¡Hola!
And so it begins… For many of you this will be the first
you’ve heard about my Honduras adventure for a long time, it’s almost exactly a
year to the day since I decided to take part in Project Trust and leave
Scotland to work overseas for a year. I’ve now been in Honduras for a week and
have well and truly fallen in love with the place!
Thankfully all 16 of us Honduras volunteers made it here
without much trouble! We spent one night at a B&B in San Pedro Sula, the
countries second biggest city, before heading off in all directions to our
projects. My partner, Ione, and I were lucky enough to have only a 2 hour drive
to our village, Aguas Del Padre, which is about a 15 minute drive from a large
town called Siguatepeque. It is absolutely beautiful here!!!! It’s surprisingly
green and lush, thanks to the thunderstorms that strike about every 2 weeks at
this time of year, and we’re surrounded by pine tree forests. We have a
stunning view from the school because it’s on a hill, though it’s a bit
different to that at home!
Aguas Del Padre is a small, typical Honduran village built
on one main, rocky dirt track. There are probably a couple hundred people here
but the houses are quite spread out. It has a small church that on a Sunday
morning wakes the village with the happy singing and enthusiastic clapping,
it’s got a great vibe and I love it despite still massively struggling to
follow what they’re saying! There are also a couple pulperias (small shops)
which sell a lot of basic and random things.
Okay so now the house I’ll be spending the year calling home…
Well we sure got lucky!! Our hosts are Don José and Doña Luci, they are kind
and very caring! Their house is just beautiful, a 4 bedroom bungalow with a huge
garden. They have 2 aggressive dogs which do make us feel very protected, I’m
not sure I’ll be testing the ‘their bite is worse than there bark’ on these
ones though! Luci likes to keep the house very clean and she cooks our meals (and
teaching me!!) while José spends a lot of time tending to the many fruits and
plants they grow in the garden. They also grow coffee so I’ve started to drink
it every so often to keep them happy! We spend a lot of time talking to them in
what can only be classed as ‘Spanglish’ and it’s always very entertaining. As
Ione has almost no Spanish I’ve been acting as translator and have been pretty
amazed at how much I can understand… Really thankful for those Spanish lessons
back home! We also have a Californian volunteer, Katie, living with us though
she’s been away the past few days. She’s been here since January and also
teaches at the school. She’s great fun and it’s really nice to have another
person who’s been through everything we’ll go through in our first few months
guiding us!
The school, La Providencia, is only part of a much larger
project and plan. At the moment on the property there are 2 orphan homes, a
crafts workshop and a medical centre as well as the school. They want to
continue to expand until they have 8 orphan homes (each with ‘parents’ for the
children), a home for local widows (who will act as grandmothers to the
orphans), an administration building and a retreat centre for mission groups.
The eventual aim is for La Providencia to be self-sufficient. At the medical
centre they have surgical operating theatres and 6 times a year medical teams
come in to perform different operations for the community such as prosthetic
limbs, eye surgeries and clubfoot surgeries. Amazingly not only do we have the
opportunity to teach but also to get involved with any of the other projects!
(Even to watch operations… there aren’t many rules about that over here!)
At the moment I am teaching maths and science to Grades 2
and 3 and PE to Grades 1, 2, 3 and 4. It’s been a pretty hectic week to say the
least but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t having the time of my life. The
classes are all fairly small (20 in Grade 1 being the biggest and craziest lot
in the school!) and the kids are really good fun! As it’s a bilingual school we
have to teach our lessons in English but the kids (and other teachers) do love
trying to teach us Spanish at recreo (break). At the moment Ione and I are
looking into starting up a music and drama club as well as an extra help class
as there are currently no extracurricular activities running. We’d love to do a
school play of some sort at Christmas so hopefully we’ll get something sorted
out soon! There is definitely a very challenging but exciting year ahead of us!
I’ve attached a few photos to give you a vague idea of what I’m experiencing
though nothing will do it justice. I’ll write again soon, much love and thank
you for all the support.
Un abrazo, Michaela x
First day of school!
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