The People's Virgin, Sophocles, and ...Ozzy Osbourne?

A few weeks ago, I woke up with a start at 5.30 in the morning to the sound of explosions in the street outside the school. They were pretty regular, so after a few minutes, I realized they were actually fireworks. Yes, at 5.30 a.m. I was not happy to wake up twenty minutes earlier than usual, but this was just another reminder of how present Mary (you know, Jesus's mom) is in the culture here. It happened on the feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel (google it), a day that I normally don't pay much attention to, if any at all. In fact, the only Marian holiday that I've ever actually "celebrated" was the feast of Mary, Help of Christians in May in Chalchuapa, and I probably wouldn't have even does that, had I not been living with nuns that honored her as their patroness. Therefore, this day came completely out of the blue for me. We didn't do much for it here at the school, but the rest of the city had a procession in the morning (hence, the fireworks. side note: nobody waits for dark or even a holiday, really, to blow up fireworks. They're more about the bang than the beauty anyway). Then, at the evening Mass, people were spilling out of the cathedral into the street, and there were at least 50 people with candles. On a weekday, no less, when the priest can barely get 20 non-nuns to come!

Then I got to thinking about what the big deal is with Mary. Yes, I'm a cradle Catholic, but, like I said, I've never paid all the much attention to her. Sure, I'd say the Rosary, and I've played the part of Mary in a Passion skit, but that was about it. Here, it's a big deal to say the Litany at the end of the Rosary, calling on all the titles of Mary for intercession. One of them that always confused me was Virgen Poderosa, or Powerful Virgin. I just didn't understand what's so powerful about being a virgin. It's just a state of being, or better put, a lack of a different state of being. But then I realized that it's missing the second and equally important half, that the power lies in the fact that she's a virgin AND a mother. For everybody else in the history of the world, living or dead, this is an oxymoron, except Mary. It's pretty much impossible to be a virgin and a mother at the same time (though, I suppose through the wonders of modern medicine nowadays, you could do this through artificial insemination). The power here, though, is the power Mary was given by God when she conceived through His Spirit. That's already a sign of nearness and importance to God, besides being His wife and all. The fact that He would bestow power on a virgin is important in itself. And the fact that she can get people to wake up before the dawn to have a parade through town, thereby waking up an American volunteer from her much-needed sleep is evidence enough of her power. Truly, even if you're not Catholic and maybe don't even believe in God, you can't deny the power of even the image of Mary in the world, and how much influence she has over the people who believe in her intercession, especially here in Latin America.

Continuing the philosophical trend, I found myself in a really unprecedented situation just this afternoon. Every Wednesday, in the evening, the internas break into groups of 6 or 7, of different ages, called Life Groups, to say the Rosary and do a Bible study. I joined one of the groups, as usual, and as we got into the reading, I was surprised by just how much each girl contributed to the topic. Eventually, we were completely off topic all together, and the discussion somehow developed into a debate between Creationism and the Big Bang. Then, they started tossing names like Sophocles and Aristotle around. I could barely keep up with the Spanish, much less the ideas. But it was very clear that I was not prepared for something like this in the middle of Honduras, in a Bible study, with a bunch of teenage girls that are pura montana!

And, to change gears completely and just vent for a second, I'm finding it's extremely difficult to teach a computer class when there are only a few functioning computers. The computers are so incredibly old here, and extremely slow. A lot of times, they just shut off on their own, and I'm pretty sure they all have at least ten viruses. The girls are forced to share, sometimes 3 to a computer, and take notes in a notebook while one of them does all the computing. Because of this, they don't really get to learn if they don't get to practice, especially when we're working on typing, or dragging and dropping, or double clicking versus single. One of the computers doesn't function at all, except that it plays a music video of Ozzy Osbourne. I'm not sure how it got there or why, because I'm pretty sure nobody here has ever heard of him. But since it's all the computer does, the girl who sits there watches it all the time. I know I must sound like a whiny snob, but it kind of defeats the purpose in a classroom situation anyway.

