visit to new property and trip to Honduras

Hi everyone!

It’s been a while again, this time due to a trip to Honduras! But before I get there I’ll go back a few weeks. The first week of June was tests again in the school, so my schedule was a little difficult. But I managed to work with some kids, although we mostly just studied for the tests, rather than doing out usual activities.

The next week was back to normal, so I worked with almost everyone. On Wednesday all the volunteers took a trip to the new property. I’m still not quite sure why we went. It was kinda nice, to see the inside of the four new houses, and to have the rest of the plans explained to us, but we missed a whole day of teaching and therapies, and I’m not sure it was worth that. But it was interesting. There are four houses done and they look really nice. Each house is for a section, so about 16 kids. There’s two bedrooms, each for 8 kids, and each bedroom has it’s own bathroom with three toilets, three showers, and a big sink with lots of faucets (like you sometimes see in public restrooms). Each house also has a bedroom and bathroom for the tios or tias. Also, there’s a common room which has a living room area and a dining room area, so the kids can eat each section in their own house, rather than in a big cafeteria like dining room. Each house also has a store room and a washroom, with 5 sinks for washing clothes and an outdoor, but enclosed, area to hang the clothes to dry. The houses also have really nice windows and are planned really well for ventilation. When we got back, I told some of the kids about the new houses, and they were pretty excited. Who knows when they’ll finally get there though. I think (although this is from me counting sections, not from an NPH source) we need at least 10 more houses, and it could be closer to 15. Plus there’s no school, clinic, general storehouse, kitchen, common dining room, church, maintenance shops, sports fields, offices, housing for the little kids from Casa Asis, director’s housing, volunteer housing, or visitor’s housing. Obviously not all these things are critically important to have before the move- for example, the kids could go to public school at first, they could move before the visitor’s housing is done, etc. Also, the Casa Asis kids and the offices are already planned to be moved much after the kids from the island. But it does show the amount of work left. And the rising costs of pretty much everything is making it harder to get things done. So we’ll see what happens! I get a different story from everyone I ask about what the current plan is. The most recent story is that they’re planning to move the secondary school kids soon, two houses for the boys, and two for the girls. They’ll probably be a little more crowded than 16 to a house, but it shouldn’t be too bad. The idea is that they can go to public school, and then NPH can get a feel for how the housing design works with kids living in it before they build more. They also think maybe they’ll get money faster if there’s already kids living on the property. I guess the idea being that NPH international will want to see all the kids back together as soon as possible

I was also busy the week of the visit to the new property working out (or trying to work out) details for the Honduras trip. I was asked to go because they wanted someone who was comfortable with both English and Spanish. Michelle, the US volunteer who’s the English teacher, and Emelina, the director of the school also went. However, it was getting closer to the weekend (and my descanso) and we still didn’t know when we were leaving, which was a problem because then we didn’t know if we had to come back early from descanso. The final info we got before leaving was that we’d need to leave either Mon or Tues early, so we just packed for the whole trip. We stopped by the office on Friday on our way out, because we were told we’d need to go in person to buy our bus tickets. It turned out that they just needed a copy of our passports, but it was good we stopped by because then we knew when we were leaving.

So I headed to San Juan for descanso with Kiki and Julia. I had thought maybe to go to Salinas, but Pabla (my host mom) was having foot surgery and so it wasn’t a good weekend to visit. Plus I didn’t know ahead of time whether I’d need to be back early. So we went to San Juan, but we really didn’t do anything. Just relaxed. We used the internet a lot, and I got a skype account, so when I’m somewhere with decent internet I can call the states for 2 cents a minute. I’m not sure the internet here on the island is good enough, but at least when I’m on descanso.

Monday morning I headed back to the office because I was told to be there at 1:00. We didn’t end up leaving ‘til 4 or 4:30, but oh well. That gave us time to go to the bank, because NPH gave us some money for the trip, but they gave it to us in $100 US bills, which you can’t really use ANYWHERE, ‘cause no one has change. So we took it to the bank and got them to give us smaller bills. Then when everyone was ready we went to Managua to spend the night in the girls’ house.

The next morning we had to be at the bus station by 4:15 because the bus left at 5am. So that was VERY early. The bus ride was long, and not such great fun because it was very mountainous, so I got a little sick. It was nice to get to the border and have a chance to get out. We ended up being at the border for quite some time, because a woman was standing too close to the bus door and when it opened it hit her in the head and she got a pretty big cut. So they took her to a doctor just a bit back into Nicaragua, so we had to wait for her. So that was actually good for my stomach, because then I felt much less sick the rest of the way.

We got to Tegucigalpa at 2PM, and easily found the NPH volunteers who were there to get us because one of them had an NPH shirt on. Very convenient, those NPH shirts. They took us first to a mall to get some lunch and buy some groceries. There was a bit of confusion about if we were supposed to wait for the NPH Guatemala people. It turned out we didn’t need to wait for them, so we drove the hour up into the mountains outside of Tegucigalpa to get to the NPH home.

