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You know it’s bad when even the kids wrinkle their noses at what’s come inside the big red thermos for dinner. Apparently even hungry nine and ten year olds aren’t huge fans of mystery meat hearts and livers (was it chicken? Or leftovers from the lunchtime beef feast?). I know better after seven months than to try to dissect the various murky shapes swimming inside the soup. That seems to be a defining concept for me as I find myself just into the third quarter of my service year: I know better now.
I know better now how to manage and find success within the Honduran school system. I know that when they call a teacher’s meeting, I had better expect that at least thirty minutes will be dedicated to frivolous details, like deciding which day of the week to wear the red polo uniform shirt and which day to wear blue. I know better now than to leave thirty notebooks sitting out overnight on a table near a window in my classroom and expect them to still be there in the morning (they won’t be there, let me tell you). Most importantly, I know better than to force a kid to sit down and participate in English class when he is having an “off day.” Let me explain this one.
Sometimes I wish that there was someone following me around with a video camera and making a movie of my life. I’d watch it again if just to laugh, hard, and shake my head at the ridiculousness of my daily encounters. My classes these last weeks have been exhausting and energizing; successful and mutinous. I think someone could have done a “Dangerous Minds” type film, Honduras style, after one of my classes with remedial 6th grade a couple weeks ago. All of the boys with anger management problems and learning difficulties are in one class together (a brilliant plan), and Fredy , 13, was refusing to stop spitting spit wads and do the vocabulary word-search. After taking away his ammunition and weapon (an inkless pen), he yelled at me and spat out a number of colorful phrases that I won’t repeat here. Naturally, I ignored him and continued checking homework with the other students, so he raised his fist as if he were going to hit me. Without looking at him, I told him that I hoped he would make a good choice. Instead of hitting me, he threw a metal desk across the room, then jumped from desk to desk until he split the wood of one of my chairs. He eventually lost his steam and the other kids lost interest in him, but I remember being surprised with myself at some point that I was not shocked at his behavior. I was more shocked this week that every single one of my 9th graders turned in ALL their homework for the week ON TIME. In one day, I will have wonderfully intelligent students who desperately want to achieve, followed by a volatile, aggressive pre-teen clinic case bordering on bi-polar, and then kids who are either special-ed or age fifteen and unable to read or write in Spanish. Academy Awards material? Perhaps.
The other weekend, I visited another “casa hogar” just outside of Tegucigalpa. It’s a small retreat center where only nine boys live and are taken care of by an older woman, one cook, and one tutor who comes to give them lessons every day. The psychologist on the Ranch, who works at several children’s homes, invited me so that these boys could have some exposure to someone outside of their small enclosed circle. I was pre-warned that these boys were serious cases, often getting in fist fights over soccer games and very fond of using Fredy-type language. I was amazed, though, after spending a Saturday with them at their respect, politeness, and obedience. Each boy, who comes from a serious background of broken families and extensive government-sponsored children’s homes, made an effort to make me feel welcome and to participate in the activities without a single fight. The psychologist told me that it had been an unusual day, and that they were behaving so well just because I was there. NPH, he explained to me, is the largest and best-run of the children’s homes in our part of Honduras, in terms of having a system down and producing capable young adults who can enter into the work world and support themselves. But my experience with these children outside of NPH who come from similar backgrounds as the kids on the Ranch got me thinking about our kids and why so many seem to be so—well—bad. What is the connection between bad behavior and growing up in a rural children’s home where you are just one out of 500 kids; where the same people that are in charge of you in school are in charge of you at “home”; where the attention of two parent figures is divided among 25 children of the same ages; where privacy and personal space are negotiable or nearly non-existent; where everything is provided for you, but shared, and therefore not valued; and where the faith that is taught is made about as exciting as a plate of beans. Perhaps the behavior of the Fredys isn’t so unexplainable.
I’ve observed over the last seven months that without the small, intimate social dynamic of the family, it is inconceivably hard to teach values to children. Without the security of the undivided attention and unconditional love of a good parent, it takes an exceptional child to rise above the overwhelming status quo to develop a strong moral character. Where is my motivation if my reward for doing my chore and completing my homework is to avoid being reprimanded by the tío or tía of the hogar and getting to eat dinner that night? I don’t mean to say that all children on the Ranch are lacking a values system; just like everywhere in the world, there are the numbered golden children who are dubbed prodigies by we volunteers by the mere fact that they’ve been on the Ranch so long and haven’t been turned into Frankeniño.
