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.