NPH Honduras is in a beautiful location! There are LOTS of pine trees, which I haven’t seen since leaving the US. I felt like I was in a warmer version of Rocky Mountain National Park, just with eucalyptus trees instead of ash trees. It was very peaceful, even though they have ~500 kids, almost double what we have. The property is also very large, larger than our property on the island, although I’m not sure if it’s larger than our new property in Jinotepe. So it really didn’t seem like they had that many more kids. Michelle and I noticed a few things that we liked that we’re wondering if NPH Nicaragua can incorporate into the new property. For example, the visitor’s house, and the volunteer’s house, was designed around a central garden. That design could be really nice for the new property, because the volunteer house will be much closer to the kids. Here we have a 5 minute walk through the plantains and bananas to get to the kids, but if I understand the plans for the new property right, the volunteer house will be much closer. That’ll be nice, because sometimes the 5 minute walk seems very long when it’s dark and pouring rain. However, that 5 minutes gives us some much appreciated privacy. But a central garden, rather than outdoor porches, like we have here, would do the same thing. It was also really nice to get to meet the volunteers in Honduras. They have the opposite situation that we do- most volunteers are from the States, with just a few from Europe. So it was fun to meet people who were from similar situations. There were two from Minnesota, one graduate from Gustavus, one girl from Boston and another that attended Boston University. It was nice to meet people with connections to some familiar places.

I suppose I should tell you all a bit about the real reason we went to Honduras- the conference. It turned out that the conference was given by two men from the Netherlands on “Competence based education”. Wednesday morning was the presentation of what this exactly means. I ended up translating half the time. Two volunteers from Honduras were asked to translate, and I volunteered to help (‘cause that’s what I thought I was going there to do anyway). So one of the Hounduran volunteers stayed with the guy who’s main job was to switch slides, to make sure he knew what was going on and to translate during the question/answer part, ‘cause he did that. The other two of us went with the guy who did the presentation, and we just traded off. One of us would go for 45 mins to an hour, then when we got tired, we’d switch. We’d also stay close by when we weren’t translating to help if the other one got stuck. After a lunch break, there was an hour and a half question/answer session. The group was split in two, so the two of us divided up (the other girl had somewhere else she had to go I think). That was a little bit more difficult at times, but it was also lower stress because it was more of a conversation, so it was easier to ask for clarification and to make sure that everyone understood everything. Thursday morning we visited the school and Thursday afternoon I translated for another question and answer session. Then Friday we left to come back.

So after all that translating, I think I finally figured out what competence based education is. It combines all of the subjects, including technical education, and teaches through real world situations. So if I understand correctly, a unit might go something like this. A “client”, which could be a real client from a nearby town, or a director of NPH, or whatever (but not a teacher) come with an assignment, maybe to design a door. So then a group of 2-4 students make a plan to make the door, with help from the teachers. So maybe they learn some geometry in math that they can use to make measurements for the door, and maybe in science they learn about trees, and which woods make good doors, and maybe in Spanish they write an advertising piece for their door, or a proposal to the client or something, and then in their workshops they make the door. Then they’re evaluated by the client, depending on if he or she likes the door. I think that’s at least the general idea. It’s obviously a very hard system to implement, because it requires completely changing the school structure. The guys running the conference said you can keep the same basic curriculum, if by curriculum you mean the topics you plan to teach, you just design them around central themes. Except I’m not really sure about how that works, ‘cause it’s supposed to be the client that presents the project. So if the 9th graders are supposed to learn about the digestive system in science to pass their government exams, and no client ever wants any project that has to do with anything that could be connected to the digestive system, I dunno what you do. I’m still not exactly clear on how it would work. I think it has a lot of really good components- real world connection, learning why such-and-such topic is important to learn, more student self-motivation, etc but I’m not sure how it would actually look fully implemented. I think Honduras is going try to implement it, at least to some extent, so then maybe the other NPH homes can look at it and get some ideas. But the guys running the conference said to expect up to 10 years to fully get it going. So who knows. I think we’re supposed to meet with Marlon (NPH Nicaragua national director) to tell him what we learned and to see how we could use any of it here. I’m not sure Nicaragua wants to do too much of this yet, because it requires a lot of training of the teachers, and with the move, there’s likely to be almost a complete switch in the teachers. So that’s a lot of lost training, if we train teachers here and then move in two years and have to train them all over again. Again, we’ll see!

As I said, Friday we came back from Honduras, luckily not leaving so early in the morning. We stayed in Managua again Friday night. Saturday I went and bought a copy machine with the money donated by my church and some of you all. It’s currently in the clinic (I’m not really sure why Alex the driver wanted to put it there, rather than in the school, but whatever). So at some point early this next week hopefully it will get moved to the school and installed. It wasn’t as expensive as we had thought, so I had some extra money so I bought lots of ink and lots of paper, ‘cause what good is a copy machine without ink and paper? And whenever we run out of ink it seems to take a month before we get more. So I figured better to have it on hand. Then we got driven back to San Jorge to the ferry and picked up from the ferry (it’s nice to travel with a donation, you get transport!) And now we’re back on the island!

I’m still not sure what’s really going on today, because I’ve spend the morning on laundry and unpacking and figuring out what I’m supposed to be doing to prep aula de recurso for this next week (although there are rumors that they’re in final exams, so maybe I won’t be able to do anything…). I’m sure I’ll get up to the kids at some point today. I have to start reading Narnia (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) with the girls, because they’re super excited. We finished Charlie and the Chocolate Factory the Wednesday before I left on descanso, and they really wanted to start Narnia on Thursday, but I told them that then I’d be gone for more than a week, so better we waited ‘til I got back. So now it’s time!

I’ll try to get pictures of the new property and of Honduras up later today or later this week. I haven’t heard from some of you in a long time, so send me an email! I hope the summer is going well for everyone!

Love,
Beth