Today I experienced a purely golden moment where time stopped for me and I was truly happy, truly thankful, truly in love with my girls. We’d been working in the hot sun for an hour watering all the newly planted trees that HSBC bank donated last weekend. All the girls were in a good mood after running around and playing in the water fountains, filling up empty 3 liter Pepsi botles and then dumping it all out over the baby greens. Halfway into our long walk back up to hogar from the school, one of the older boys in his service year pulled up in a big John Deere tractor, pulling a large, empty trailer to the farm. Like most people, he was unable to say no to the kitten eyes of 9 year olds, and he let us all climb up in the back of the trailer to give us a ride back to the hogar. The girls were absolutely ecstatic: a four minute ride in a rickety old trailer was surely the best thing that could have happened to them on a normal Saturday. I watched my grinning, laughing chicas from the back of the trailer, unable to keep from laughing and smiling myself when they cheered and screamed at each jerk of the trailer as the tired balding wheels jumped with each deep rut in the dirt road. For a moment, I was transported back to my own childhood rides with my siblings in our Cub Cadet tractor trailer: dirty and hot from the late August desert sun, but just a happy kid, on top of the world as I’d coast by the golden wheat grasses from my throne of metal and plywood. The four minute spent riding the rough Ranch road today filled me with a familiar golden sweetness: it was spontaneous, simple happiness caught in its most pure moment and condensed into a delicious butterscotch melting slowly on my tongue, the honeyed rays of its sweet richness shooting out and soaking us with gold. The girls descended from the trailer giggling and grinning still, shrieking over and over: “Qué rico! Qué rico!”
So I have just under five months left. That’s still a mighty long time when I consider how thoroughly each day drains me to the bones. I have visions of myself at 50 sitting around a table with friends and sharing stories about our hardest jobs. I have plenty of more challenging jobs in my future, that I do not doubt; yet, it’s hard to imagine one with as many corresponding and conflicting social and cultural aspects. In what other job in my life will I—in one day—catch an entire class cheating on their English homework, serve a lunch that has chickens’ feet in it, embrace an HIV+ child, and explain to another child what chocolate is (yes, there is a new girl in my hogar who had never heard of chocolate before). In five more months, I am sure there will be more Fredy days, but there will also be more spontaneous butterscotch moments, too. I know better now than to think otherwise.
I know better now how to manage and find success within the Honduran school system. I know that when they call a teacher’s meeting, I had better expect that at least thirty minutes will be dedicated to frivolous details, like deciding which day of the week to wear the red polo uniform shirt and which day to wear blue. I know better now than to leave thirty notebooks sitting out overnight on a table near a window in my classroom and expect them to still be there in the morning (they won’t be there, let me tell you). Most importantly, I know better than to force a kid to sit down and participate in English class when he is having an “off day.” Let me explain this one.
Sometimes I wish that there was someone following me around with a video camera and making a movie of my life. I’d watch it again if just to laugh, hard, and shake my head at the ridiculousness of my daily encounters. My classes these last weeks have been exhausting and energizing; successful and mutinous. I think someone could have done a “Dangerous Minds” type film, Honduras style, after one of my classes with remedial 6th grade a couple weeks ago. All of the boys with anger management problems and learning difficulties are in one class together (a brilliant plan), and Fredy , 13, was refusing to stop spitting spit wads and do the vocabulary word-search. After taking away his ammunition and weapon (an inkless pen), he yelled at me and spat out a number of colorful phrases that I won’t repeat here. Naturally, I ignored him and continued checking homework with the other students, so he raised his fist as if he were going to hit me. Without looking at him, I told him that I hoped he would make a good choice. Instead of hitting me, he threw a metal desk across the room, then jumped from desk to desk until he split the wood of one of my chairs. He eventually lost his steam and the other kids lost interest in him, but I remember being surprised with myself at some point that I was not shocked at his behavior. I was more shocked this week that every single one of my 9th graders turned in ALL their homework for the week ON TIME. In one day, I will have wonderfully intelligent students who desperately want to achieve, followed by a volatile, aggressive pre-teen clinic case bordering on bi-polar, and then kids who are either special-ed or age fifteen and unable to read or write in Spanish. Academy Awards material? Perhaps.
