Life is All Kinds of Beautiful: Honduras Style: Gotta pee, grab an iced tea!

My classroom is coming together really well. It’s mostly completed—I just need a bookshelf for my books and activities! I hope you enjoy the pictures. Alejandro is a boy in one of the K classes, but him and I put together my alphabet rug today and we said the letter sounds together—he is really good at them!

The Language barrier is still very frustrating. I read it the best, understand a little bit here and there, and can speak very little. My assistants seem to get frustrated with me when I don’t understand them. I think it’s the most frustrating for me, as I am the head teacher, and I am the one who has to do the teaching and planning. I hope it is something that I will just get used to.

Check out the picture of my classroom rules-the top 8 were required (even for the nursery) and I added a few at the bottom (I hope the ones I added are as obvious to you as they are to me!) But I plan to have the students’ trace their hands on the first day, color them any way, and then I will cut them out and arrange them around the rules for a cute decoration!

We have to change our decorations every 2 months—including the Bible verse we put on our wall. The first verse I chose was “This is the day that the Lord has made, we will rejoice and be glad in it.” Psalm 118:24—there is a fun little song to this verse that I plan to sing with my kids every day!

The other day we picked up some laundry we had dropped off. It was $5 for me to do about two loads. It was nice getting my clothes back and having them smell like fresh laundry! I think that I will try and make my clothes last and do laundry about every two weeks, and do it myself sometimes too! I want to experience washing my clothes on the “pila” outside!

The other night we had a bonfire at Tabitha and Stacey’s house! We roasted hot dogs and s’mores-yum! We sang songs while Zak played guitar—such as Michael Jackson, John Cougar Mellencamp, Hootie and the Blowfish, and more! It was a lot of fun.

MI CUMPLEANOS! Yesterday was my first birthday celebrated outside of the states. My roommates made a great breakfast for us all: coffee, pancakes, and fruit. They sang me happy birthday and prayed for me—they’re pretty awesome. At school we had our teacher morning devotion and they prayed for me again, and then at 10 o’clock we had a little break from decorating/planning and a celebration. We had delicious cake and juice. Everyone was so nice and gave me warm wishes! That night a group of us met up for dinner at a Chinese place down the road, which was some of the best Chinese food ever! We then went to an ice cream place and got “tres leches” which is a 3 kinds of milk cake dessert—very good! We then hung out at our place with everyone for a bit. The group of teacher’s from the states is pretty awesome, and we have already had a lot of memorable moments together. God has blessed me with some pretty awesome new friends already!

This morning some of us went to Santa Rosa again to get some more things. Done Mundo (one of the driver’s from our school) picked us up and was our driver for the day—it was cheaper to hire him to take us around instead of riding the chicken bus to and from Santa Rosa, and taking taxi’s everywhere. We discovered the grocery store there is much cheaper, so we bought a lot of stuff there. If you buy name brand items here it is a lot more expensive than off-brand stuff, so we are careful as to what we buy! We ate lunch at an awesome pizza place there too. On our way out of Santa Rosa we stopped at a gas station to use the bathrooms. There was a group setting up a stage and they had Lipton Ice Tea posters and drinks. We asked them if they were free and they said yes, and then they got out free t-shirts for us. All we had to do was learn the commercial dance (the Hugh Jackman Lipton Ice Tea one) and do it with them. So they taught us the dance we and danced with them to the music—it was hilarious and so much fun! After, we left with a nice beverage and new shirt! Good memories. That;s where we came up with the “Gotta pee, grab an iced tea” quote—since the reason that whole thing happened is because we simply stopped to use the restrooms!

We arrived home and we had internet installed in our house!! This will be nice for lesson planning and for catching up with friends and family. Tomorrow we are planning to check out a church and to do a lot of planning and preparing for Monday which is Parent Orientation (I have to speak about myself, the school and curriculum, and answer questions. There will be a translator for all of this). And then Wednesday my children arrive! Please be praying for all of us teachers and our school, and for this coming week to go very well! It’s planning time for me now—adios mis amigos :)