Pictures!

I finally have some pictures to put up, so this post will just be a taste of what I have been up to in these last five or so weeks . . .

Some of the beautiful scenery along the road from San Pedro to Santa Rosa.

At the school with Roxana (one of the young women who works at the school), and Fatima – my 'guardian angel' for my first few days in Honduras, and a beautiful future Salesian Sister.

A group of the sisters and I visited the family of one of our boarding girls during the week of vacation for the feast of St. Rose of Lima. This picture was taken looking out from their farm, and gives you an idea of the type of scenery around Santa Rosa.

I don't yet have a picture with all of the sisters, but here is one with S. Eduviges (left) and S. Consuelo, and one of the teachers from the school. (Side note: you would not believe how many people can fit in that truck.)

This is not the best picture of me, but I had to include it because I thought it was really cute how a)S. Dorita thought it was necessary to stop this little boy and have me take a picture with his donkey (probably something like the equivalent of taking a picture with someone who is out walking their dog in the US), and b)the little boy was obviously extremely bashful about having his picture taken=)

“Campo Maín” - the girls from the weekend camp/retreat I went to outside of Tegucigalpa.

September is a month of patriotic celebrations in Honduras. This photo is of a flag ceremony at the school.

As I mentioned in the last post, many of the girls prepared and performed traditional folk dances at several points throughout this month for celebrations of Honduran culture. Here is a picture with one of the dance teams. Since Maria Auxiliadora is an all-girls school, we saw a lot of creative marker-facial hair=).

Some of the boarding girls hard at work. This was the beginning of the long vacation weekend, so eight or so of us formed a single line, and gave all of the corridors a thorough cleaning. I was one of the ones in front with the brooms; I learned that day that I apparently sweep very slowly.

Last week, S. Ena, the Provincial Director of the Salesian Sisters, visited us for several days. This photo is with her and all of the boarding school girls (hopefully I will get one with better quality at some point). They put on a little presentation for her, and a handful of the girls were brave enough to do a line dance I taught them=).

Last Sunday, this group of girls (six are boarding girls) made their First Communion at the Cathedral. It was so beautiful to be able to share that moment with them! 

One last note: if you could keep the boarding girls in your prayers still, I'd appreciate it. So many of them keep getting sick with bad fevers (probably Dengue), and we've had to send several of them home. Thanks!

Post 2

I have been holding off on my second post, hoping to get the camera situation worked out; but I think I had better not wait any longer.

Lots to catch you all up on . . .

The camp was a lot of fun . . . I traveled with Sr. Roselba and about ten girls by bus from Santa Rosa to San Pedro Sula, to Tegucigalpa, and finally to a cute little town up in the mountains called Ojohona – in total, it took about ten hours. The weekend was filled with a lot of singing, dancing, skits, games, talks by the sisters, and prayer . . . it brought back a lot of memories from the Challenge and MI camps/retreats I attended when I was younger. It was fun to see how, apart from the obvious cultural and language differences, these girls were so similar to ones I might meet at a Catholic camp in the US. You had all the same camper personalities/characters (the loud enthusiastic girls, the good girls, the 'cool girls', the quiet girls . . .), and even some of the songs were recognizable – different words, but definitely Spanish versions of “Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?”, “Old McDonald”, “Father Abraham”/“The Button Factory”, etc.

I have now had two “normal weeks” at the school. I'm sort of, somewhat getting the hang of the routine, despite language issues. I've started helping Sr. Dorita sell snacks during the girls' recreation time between classes. Imagine that you're standing behind a counter; you have 30 or 40 school girls crowded around, many of them yelling to try to get your attention; the money is new to you; the snacks are new to you; the prices mostly aren't written anywhere (I fixed that this week); and it's all in a language you hardly understand. Yeah, it's slightly insane, but kind of amusing. Luckily, I don't have to do it on my own, and mostly the girls find it funny when I have to point to five different things before figuring out exactly what they want.

In celebration of Honduran Independence, many of the girls participated in a Honduran folk dance presentation/competition at the school this Friday.

My Spanish has been slowly, slowly getting better. Speaking is still very hard for me, but I can tell that I'm understanding a bit more than I did a couple weeks ago. As I told my family, the trouble is, now people seem to think I understand enough to take on responsibilities . . . and, well, that doesn't always work out so well. Several of the girls have been really sick, and I've spent quite a number of hours sitting in a clinic this week. One of the girls in particular has been very sick with what we are guessing is Dengue, and so her mom came to pick her up this week. Unfortunately, the American didn't realize that a)the girl wasn't supposed to go out due to her fever, and b)didn't know which sister was supposed to give permission to leave the school. So, the mom showed up at the school to pick up her sick daughter, and the daughter couldn't be found because she was at the clinic with me waiting for the results of her blood tests. Yeah, that was embarrassing. I'm very grateful that the mother was so sweet and understanding.

Speaking of not understanding things . . . The room where I am staying has now flood about a dozen times. It seems that it often floods when I use the shower. The maintenance man has looked at it three or four times, and attempted to explain something to me, but his accent is so thick that I have a really hard time understanding much of anything he says. The one thing I have understood is that if I run the bathroom faucet at the same time as the shower, it often doesn't flood. I really am not sure how that works . . .

This last Thursday afternoon was exciting (and, in hindsight, pretty amusing). School had been out for an hour or so, and I was just helping the boarding girls get started on their chores. All of the sudden, one of the sisters, trailed by a group of men carrying some sort of equipment, walked up to us and told the girls that they needed to drop what they were doing and go to the patio. I was pretty confused for a few minutes, until I caught on that they were fumigating the buildings for bugs . . . right now. It was slightly chaotic. Girls were rushing around trying to grab homework, going “Listen! They're coming! They're coming!” By the time we got most of the people to leave the building for the part of campus across the street, smoke was billowing out of rooms. Luckily, someone had the foresight to grab the cat. If that wasn't exciting enough, we had to return to the main building after 45 minutes or so because they needed to fumigate the second building as well. I spent the afternoon trying not to freak out too much about girls breathing in toxic fumes. Honestly, most of them stayed in the patio where there was at least semi-fresh air, and everyone seems fine. I have seen more dead or dying cockroaches in these last couple of days than I think I have seen in my entire life up to this point (and I lived in Old Mill for two years, so that's saying something). Language/cultural immersion has definitely taught me the importance of being flexible in adapting to the random situations that arise in the present moment=)