.  San Isidro is an extremely small, poor, and isolated village.  To get there, we had to come all the way down the mountain from La Esperanza into the valley of Otoro.  Then, we went back up again, probably two-thirds of the way, along an unpaved, rutted and washed out road.  We traveled a good two hours (again less time on a motorcycle) into the wilderness, treacherous inclines and declines, at an average of about ten to twelve miles an hour.  The few people that live there, do so in order to harvest the coffee.  You can’t make much of a living harvesting coffee, and the people basically live off of the beans and corn they grow, completely cut off from the rest of the world.  It was an absolutely breathtaking experience and one I doubt we’ll ever have again unless I can get Laura on the back of a motorcycle.  Not likely.  The four wheel drive vehicle we were in is old, held together by prayer and duct tape, and we would seldom take it on such a trip.  As most vehicles in Honduras, it was reconditioned from an automatic to a standard transmission.  Sitting in the front sit, I could feel tremendous heat coming from the stick shift as it struggled up the steep rises.  On the way back we stopped briefly at the site of a memorial cross marking the spot where a bus with twenty plus people lost its brakes and plummeted down four to five hundred meters into a canyon.  As we started back out, our driver, Arturo, stopped immediately, pumping the brakes vigorously.  The heat from the transmission had thinned out the viscosity of the brake fluid, almost causing the brakes to fail.  After a few minutes, the pressure returned, and we drove on without further difficulty.  I did, however, wonder whether there would be room on the memorial plaque to add our names.

More than anything else, the two days of travel gave Laura and I a deep appreciation for the commitment of our teachers.  They don’t get paid a lot.  At least three of them do not have electricity in their home, and, like many Hondurans, at least one has a home with a dirt floor.  It is clear that they work at Maestro en Casa because they need jobs.  But, it is equally clear that they fervently believe in the value of what they do.  As so often is the case in the thankless job of education, here and in the States, they do what they do because they have hope in their students.

Money is very tight right now.  I’m told that this is not an uncommon event for Maestro en Casa at this time of the year.  The school year will go to November.  At that time we’ll have an influx of registration and an infusion, albeit modest, of income from tuition.  As we are yet a ways off from November, we’ll knock on wood and rely on the kindness of supporters and foundations.  Hopefully, we’ll squeeze by as I’m told we have in the past.  But, we are living from hand to mouth, a very sobering feeling.  I jokingly told one of our administrators here that Laura and I would be happy to give up our salary.  It’s easy to be generous when the donation is zero.

Laura with students outside classroom in San Isidro.

Almost four-hundred students, and our yearly budget is about $40,000.  You can do the math, but even in Honduras, the per-capita cost is incredibly low.  We’re a no frills education program, and the lion’s share of our income directly serves the educational needs of our students.  Maybe a quarter of our operating budget comes from student’s tuition.  Another half comes from a small amount of rental income, private donations, and foundational grants.  That leaves us with about one-quarter, about ten-thousand dollars, that we are short.  If you’ve read the website, you know that we have a greenhouse where we produce tomatoes.  A second greenhouse is in the process of being built, but presently the construction is on hold as we look for funding to complete it.  The hope is that the revenue the greenhouse will generate will meet that $10,000 short-fall and Maestro en Casa will become virtually self-sufficient.  There is good reason to hope that this will be the case as the greenhouse, after only its first season, is beginning to produce fruit (pardon the pun).  Still, we are not there yet.  We continue to confront the day to day struggle of meeting expenses while holding onto the long-term vision of creating a sustainable, regular source of income.

San Isidro

Laura has been working on applying for foundational grants, both to meet our annual budget and for the greenhouse.  This is encouraging and hopeful, but the results will not be immediate.  We are also reaching out into the community here to make more contacts.  There are some leads that indicate we may be able to rent some of our unused space.  We also might offer computer classes and/or English classes on a fee basis to interested parties in the larger community.  That could help a lot, but it is very unlikely that it will completely fill the gap.

The people who read this blog, our family and friends, have been incredibly generous to Laura and I personally, and to the first program we were involved with in Honduras.  Since coming to Maestro en Casa in La Esperanza, I have not asked for any money.  Given your great generosity, it didn’t seem appropriate.  But necessity is always humbling.  And here and now, we feel great need.  Anything you can give will be of tremendous value.

On line, you should go to http://lencaeducation.org/support-us/.  That will bring you directly to the page that you need to be on to make a donation.  If you simply go to the web site, click on the tab “support us” that appears on the top of the page on the far right.  Do not choose any of the five drop down menu items on this tab as you will end up on an entirely different page.  Instead simply click on the tab heading, “Support Us”, and that will bring you to the correct page.

I hope you’ll see the tremendous value of your donation.  My expressions of gratitude for your unselfish generosity are insufficient.  I am confident that you will shame me once again.

 

Finding a Fit

Paul teaching English to the 11th grade class.