The other weekend, I visited another “casa hogar” just outside of Tegucigalpa. It’s a small retreat center where only nine boys live and are taken care of by an older woman, one cook, and one tutor who comes to give them lessons every day. The psychologist on the Ranch, who works at several children’s homes, invited me so that these boys could have some exposure to someone outside of their small enclosed circle. I was pre-warned that these boys were serious cases, often getting in fist fights over soccer games and very fond of using Fredy-type language. I was amazed, though, after spending a Saturday with them at their respect, politeness, and obedience. Each boy, who comes from a serious background of broken families and extensive government-sponsored children’s homes, made an effort to make me feel welcome and to participate in the activities without a single fight. The psychologist told me that it had been an unusual day, and that they were behaving so well just because I was there. NPH, he explained to me, is the largest and best-run of the children’s homes in our part of Honduras, in terms of having a system down and producing capable young adults who can enter into the work world and support themselves. But my experience with these children outside of NPH who come from similar backgrounds as the kids on the Ranch got me thinking about our kids and why so many seem to be so—well—bad. What is the connection between bad behavior and growing up in a rural children’s home where you are just one out of 500 kids; where the same people that are in charge of you in school are in charge of you at “home”; where the attention of two parent figures is divided among 25 children of the same ages; where privacy and personal space are negotiable or nearly non-existent; where everything is provided for you, but shared, and therefore not valued; and where the faith that is taught is made about as exciting as a plate of beans. Perhaps the behavior of the Fredys isn’t so unexplainable.
I’ve observed over the last seven months that without the small, intimate social dynamic of the family, it is inconceivably hard to teach values to children. Without the security of the undivided attention and unconditional love of a good parent, it takes an exceptional child to rise above the overwhelming status quo to develop a strong moral character. Where is my motivation if my reward for doing my chore and completing my homework is to avoid being reprimanded by the tío or tía of the hogar and getting to eat dinner that night? I don’t mean to say that all children on the Ranch are lacking a values system; just like everywhere in the world, there are the numbered golden children who are dubbed prodigies by we volunteers by the mere fact that they’ve been on the Ranch so long and haven’t been turned into Frankeniño.
Today I experienced a purely golden moment where time stopped for me and I was truly happy, truly thankful, truly in love with my girls. We’d been working in the hot sun for an hour watering all the newly planted trees that HSBC bank donated last weekend. All the girls were in a good mood after running around and playing in the water fountains, filling up empty 3 liter Pepsi botles and then dumping it all out over the baby greens. Halfway into our long walk back up to hogar from the school, one of the older boys in his service year pulled up in a big John Deere tractor, pulling a large, empty trailer to the farm. Like most people, he was unable to say no to the kitten eyes of 9 year olds, and he let us all climb up in the back of the trailer to give us a ride back to the hogar. The girls were absolutely ecstatic: a four minute ride in a rickety old trailer was surely the best thing that could have happened to them on a normal Saturday. I watched my grinning, laughing chicas from the back of the trailer, unable to keep from laughing and smiling myself when they cheered and screamed at each jerk of the trailer as the tired balding wheels jumped with each deep rut in the dirt road. For a moment, I was transported back to my own childhood rides with my siblings in our Cub Cadet tractor trailer: dirty and hot from the late August desert sun, but just a happy kid, on top of the world as I’d coast by the golden wheat grasses from my throne of metal and plywood. The four minute spent riding the rough Ranch road today filled me with a familiar golden sweetness: it was spontaneous, simple happiness caught in its most pure moment and condensed into a delicious butterscotch melting slowly on my tongue, the honeyed rays of its sweet richness shooting out and soaking us with gold. The girls descended from the trailer giggling and grinning still, shrieking over and over: “Qué rico! Qué rico!”
So I have just under five months left. That’s still a mighty long time when I consider how thoroughly each day drains me to the bones. I have visions of myself at 50 sitting around a table with friends and sharing stories about our hardest jobs. I have plenty of more challenging jobs in my future, that I do not doubt; yet, it’s hard to imagine one with as many corresponding and conflicting social and cultural aspects. In what other job in my life will I—in one day—catch an entire class cheating on their English homework, serve a lunch that has chickens’ feet in it, embrace an HIV+ child, and explain to another child what chocolate is (yes, there is a new girl in my hogar who had never heard of chocolate before). In five more months, I am sure there will be more Fredy days, but there will also be more spontaneous butterscotch moments, too. I know better now than to think otherwise.
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