My First Week!

So it has been about a week since I have updated. A lot has happened since my last post. I have finished my first 5 days of teaching now and surprisingly it has been going really well. A few highlights of the first day were first of all I was writing on the board and my marker went dry and one of my girls said “I can fix that for you” so without thinking I handed her the marker. Well she proceeds to put the thing in her mouth taking out the tip and flipping the tip around and puts it back in the marker. She of course then had to go to the bathroom to get all of the marker stuff out of her mouth. Another moment came when I told the kids that they don’t have to have my permission to drink out of their water bottles. I figured since it was like a hundred degrees in my class and they were asking me every 3 minutes to get a drink and it was disrupting class like crazy. Later today I was told by another teacher that I am not allowed to do that and they need to ask my permission to even get a drink out of their water bottles. How crazy is that. A few other things I have to get used to are every time I walk into the classroom the students all stand up and tell me good morning. There is a lot to get used to. The students here don’t exactly think for themselves when they are in the classroom and constantly are asking if they have to write what I am writing on the board and normally I proceed to tell them that it will be on the test so it up to you to decide but my suggestion would be yes. Tomorrow or I guess it will be today when I actually get this post up is children’s day here in Honduras. This is a big holiday here so all we do all day at school is play games and hand out candy. All the money for the candy has to come out of the teachers pockets though so that is kinda different but that is what happens when your school is extremely poor. The 7^th graders don’t have any of their own textbooks and even the teacher hardly has even a teacher’s edition for most of the courses. It makes learning a much slower process because so much more writing on the board has to happen. This next weekend is our first vacation already for another holiday so we actually have a four day weekend so I am pretty excited about that. I will be hopefully heading to Copan which is the site of Aztec ruins which I am really excited to learn about and see. Something else that I have been doing since I have arrived here is drinking a little bit of coffee. I never thought I could ever stand it but here the coffee comes from the hills right next to where I live and it isn’t very bitter it is a little sweeter. They roast it themselves and do all the work themselves so it is fun to enjoy the coffee they produce with them. The principal of my school even has a farm where he packages and sells his own coffee that he grows. One thing that needs prayer is I got an email from one of the teachers in Gracias which is another school owned by Abundant Life Schools which they just bought and I guess things there are terrible both academically and discipline wise. They are debating about whether they will even stay through the week. I actually graduated high school with these teachers so I know them pretty well. Please pray that things get better and that they stick it out for the year because if they leave they will be more short teachers then the school already is. Well this is turning out to be a rather long post but I hope it gives you a better idea about my life. Hopefully I will be able to put up pictures once the Internet connection here allows me. I miss you all more then you know. God Bless

P.S wow this weekend already is my one month anniversary of being in Honduras…time flies.

P.S.S So after actually writing this post we had Dia por la Nino's or somthing along those lines. It was pretty crazy. Very little was planned and basically it was like summer camp for the kids for a day all we did was play games all day. While we were hitting a pinata one girl got hit in the face and so I had to fill out an injury report. Meanwhile all the kids were stealing the candy out of the pinata. At least the injury was only a small cut on her head and really wasn't a big deal it just scared her.