Tomorrow will mark the second month here in La Esperanza and Maestro en Casa, minus the brief time back in the States.  We know that because tomorrow our monthly rent of a whopping $150.00 is due.  I defy anyone to find a two bedroom house in the States for that kind of money.  If you don’t want to spend any money, come to Honduras.  Unfortunately, if you don’t want to make much money, namely none, come to Honduras.  In any case, after two months we are both beginning to feel we are settling in.

It’s taken more time than we anticipated to find our fit.  That was not the case at all where we had been.  At Montaña de Luz there was always a lot to do.  Things needed to be responded to on a daily basis.  But, here that is not so much the case.  The program runs fine, albeit on a shoestring of a budget, and would run fine with or without us.  Our task here, therefore, has been much more open, subtle, and creative.  It falls to us to discern how we might present ourselves in such a way as to help the program to become that much more efficient and sustainable, and become a little more impactful on the students who utilize it.  The teachers teach, and they do a very good job of it given the limitations, mostly financial, of the program itself, and the challenges of an extremely sub-par education system in Honduras.  The program is administered well.  There have been quite a few short-term volunteers who have come and gone.  They would mostly teach English, or involve themselves with construction projects, or other short-term endeavors.  There haven’t been many long-term volunteers at all.  I suppose the founder, Susan, could have been considered a long-term volunteer as I suspect she never took much of a salary, if any, from Maestro de Casa.  Presently, she is semi-retired, and living in Vermont.  So, when we first arrived, I think the staff at Maestro en Casa had to wonder what to do with these crazy people for the next year plus.  But we were welcomed by people of great commitment, and through a series of fits and starts, we have begun to figure out how we can be of assistance.

Paul having fun with the class.

We walk in and back to Maestro en Casa six days a week.  Monday is our only day off.  Tuesdays and Wednesdays are mostly office days as there are no classes scheduled at the facility.  Some of the teachers are off-site teaching classes at some of the smaller villages.  These days we are often correcting papers, recording grades, and managing some of the endless bureaucratic demands of the Honduran government.  What they lack in quality education, they make up for in administrative nonsense.  Laura has been searching out and applying for foundational grants.  Thursday through Saturday are class days at the center.  On Thursday, we teach English to about 25 Bachillerato I students (10^th grade).  On Friday, we teach English again to fifteen Bachillerato II students (11^th grade) who will graduate in November.  In a few weeks we will begin a Socio-Economics course with these same kids.  I have come to a new appreciation for teachers.  Preparing for the classes (Laura’s talent – not mine) and then actually attempting to get kids to learn something has to be one of the most difficult jobs in the world.  Somehow though, we have a great deal of fun doing it.  Laura and I team teach.  It has been joyous and I think the kids get a lot out of watching us interacting.  Saturday is a more relaxing day as we, ourselves don’t have a class.  We usually have opportunity to involve ourselves with the kids, either formally by way of proctoring a test or filling in, or informally.  Sunday is not officially a class day, but one of the teachers runs a computer course.  Laura is very much partnering with the teacher on this, and today took the class to teach Excel.  The work day ends at around noon on Sunday, giving me time to write this blog.

 

We are very busy, and we are carving out our little space.  Still, if you haven’t noticed, very little of what I described in the last paragraph could rightly be called social work.  So why are we here again?  And why am I saying that it feels as if we’re beginning to find our fit?  One word answer, really.  Relationships.  The longer we are here, the longer we present ourselves as non-threatening, and the longer we seem as if maybe we might have something to offer, the more willing people are to build relationships.  It is said over and over again in Social Work classes that the foundation for any meaningful change is trust and rapport.  Still, we often skip this step.  We rely on programs and paradigms, systems and analyses, and we avoid the hard step.  Here, we don’t have a lot of those professional, social work supports.  You can’t skip the first step, and it makes all the difference.  It is only now, after two months, our bright faces showing up day after day, that a few of the teachers are finding confianza (trust):  starting to share with us their personal stories, their dreams and fears, personally and for the program.  That is really what is making us fit in.

Remember doing this? Conjugating verbs.

We met three Americans this week, all three in the same way.  They have cars and drive in and out of the main town.  We walk in and out of the town every day.  After they had seen us maybe a dozen times, they stopped and asked if we wanted a lift.  The first is a gentleman who runs medical brigades in conjunction with the local hospital.  He also runs a shelter at the hospital for pregnant women from the outlying towns so they can receive medical care and be close to the hospital around delivery time.  We met him when he was returning from San Pedro Sula after dropping his wife off at the airport for a trip to the US.  The second man was with his wife.  He is the vice-principal of a private, bi-lingual school that teaches according to the American educational model (therefore they are now on “summer” break).  These persons, I’m sure, will be vital contacts, and perhaps even vital supports and friends, for Laura and I.  The point, however, we would have never met them if we had not simply been present.  It is extremely important.

