Wednesday :-)

It's Wednesday, which means half a day of school, because there's a visiting brigade coming in, so the students get out at 11:30 so they can clear the school during the tour and get ready for the soccer game. That will be later...right now it's 7:15 in the morning and I'm enjoying the relative calm of morning on the screened in porch. This is my favorite part of the morning. I'm ready for school, I don't have to leave for 20 minutes at least, so I get to sit here, pray, write, and just bask in the beauty of this place. This is what gets me up in the morning...the knowledge that I get this time. That's what keeps me from hitting snooze 5 times in the morning. I get to spend time with God and enjoy His creation. And that's what I'm going to try to focus on today.

Phone Home...

Or actually I phoned my aunt and uncle's house where some of my family was gathered to celebrate my grandmother's birthday. When I checked e-mail the other day (Friday) I found one from my aunt inviting everyone over to her their place for dinner at 5...so I called about 5:30 their time and ended up getting to speak with my grandma, my parents, and a few cousins. It was definitely good to talk with people, and thank you, Scott, for letting me use your phone/antenna. I still need to get a cell phone down here.

The weekend went really well. I had a lot of time interacting with people and getting to known them better. I went back to the same church I went to last week (sans chicken) and I think I'm going to stay there for this year. I understood the pastor better this week...which hopefully means I'm getting better at picking up the language...or it could mean he was speaking more slowly this week!

I should probably get to bed...because tomorrow starts another week of school. Hopefully interaction with people will keep up this week. Love you all! Have a great week!

Adjustments...

And just when I thought I was adjusting so well...

Don't worry, nothing bad happened, I just realized that maybe my adjustment wasn't happening as smoothly as I anticipated.  I made it through the first week of school, and that is going well.  School is school, I can snap into "teacher mode" in a matter of seconds, figure out what I need to do, and do it.  The kids are nice, and most of them are responsible and get their homework done.  I have a couple of boys that...well, we'll see how that goes.

What did happen is I realized that after school, I'm withdrawing from everyone.  I've read 4 books in the last week.  One of which, I realized after the fact, was 700+ pages long.  (The problem with using kindle/nook apps...you can't really see the size of the book.)  Since Tuesday, I've probably spent a total of 1 hour in the company of my roommates actually talking with them.  The rest of the times I've been by myself reading, facebooking, or e-mailing.  I haven't even really paid attention to school, until it became necessary.  So it hit me yesterday morning as I was reading my Bible and praying on the screened in porch (a GREAT place for devotions) that I'm not adjusting, because I'm not interacting.  I'm surrounding myself by the familiar as much as I can.  It could be in part that with school starting and more responsibility I need time to think and process...but not from 4pm until I go to bed, usually after 10 or 11.  I want to interact here, I want to really participate in life.  I don't want to spend the whole year hiding in my room (or the screened in porch, beautiful as it is...I'm really impressed with it if you couldn't tell).

So yesterday at the teachers meeting before school (we meet together about 15 minutes before school starts to make announcements and pray as a group) when Jennifer asked for prayer requests, I said that pray that I start to adjust and stop withdrawing from everyone, and I described what my roommates had already seen, and apologized for it.  It was good, they were really understanding about it. 

After school yesterday when I went home, no one was there...so I was going to write a blog entry then.  However, I heard noise coming from the house next door (video game noises), so I decided to make an effort and interact.  When I went over there (after knocking) I found three of my students playing video games in the guys' house...which seemed to be a fairly common occurance.  Scott, one of the teachers, was there too.  So I spent the afternoon/evening talking with people.  And it was good times.  When Melody (one roommate) came home, she came over for a while.  After the power went out about 9, Hannah, another teacher, joined us.  And the 5 of us (I forgot to mention that Lucas got home sometime around 6 and my students left shortly thereafter) talked and laughed until probably 10:30 or so.  I did spend a little time checking e-mail, but I definitely didn't start reading a book. 

Today I've been invited (or rather told) that I'm going to the Valle with a group of the teachers here.  More enforced interactions.  I'm looking forward to it, I want to get a purse because I didn't bring any of mine with me, and they sell these huge shoulder bags there.  I had a blue one for a few years before it finally wore out. [I bought it in 2006.]  They don't look overly large, but they can hold everything (okay maybe a slight overstatement, but only slight), and I loved it.  So I'm hoping to get another one of those.  I don't know how long we're planning on being out, we're leaving late morning so my guess is we'll eat lunch out there. 