Well, that's all I've got for now, folks, and I promise pictures for the next post. Have a good week!

Field Trip!

Well, folks, things have been slowing down a bit lately. I'm teaching two more classes than I was before, which means I have less time to go out and do things, but it's what I'm here for. There haven't really been many opportunities to leave recently anyway, so it's just been business as usual.

Yesterday, however, all the internas got to go on a field trip around town, and I got to go with them! Their life here is so structured that they rarely leave the school, except to go home, so most of them don't know much about Santa Rosa. This field trip was basically a really long walk around one side of town, so they could have some exercise other than the usual PE class and a change of scenery. We walked down to the lower area, away from downtown, and took a cooler full of snacks and some cookies. We stopped in a dry riverbed/drainage ditch/soccer "field" to rest, eat, and play, then came back. We were gone about two hours, and had to walk back during a thunderstorm, but it was worth it! Here are some of the pictures from the walk (by the way, you can click on the pictures to enlarge them):


Here's the line of internas stretching all the way down the street just outside the school, with Sor Marisela leading the way.


When the two carrying the cooler got tired of carrying it, two behind them would pick it up. I was very surprised at the lack of whining.

This is where we're headed, just on the other side of all the houses on the right side.

The drainage ditch/dry riverbed/soccer field also is used as a (non-commercial, anyone-who-wants-it-can-take-it) quarry.

Here are the girls lined up for Popsicles and cookies.

Here are Maria Luz and Delmis, actually very true to life. Super silly and super serious, but best friends nevertheless!

Another view of the soccer field part of it. At the top of the mountain is another quarry and also the city's dump. Yum.

Luckily, we left to go home before the dry riverbed became a wet one, but here are Yosselyn and Rosa Lillian, walking back up one of the few paved roads in the city. The rest are caliche or cobble-stoned. I think the cobble-stoned streets are very cute, but I hate driving on them. The building at the top of the hill is our school!

Here I am with Mirna, at a bad angle, rounding out the end of the group.

The sisters said they're going to try to make these outings a weekly thing (weather permitting), which I think is a terrific idea.

That's all for now, folks! Hasta luego!

Happenings

Since my photo website is letting me down, here are some pictures from recently:

If you get annoyed driving behind slow tractors on the highway, longing for an opportunity to pass them, just imagine how you'd feel behind this guy (it's actually pretty common) in San Pedro Sula:

This is one of the lakes in La Esperanza. It was so calm and there weren't many people around.

This is the cathedral in Tegucigalpa. Yes, it's covered in pigeons.


Here I am with Sara, the biological sister of one of the nuns. We're coming back from a birthday party for her dad in the town of La Entrada. The truck has 7 people inside, so we were demoted to the bed of the truck. On top of that, we were accompanied by food donations, a turkey in a box and two piglets in a bag by our feet. We had to keep our feet on them to keep them from jumping out the back.

Here are some of the girls in the missionary group, going to hand out food and household items to the poorer around Santa Rosa. The houses are typical of the area, and they were thankful for whatever help the girls could give them.


Here is a crowd of people around the truck, all wanting whatever we had to give away.

Sor Eduviges is buying mangoes from a vendor in the plaza at La Esperanza.
This is just a bit of what I've been up to lately!

Here are what's left of other pictures: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2480695&id=7911406 and http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2470491&id=7911406

Situations

I thought I´d attempt to explain a bit what it´s like for the girls to live here. Y´all already all know how it is for me, a foreigner, to get adjusted to life here, but what´s it like for the people who live here always?

Well, from my extremely limited experience, and just from looking at the 300 or so girls that come to school here and the 6 nuns that work here, this is not scientific, by any means. Just observations of an interesting cross-section of life here.