 

What do we hope to do as we build these relationships at Maestro en Casa?  We lose a lot of kids over five years of study.  The great majority of them come in with great hopes to receive their high school diploma and perhaps go on to college.  This is a dream that is mostly achievable in developed countries.  Over a hundred students enter our program in the seventh grade.  But, somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five actually leave our program with a high school degree.  Some of them perhaps go on to a different program.  But the great majority simply return home.  There is a great deal of challenges and frustrations.  Sometimes that frustration can turn to anger, alcohol, and drugs.  As we meet these kids and get to know them, we might be able to help them sustain their hope and meet their challenges.  I hope so, anyway.  One thing I’m sure of.  If we aren’t here, and we’re not known, it won’t happen.

Guilty Pleasures

A treat brought to Honduras from the US.

It’s been a long time, right?  You probably thought we were on vacation.  Well, we were.  We went back to the States for a brief trip.  We only told a few people because we weren’t going to have a lot of time and we had a lot of ‘have to’ things to do.  We went to Georgia to see Laura’s sister and family, then we went to Virginia to see Laura’s daughter Emma in her new digs.  That left us with a very little time in the North, only a matter of days.  There we had to get a few warmer clothes and other things out of our storage unit.  We also had to get a prescription for a Typhoid vaccine.  There was very little time left for visiting.  We knew that when we left so we told only a few select people we were coming.  People we did see, we just showed up at their doors.  Boy, were they shocked – look what the cat dragged in.  We hoped we would see more people, but it just didn’t happen.  I imagine a few of you, particularly some of my own family, might be a little upset that we didn’t see you.  I’m sorry.  I had hoped too, but it just didn’t work out.

Actually we got back on our anniversary, Tuesday, July 8.  I wanted to get off a quick blog post earlier so that those who didn’t know we were on vacation wouldn’t think we were dead.  But I just kept putting it off.  In retrospect, I think I was probably feeling a little guilty.  Certainly that was partly because I hadn’t seen everyone that I wanted to, but mostly it is because being in the States is such an overwhelming experience.  I think I might be feeling like the teenager that runs off to do something very special with his closest friends, but doesn’t tell his other friends he is going.  The U.S. is just so incredibly wealthy as compared to what we experience here.  I was on stimulus overload – the glitz, the glamour, the endless choices of consumer products, the paved roads, the clean bathrooms with toilet paper and running water, and I could just go on and on.  After our four hour bus drive from La Esperanza to San Pedro Sula (a thirty degree raise in temperature), we took a taxi from the bus station to the airport.  The taxi was beat up.  There were no instruments that worked left on the dashboard, a hole where the radio used to be, and you had to reach your arm outside the window to open the door from the outside latch.  The vehicle stalled at least two times at every stop.  We started up a conversation with the man who was very interested in going back to school to finish his high school education, but he couldn’t give up his job while supporting his family.  Laura made the mistake of commenting that the man’s taxi seemed a bit old.  The man was incredulous.  “This taxi’s not old!  It’s a 2000 and in perfect working condition!”  Three hours later we were in Atlanta.  We did not see a vehicle that looked anything like that the whole time we were in the States.

Caught in the act of “indulging”!!

Don’t get me wrong.  I thoroughly enjoyed the excesses of the decadent capitalist culture.  I must have gained ten pounds back of the thirty I have lost (we don’t have butter here).  And we brought back things we just can’t get here.  Two huge jars of peanut butter would have cost us about eight times as much here.  As I am writing this, I am munching on Stacy’s Multigrain Pita Chips – you couldn’t even describe what that is here.  Dark chocolate, little speakers for our computer to watch the DVDs we also got in the States, and various sundries are exquisite pleasures.

I really like these things because I am thoroughly American.  But I do feel guilty.  Both Laura and I felt guilty in our first English class back at Maestro en Casa.  The students wanted to know what we did on vacation.  We explained to them where we went and asked if anyone had been to the States.  One kid did spend three months in Washington, DC. (He’s the same kid, and only kid, who also had a car.)  But of the three months, he spent two in a detention center before being deported.  That spawned a discussion on immigration, going wetback, and what’s a visa.  After the class, one young girl who is slightly older than the other students shyly approached Laura.  In a soft, insecure whisper she asked how she could get a visa.  She probably lives on her own and is also probably desperately poor.

Typical Honduran fish dinner.

Television is something we don’t have down here either (that’s just us, not everybody), but I don’t really miss ad-infinitum reality shows.  At one point on our vacation, someone was watching CNN or MSNBC or FOX or something like that.  The pundits were debating over the immigration crisis and the kids being dropped at the Mexico / US border.  The conservative was saying that the kids were coming to escape poverty and that was not a legitimate reason to grant amnesty.  He also said that the narcotraficantes were sending them here to bog down the immigration system so that they could more easily smuggle drugs with less chance of detection.  That second argument is just absolutely absurd.  The liberal pundit was making the case that families were attempting to rescue their children from the threats of intense violence and, therefore, these children did qualify for amnesty.  I found the argument puzzling and frustrating and I didn’t think that either of the two really understood what it means to live in Latin American.  Here, poverty is violence, and the victims of violence are almost always poor.  If we want to be citizens of the world, we really ought to figure that out.  Even if we drive on good roads, eat rich food, choose our television programs from 2000 channels, and decide upon the tastiest snack dip at the grocery store, we really ought to figure that out.