My hope is, now that I've recognized what I'm doing, I'll be able to work through it (and now that I've brought it to the attention of the rest of the teachers here, a few of them will help me).  Scott told me that he did the same thing when he first got here...at least in terms of withdrawing...and now he's doing really well, so there definitely is hope. :-)  And actually, after yesterday and spending time talking and laughing with everyone, I'm already feeling better.  I just know I'm going to need to be intentional about spending time with other people and not totally hibernating in my room.  A little hibernation is okay, and for me, probably necessary...but definitely not as much as I have been doing lately.

Highlight of the week (well, other than spending time with everyone last night): one of my students came in and told me that now Math is her favorite subject, and she had never liked it before.  She also said that she told her parents that and they didn't believe her at first.  It made me smile.

School has started...

I now have two days of school behind me.  Today went more smoothly than yesterday.  Yesterday, I mostly felt like I was surviving.  I didn't know the students, they didn't know me...and it felt very strange with only two of them in class at a time, so I was feeling a little uncomfortable.  I'm sure they felt a little awkward as well, because they're accustomed to knowing their teachers for the most part, and they don't know me (and in some cases I was the only teacher they didn't already know).  After yesterday I knew I could make this work, but I didn't know what exactly I would need to do to make it work well.

Today was much better.  I had a little bit better sense of the students and of pacing.  I clicked into "teacher mode" at least with the high schoolers.  It may take me another few days to get a sense of the middle schoolers - what I can and should expect of them in terms of ability and learning, but at least we mostly have a sense of rapport down.  I brought in some pictures of my family (and my cat) to show them, and they enjoyed that.  I still need to figure out what I'm doing for tomorrow, but I'm not too worried that I'll be able to get something figured out.  It's just definitely a change teaching 2 kids per class, especially when in some cases one student is much farther advanced than the other.  There's no buffering of other students who are halfway in between, and there's no "hiding" it either.  Even with the fewer kids, I'm also spending more time in school actually teaching than I'm used to.  Preparing for class is much more time consuming as well, but grading is nothing, which is nice.  In the long run, it will probably be less work, but right now, getting the hang of it seems a little more difficult and a little more out of my comfort zone...but it's coming.

So for now, I'm going back to preparing for tomorrow.  Hopefully the process starts going more quickly soon! 

I rode to church with a chicken today.

Seriously...well most of the way.

I went to a small Honduran church today.  It was awesome, and I think I may have found my church home while I'm down here.  On the way there, about a kilometer or so from the Ranch, we stopped to pick up a family [mother, three kids, and a granddaughter].  About another kilometer or two down the dirt road we stopped by a group of people, and one woman came up with a plastic bag (it was double bagged actually)...and a chicken head poking out.  This was a live chicken.  It moved and it clucked.  She handed it through the window to one of the house moms who was riding in the van with us...and we kept going.  With the chicken.  I was informed (upon questioning Melody) that this particular house mom spends Sunday with her family back in Teguc, and this isn't the first time she's gone there with a chicken.  It definitely was a first for me.

The church, as stated, was small and very welcoming. We weren't even meeting in a church building, it's in a small building that houses a kind of corner mini-grocery store (pulpería) where they sell pop and snacks downstairs, and we were in a large-ish room upstairs that had other rooms coming off one end of it.  They looked kind of like apartments or offices, I couldn't tell.  We were singing songs with lyrics off of an overhead projector (the ones that require clear transparancies), and sitting in plastic chairs.  But the people are amazing, and in conversations and in the preaching there is a definite sense of God's presence there.  I was able to understand some of what the pastor was saying, and what I didn't pick up on, Luis translated.  [He translated the whole thing, I just sometimes paid attention to him, and sometimes paid attention to the pastor.]

Afterward was the weekly stop at the mall for lunch and shopping.  Conversation was good, shopping is tiring...and we had some fun getting back.  It's been raining a bit more lately (it's raining as I type)...and the dirt road gets a little more eroded, a little more slippery and the stream crossing the dirt road gets a little higher it seems each time we travel it.  I was a little concerned about us making it across (obviously we did).  There was concern about making it up one particular hill as well (which we did...barely...last night it took us 4 tries to get up that hill!).  For some reason, a day in the city exhausts me.

