El Dia de la Biblia

In Honduras they celebrate annually "El Dia de la Biblia" (The Day of the Bible). That's pretty awesome. No other books, religious or otherwise, get a special holiday all to themselves... hmm, maybe this isn't just any other book. At IST we celebrate this national holiday by dressing up each class from nursery to 2nd grade (16 sections total) to represent a different story from the Bible, and then parading around the entire school accompanied by the High School marching band. It is quite a celebration! This year, my class was the story of Jesus' birth. We had Mary and Joseph, 3 wise men, several shepherds, a donkey, a cow, 2 sheep, and 2 angels. It was great fun, and the kids were super cute!

The Long Weekend

Monday, September 15th, Honduras celebrated it's independence day. In light of the holiday we were given both Monday and Tuesday off, making it a 4-day weekend. Most of the North American teachers took advantage of the long weekend by taking a vacation to the caribbean coastal town of La Ceiba. But not the green house! Most of us had already been there and we didn't feel like spending so much money this early on in the schoolyear, since we've only gotten a third of a paycheck thus far. Instead of the vacation at the beach, we had many other adventures to keep us busy instead:


Saturday morning we got up early, Jake picked us up at 8:30 and we spent nearly the entire day building a classroom for a small church about 5 miles outside of Tegus. When we got there, we found a pile of rocks and dirt, 7 posts cemented in the ground, and a large pile of wood planks on the other side of the fence. 7 hours and a lot of hard work later, we left them with 4 walls, a doorframe, 2 windows and half a roof, while we took away some sore muscles, sunburns and lots of mosquito bites. It was great fun, but we had no energy to do anything else that night except sit at home and watch Friends.

On Sunday, Megan, Melissa, Bertha and I set out to find the CRC church that Gregorio Sanchez is the pastor of. BT had a bit of an idea where it was, so we commenced the search. We drove halfway up the mountain, keeping our eyes peeled on both sides for any sign of it. After asking a number of nice people and getting the same number of confused looks, we decided it was hopeless. But as Megan was quick to point out, "Who needs church, when you have Mas por Menos?" When we got back down the mountain, we decided to check out Mas por Menos, a grocery store that carries a lot of U.S. brand name items that you can't get elsewhere in Honduras. So after a little shopping, some lunch, and a visit to the big Catholic Basilica, we made our way back home. That afternoon, we hear Bertha holler down from her apartment, "Corrie! Megan! come look at this." Megan runs upstairs and comes back shortly announcing that Bertha had found and trapped a live chinche in her bedroom. Now, keep in mind, we just got our place fumigated for chinches on Thursday, and this is Sunday. We were all a little freaked out. After talking to a number of people, including Fu, who came over and looked at the bug and a suspicious-looking bite on Anna's arm, we decided it would be ok to spend the night that night (apparently chagas is fully treatable if you take care of it in a reasonable amount of time). We spent the night, but everyone was quite uneasy the whole night and I don't know how well anyone slept..

Monday morning the fumigator shows up again. We pack up enough stuff to spend 2 nights at Dona Bertha's house again and take off. This time they are fumigating our house again, spraying the whole mountainside, where the chinches are coming from, with the pesticide and then on Thursday or Friday the government is supposed to come and cut down all of the grass and brush on the hill above our house. So we're keeping our fingers crossed that everything will turn out ok. After dropping stuff off at DB's, we went out for lunch and then Melissa, Corrie and I took a taxi to the dentist. Dr. Marco Mass, a friend of ours from IST gave me a filling and Melissa a cleaning. When it was all finished we headed back to the mansion for spaghetti dinner and a game of hand and foot, which BT and I won!

This morning, after a quick pancake breakfast, we all piled in Bertha's Land Rover and took a trip to Danli, a town about an hour outside of Tegus that is famous for its cigar industry. We took a private tour of one of the cigar factories... that place was amazing! They get their tobacco from all over the world: U.S.A., Italy, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Brazil, and many more. There are 600 people who cover all parts of the process, from sorting leaves, to rolling cigars, to wrapping them with damp tobacco leaves, to putting brand name stickers on each one individually, to packaging them in bundles or boxes and shipping them to all over the world. It was quite an eye-opening experience. Now we are back at DB's, we just got out of the pool and are getting ready to go get dinner.

WHAT A CRAZY WEEKEND!!

Tomorrow we have school, and then hopefully we can move back into the green house which if everything went according to plan should be chinche-free!

El Chinche Picuda!

Wednesday afternoon, I walk over to the office to sign out, in a bit of a hurry because I had missed the bus the day before. When I got over there, though, I saw all of my housemates, including those in the 3 apartments connected to mine having a bit of a discussion. I walk over to find out what's going on. Turns out Megan had had some termites in her apartment, so the exterminator had come that afternoon to take care of them. In the process, he found in her ceiling at least six chinche picudas (chinches picudas... chinches picuda? not exactly sure how to pluralize things in spanish yet). Now, if you've never heard of this bug before, you're not the only one. But almost every Honduran we mentioned it to warned us that Megan dare not sleep in her apartment that night and highly recommended that all six of us get out. So, being that we had Bertha with us, she decided we should go to Pamela, one of the top administrators, and see if she could get us a hotel room for the night. We told her the situation and instead of getting us a hotel, she told us we could stay at her mom, Doña Bertha's house for the night and they would fumigate out entire house the following morning. Doña Bertha, who is THE owner/director of our school, is in Mexico for the month, and boy does she have a NICE house. So the six of us, Megan, Melissa, Bertha T, Anna, Corrie and I went out for some Chinese food dinner and then to DB's house. It is a very nice house, but there weren't enough beds so I ended up on the futon that had no mattress... it had little couch cushion things, but not comfortable at all. Not the best night's sleep, but I do have the privilege of saying that I have spent the night at Doña Bertha's house, so I'm not complaining.

