To bring you up to speed with what's been going on with me. I just started teaching again about two weeks ago. I've noticed a significant difference from this round of classes compared to the last. Most significantly is being able to communicate with students starting on the first day. Everyday I am reminded how little Spanish vocabulary I seem to know, and how much work it takes to improve. Yet also everyday I am reminded how much Spanish I have learned, and that I am able to interact and converse, most evident in the ability to answer student's questions. I also set my class sizes more intentionally this time, I enrolled kids in smaller groups. Something I learned from was that my teaching style is much more effective in a small group setting than trying to control larger classes, a fact that probably doesn't surprise people who know me. But in order to have smaller class sizes I decided I needed to offer more class periods. So I now have 7 hour long classes that I teach Monday, Wednesday, Fridays which has felt like the teaching equivalent to a marathon.
I feel that I continually get more accustom to the culture. I've noticed some gradual shifts in my perceptions and notice that I understand things I previously chalked up to mystery. A simple example is in the culture of the rapidito (my main form or transport,
What is a rapidito?). I'd never encountered a form of transportation like the rapidito before, and I especially didn't understand them for a long time. They seemed to try to persuade the whole world to get in their vehicle without regard to how many people were in already. Then at some point, money is collected and then you shout the name of your stop as you approach (some stops near my house are Spanish translations of cockroach, donkey, clinic, deposit). After six months of using public transportation I have figured out that the rapiditos do have a passenger limit, and can tell how many more passengers they are looking to pick up before the focus shifts from picking people up, to quickly getting to the destination. I also sometimes now play a game where I try to guess, within a city block, when I am going to be asked for my money. Also since I'm a computer science guy, I sometimes think about what it would take to create a successful GPS service here since the majority of directions I give and get are relational to landmarks. No breakthroughs yet.
Honduras has had some headlines in the news in recent months. Most recently there were two big fires that occurred within the same week. Often the stuff that makes the news is the negative. Honduras has its problems going on but it's important to recognize that there is also good happening too. Even small stuff like getting offered an orange from a student's mother after her son's lesson, or bigger things like the children's clinic that is opening just down the street. It is easier for me to remember that acts of kindness exist here since I see them daily, but it's a privilege that most people who read this blog don't have.
Some other things that are going on:
The Proyecto MAMA English classes are changing their computers because they were slowly dying. So I recently inherited some of these computers to try to revive (better computers than the computers that I currently have). So now I am starting to review these computers and clean them of all the junk programs or viruses that have been installed. Plus I need to set them up in Spanish because my students don't normally know English. This will keep me busy in between my marathon teaching days.
And now I have officially been in the country for 6 months already.
Thanks for reading