Oh, last night...yeah.  Last night we went out for sushi to celebrate Kim's birthday.  It was a lot of fun, and the sushi place was really good.  It never occured to me I'd be going out for sushi in Honduras, but why not.  The food was excellent, and food and drink together cost $10 (almost exactly...a little bit over).  You can spend more than that in fast food places...I have spent more than that in fast food places.  So all around a good evening, and if the drive back was a little...interesting...I have complete confidence in Andrew's ability to drive...or at least I tell myself that...since he hasn't given me a reason to doubt yet.

School starts tomorrow, so as it's already 9:30, I'm heading to bed.  I'm sure I'll write more about it later...provided the storm doesn't cut out the power yet again. :-)

Home Sweet Home?

I spent much of the last two days (Wednesday and Thursday) in Teguc, working with my home church in a medical brigade (on Thursday).  It was a very busy time.  I enjoyed catching up with people, conversations that we had both on the bus ride back to Teguc as well as Wednesday evening at the mission house.  It was really good to see people from back home, but at the same time it was very strange to see people from back home.  I spent the day Thursday at the brigade with them.  There was some definite spiritual warfare going on.  I spent the morning splitting my time between evangelism and optical...and the afternoon, I just prayed pretty much the entire time...at times for specific people that I saw, and at times just for the brigade in general.  It was good...but not necessarily restful (granted, brigades rarely are).  I went back to the mission house afterward, ate dinner with everyone, and then about 45 minutes later said goodbye and Miguel drove me to the bridge house so I could get a ride back here with Kim today. 

I understand that short paragraph is totally inadequate to describe all the emotions and activities that happened in that span of 30+ hours.  It was great to see familiar people, talk with them, ask how things were going and share with them what God's been doing in my life the last week...but it was strange, a little surreal maybe, to realize that I'm leaving them, staying here...and they're going back "home".  Then again, I could write many paragraphs and still not be able to completely convey everything that's going on.  When I was at the bridge house last night, I was completely exhausted, and just thought "I want to go home"...but in that context I meant back here, at the Ranch.  It surprised me a little to realize how comfortable I've gotten living here at the Ranch in a relatively short period of time.  It's good, but odd at the same time. 

I got back here this morning in time for meetings to start, and didn't realize until 10 when the power cut that we've been going on generators for the last day at this point.  There was a storm that came through last night, cut the power, and the best they can estimate is a few days to maybe a week or more before permanent power is restored.  The generators are a huge blessing!  At the Ranch the generators are run on a schedule so that times when the electricity is most needed (mostly meal times and after dark) electricity is available.  They cut out at 10, but that's okay, because I'm probably going to be ready to sleep long before that.  It's been an tiring couple of days.  The good news is I'm ready (or so I think) for the first few days of school...through Wednesday at this point.  By then I should have a good idea of who my students are (all 8 of them) and have a better grasp of class pacing, etc.

1 Week In

So, when I said that I probably wouldn't be online much more now that I had internet on my computer...I'm finding that was something of a lie.  I'm not on it for games as much as I was at home, but it basically has become my communication source (and e-mails are always appreciated!).  The last few days have been school meeting/lesson planning from 8:30-4 (with an hour off from 12-1 for lunch) and then spend the evening with the girls in my house and/or the other teachers on the Ranch. 

Tonight after school I answered a few e-mails and then I made dinner for myself and Melody (one of the other girls in my house).  I am my mother's daughter...I started out with the recipe...found it rather bland, and experimented (it was essentially tortilla soup).  In the end, it was good.  I know all the ingredients I added to it...but I wasn't really measuring amounts...so I'd have to recreate it by taste.  And perhaps I'd chop up some onions next time, add fresh garlic rather than powder (which was all we had) and more chicken this time around...none of which were in the original recipe I was working with.  But it was good.  I like my kitchen...it's open and spacious...and has a decent amount of storage space. 

Right now it's pouring out.  I'm waiting for the power to cut out.  I was surprised...it barely sprinkled earlier, and normally it rains before this...but about 10 minutes ago (while I was waiting for the picture to upload) it started coming down...rather quickly.  Which means I should probably upload this before that happens.

Tomorrow my church from home is coming out to the Ranch (they've been doing brigades this week).  I'm going to be going back to the city with them to join them for a brigade (medical) on Thursday.  Then I'll be coming back to the Ranch Friday morning with the Honduran teachers and workers.  It will be good to see everyone...but also a little strange, because right now I have definite divisions in my world...there is life in the States and life in Honduras.  Tomorrow...they meet.