Fun facts!
Churches are typically the historic landmarks for cities such as Gracias. When cities are named, they build a church first and then grow the city out from there.
Gracias is a city known for its giving.
Right now it is the rainy season in Honduras, and it typically rains at the same time every day, around 2-3pm for awhile, and at night. The clouds roll in, and the thunder is VERY loud, and then the rain begins! The cool breeze feels wonderful though.
I feel 100% safe here, but I of course still stick with the buddy system (it's true, but I added that in just for your comfort mostly mom/dad and gma/gpa)! :)
1 US dollar is a little more than 18 lempira’s: to quickly calculate if something is a decent price or not, we cut the price in half and take off a zero. So if something is 100 lempiras, 100/2 is 50 and taking off a zero makes it $5. It’s a nice conversion method to do quickly. There are typically set prices on everything, no bargaining really. I can go anywhere in town on a little moto taxi for 10 lempiras, my typical meal costs about $3-5.
Sarah, Jaime, and I went in on groceries together and got fresh fruits and vegetables, rice, cereal, peanut butter, bread, pasta, and other stuff like that for right now. We each only paid $15 after we divided it all up evenly.
Our house costs about $50 a month each and we plan to add internet to our house soon which should be relatively cheap. This will make it easier to do some lesson planning and to contact you all!
We can bring a lunch to school or fill out a form in the cafeteria whenever we want to eat lunch at school that day (they are called facturas) and they just take out the amount from our paychecks.
There are two showers in our house now, and both of them have hot and cold water. When you first turn the water on it starts off hot, and the more you turn it the colder it gets. So it’s sort of backwards compared to many showers in the states.
We have toilet paper everywhere we go, but you are not allowed to put any down the toilet so there are always garbage cans next to every toilet.
It gets dark around 6-6:30 and the night life tends to end early, around 8pm.
Miss Ross has 13 students in her nursery this year, at one of the most beautiful schools ever!
We can either wash our clothes ourselves in our scrubbing sink (no washer or dryer) or we can take them to the cleaners to have done. We might take the cleaners option so that our uniforms stay as clean as possible, and because we don’t have a lot of time during the school day.
We take a 20 minute bumpy car ride up to school every day, and that is how we get home as well.
We have to drink out of bottled water all the time, but we have a big container of purified water we keep in our kitchen, and our schools have these too. We just brush our teeth with the tap water, since we don’t swallow it.
We eat a lot of beans, tortillas, rice, and some meat when we go out to eat, and these will be easiest to make in the house as well.
They call white people “gringos.”
8/12/11
Happy Friday! We had another day at school and we finished up the orientation packet. My room has to be decorated by next Friday (my birthday!) the 19th. We have orientation day on the 22nd with all of the parents. This should be interesting! Many of our students are either sponsored or their parents have made a huge sacrifice so that their children can attend our private school. We have a very prestigious and respectable reputation, and our parents want to make certain that their children are getting a good education. The parents all come in and meet with us teachers and we tell them about ourselves, why we are there, go over our curriculum, and more. Now, let me remind you that they speak little to no English, and I speak no Spanish yet. There are supposed to be translators inside our classrooms to help with this orientation meeting, but the more prayers the better I think! The first day of school starts on August 24th.
We finished up the day by starting to decorate our rooms. We have to have a new full door decoration about every 2 months, a Bible verse on our wall, a birthday bulletin board, and a few other things including a picture(s) of our family on our desks. I have my two assistants helping me in my room, Miss Sonia and Miss Nadiana, and they both help a lot with decorating my room. Today it was rather difficult to communicate with it only being the three of us in the room. There was a lot of pointing and drawing, and laughing when we were flustered because neither of us understood. I will humbly admit that I am very overwhelmed with how my classroom is going to go. I know that the children will learn fast, and hopefully I pick up on Spanish quickly too, but it just all seems mind boggling at the moment as to how it is all going to fall together. My approach for teaching at this point is: to repeat in English what the students might say in Spanish, and have them repeat it to me as well. We will see how that goes! It is going to be a trial and error approach for sure.
The pictures posted are what I have completed in my room so far—we have all next week still, and there is a lot I plan to get done! When we want supplies for our classroom we fill out a form and someone on staff finds the supplies for us if they can—three of the younger classrooms asked for big area rugs for calendar/reading time, so I am waiting to see if I will get that, which would be a wonderful addition to the classroom! I plan to talk to the head of the school next week about what the school really is in need of at the moment, so the money that has been raised can be put to good use as soon as possible. It is so crazy to me to see how unbelievably beautiful my school is, yet it is in a third world and still in much need. It just shows proud everyone is of the school, and they fully deserve to be. I am really blessed to work at this place!
After school a few of us went for a run—it was a little more difficult to run with this heat and altitude, but it still felt great to get out and do that. Then we went to dinner at a small place down the road and we rode in the little mini taxi’s for the first time. They are so cute to me! Then we went to the park by our house because it is Youth Day here and there was music, dancing, and food-it was a good time! A church right outside our house decided to have their service in the middle of the road tonight, and it is still currently going on. There is a lot of singing outside my window right now! We used to say “only in Africa” all the time, and I am going to continue that saying here…”Only in Honduras.”
8/13/11
This morning a few of us rode the "chicken bus" (a big school bus packed with people) to Santa Rosa, a bigger city than Gracias. It was about an hour or so bus ride. The bus goes so fast up and down the winding mountain roads! On our way there a man started praying and talking on the bus. Sarah was translating for us, and the man was talking about his health conditions and how he had a bad hernia and needed surgery and was homeless and had no family, and he was asking for financial support. The man's medical condition was very obvious, and it was a very sad story. But what happened next was amazing and brought tears to my eyes. People all on the bus started handing the man money. It was so amazing to see that the people here care so much about one another and graciously give to one another. It made me think of "giving freely of what we have," and these people truly DO give freely of the little many of them only have.
Santa Rosa was just a busy city, but very pretty! We ate at a cafe and then did some shopping. That will be where I purchase a guitar from, but I wanted to wait a little bit. They are all classically strung, and the cheapest I can find is one for around $50. I also bought a bag of pretzels today--It's the first time I have seen them here and I couldn't resist! It's almost 3pm here now, and the storm is on schedule so I am going to post this and head home!
This is still me using Google translate but:
Echo de menos y los amo a todos. Y recuerda...con Cristo todo es posible!!!!
ALSO! I want to thank SO many of you for your support in my fund-raising for the school! If you want to support in a different way, there is another option! You can support some of my own students, or other students in the school individually. It is $50.00 a month. If you are interested or know anyone that might be, please just send me an e-mail at kendall.renee.ross@gmail.com to talk to me more about it! THANK YOU so much already for any and all financial and prayer support you have given! I appreciate you all so much :)!
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