Whoa... sidetracked, this was supposed to be about the chinches. Chinche picudas are a black and yellow bugs that are about an inch and a half long and carry a parasite called chagas, which apparently if you get bitten, it releases the chagas into your muscle where it grows and eventually can cause heart problems if not treated. And the ones that were in Megans ceiling were apparently dead already for who knows how long. But when we heard the story, it went something like this: Megan has chinche picudas in her house, if you get bitten, it stops your heart. Thankfully though, we were not in as much danger as we originally thought, and we survived our two daysaway from home and our now safe and sound back in the recently fumigated green house, about to head out for a green house dinner at chili's. I will post pictures later, cause I have to go right now. Thanks for reading, feel free to respond.

i can finally send text messages

I got a brand new phone about a week and a half ago. it is very nice compared to the old one which looked like a toy phone and could only fit 6 letters on the screen at one time. But for some reason it would not send text messages. I bought the new one from IST who put me into their cell phone monthly plan as opposed to the prepaid one i had been using. So I talked to at least three different people in the office, who all tried to get ahold of the cell phone company in different ways to get it fixed, but to no avail. Finally yesterday I went myself to the cell phone store and asked the guy about it. He pushed a few buttons on the phone and voila! Now I can send texts!! Yay. The school plan allows us 50 or 100 free texts a month, and I think I probably used all of them yesterday cause i was so excited!


can you guess which one is the old one and which is the new one?!

how do YOU spend friday night?

just got paid, friday night, party hoppin', feelin' right

well, we got the friday night and the feelin' right part... forget the other two.
it started out as any ordinary friday: granitas after school with all the other NAT's, ride in the back of a truck to the bottom of the hill, 14lemp hot dog from the stand at the corner, taxi to the mall...... but then........ we finally broke down and made the big purchase we've been dreaming about for so long......... A MICROWAVE!!! HEYYO! And isn't she a beauty?!

Welcome to Kinder C

okay guys I'm 2-for-2 on the Monday update thing. We'll see how well I keep this up.

School last week was crazy, with Monday cancelled because of the strike, this is how the week went: Tuesday: half day, Wednesday: full day, Thursday: half day, Friday: full day. And because it was the first week, we hadn't started with any actual lessons, but were instead teaching the kids how to line up in a straight line, how to flush the toilet, how to raise their hands, how to use glue without making a huge mess etc. But if you know me at all, you know I need more structure than that. I have a hard time when I don't have specific things I'm supposed to be teaching. Plus, the kid I mentioned in the last post has turned out to be quite a handful indeed. So all that said, last week was not the greatest.

The weekend was fun, though! Bertha, who lives upstairs from us took me and my roommates grocery shopping on Saturday, which is always fun (except when you check out and see that you are spending 1,900L!!) Then I stayed home in the afternoon getting some work done and catching up on some phone calls. Then Anna, Corrie and I went out to La Creperia for dinner, a cute little crepe cafe, which was delicious as usual. Sunday, I went to church downtown and then met up with the roomies and Bertha for lunch before coming back home to a somewhat productive, very rainy afternoon.

Today was so much better as far as school goes! We were having actual classes and the kids had real work to do, which was great. Plus, they had Bible, Music and Library today which meant that I finally got some free time during the day... yay!

Ok, I promised pictures, so let me give you a few of the kiddos...

first day of school... false

so one of my goals this school year is to update this thing at least once a week (i'm trying out mondays for now), so that you all can keep up with the fun and exciting things that are going on down here. one of my other goals, however, is to be a better teacher and more organized, so if the first goal conflicts with the second, please have some grace and know that it is only for the sake of my students that i forsake this blog updating thing.

that being said, let me give you a rundown of what has happened so far.
Sat 16th: arrived in Tegucigalpa, met new roommate, Corrie, and had dinner with all of the new North American teachers
Sunday: church downtown and lunch at a school administrator's house
Monday-Thursday: workshops and classroom preparation
Friday: Open House - got to meet the parents of 13 of my 20 new students
Saturday: started unpacking my suitcases (yes, one week later)
Sunday: church, lunch at the mall with the roommates and Bertha
Today:FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL.... but it was cancelled, due to a strike in the city. Ahh the life of living in the capital city of a third world country! So in lieu of school we went to campus for a few hours to finish up some last minute details in the classroom. And the best part, we finally got internet in our house. Sadly the girl with the router has not arrived yet, so the 4 of us are taking turns plugging our computers into the modem to use it. But hey it's way better than nothing.

Tomorrow will be the real first day of school. I have 20 students this year as opposed to 24 that I had last year. I also have one year of experience under my belt which I'm looking forward to employing. Please pray for me though. I have gotten several warnings about one specific student in my class who has been known to be a troublemaker in the past. So hopefully I will be able to start the year off right and we can work together and be on the same page this year.

Ok, i have to go finish up my bulletin board that I'm working on and then get to bed. Big day tomorrow. I promise the next post will have pictures.