The school is private, all-girls, and Catholic (obviously). There are about 70 girls that are internas (boarders) and the rest of the students are externas. All but one of the internas are from extremely poor families in the country. The one that isn´t is the biological little sister of one of the sisters that works here, so she gets the opportunity to live here because the public school in their hometown isn´t as good as this school. All the externas are from around Santa Rosa and pay full tuition. There are a few externas that live with some Fransican nuns on the other side of town, but they´re from abusive homes or were abandoned by their parents. There is a great divide between the internas and externas. The externas can buy food from the concession stands at recess, but the internas can´t afford it, so they get food from the dining room. Most of the externas are in trouble a lot for bringing their cell phones to school, or their music players, while these things are just a dream for the internas.

While the girls that live with the Fransicans come from dangerous situations, this is not the case with the internas here. They come from very good families, who just happen to be desperately poor. This past week was Students Week, so most of them went home for vacation, kind of like a Spring Break. The school year goes from the middle of February to the middle of November, so this really is more like a Thanksgiving break. Two of them didn´t get to go home though. One of them lives on the Isla de Roatán, which, from what I hear, is a beautiful island and is very tourist-y. But it´s on the opposite side of Honduras from Santa Rosa, and takes 3 days to get there (bus, barge, ferry, taxi), and costs over L1,500 one-way. Since she couldn´t afford it and it was only for a week, she just stayed here. Her next opportunity to see her family won´t come until the end of the school year. The other girl that stayed just had an eye operation to remove a cateract. She´s 12, and still has cateracts in her other eye, but basically, she underwent a free experimental surgery, sponsored by some Cuban doctors, and it went very well. She spent the week here recovering.

Also, this school is not a typical school. There are two seperate parts, ciclico and bachillerato. Ciclico is like middle school, three years, but once you´re done, you don´t necessarily have to advance to bachillerato. You could technically be done with school after ciclico. Bachillerato is also three years, and you don´t necessarily have to have had ciclico to be in bachillerato. You could have just come from public school. Bachillerato is like getting more than a high school degree too. When you graduate from there, it´s like getting a degree from a junior college. It doesn´t count as a university degree though.

In order to get accepted here, an interna has to be nominated by her parish priest as someone who shows a lot of potential and will be willing to learn. The externas only have to sign up. But that´s why most of the internas are from the far reaches of the country. Tuition for an interna comes from a lot of different places. A few of the girls are sponsored by some families in the US. A few others by organizations here, but most of them have to pay their own way. It costs L200 each month for a girl to live and study here, which is about $8. This month, some of them could only pay L100, but the sisters are very understanding, and usually just ask for whatever the families can give. The rest of the tuition is in the form of food or clothes. All the girls returned from vacation with something from their homes. Most of them brought giant bags of beans, rice, sugar, bananas, plantains, whatever it is their family could spare. This helps the sisters also, because, as you probably already know, food prices around the world are absolutely through the roof. This especially hurts the smallest, poorest countries, and Honduras is not an exception.

For us, $8 a month is nothing, but I´m sure you can tell just how much better off these girls are than most of the people in their hometowns. They get business classes, math, chemistry, PE, English, computers, and music. They´re learning Excel and Word, calculus, and they get to actually work with chemicals in the chemistry lab. They get such a leg up in the world here, that it´s obvious how beneficial this school is. Everywhere we go, there are alumnas donating food and services to the school, so that it´s a physical evidence of the success here. The sisters go to an optometrist that used to be an interna. Every week, one of the sisters goes to San Pedro Sula to pick up a truckful of food donations from a few alumnas that own a cooperative supermarket, something they never would have been able to do without the education they got from here.

Of course, things are still tight here. The electricity gets shut off from time to time (everything still goes on though), internet goes out, and a lot of the house doesn´t get hot water, but it´s still one of the best schools in the country. The Texas public school system is not the best, but at least there´s electricity and, if a teacher doesn´t make it in, there´s a substitute (here and in El Salvador, they just send the kids home).

It´s hard to imagine what it would be like to be Hondureña, because, at the end of my term, I get to come back to hot water, cable TV, my beloved truck, my ranch that doubles as a playground, where it´s safe for a girl to be out past dark, and where getting a job is (relatively) equal for a woman. Most of Honduras will never see that, but at least the girls here have a chance.