el programa de navidad

The Christmas Program.
well. I'm glad that's over with! Our morning started with a ride down the mountain at 6:30 in the morning. During this ride, I somehow dropped my cell phone out of my pocket into the streets of Villa Verde and it was kindly picked up by one of my neighbors! We got to the church about 7 and got ready for the kids to come. We practiced from 8-11:30. That day was the first time we worked with the drama people from Tegucigalpa so it was a lot of moving around and deciding stage placement. My girls were SO GOOD. We all brought books and just sat and read together or played Uno or Memory... it was wonderful, I was so thankful that it was only my girls dancing because I had no boys to keep in line! Still, it was a long morning and my girls were happy to go home for lunch. The teachers and I ran to a restaurant that had baleadas for 8 lempiras! (that's like 30 cents. and they're delicious) Then it was back to the church at 1 to begin decorating. We had an interesting decorating set up- we had to tape about 32 pieces of poster board together and then nail it onto a wooden frame for the back drop to two huge canvas paintings (of the town of Bethelehem of course). Not only did we have to do this almost impossible task once, but we had to make one blue posterboard creation and one black. Of course by the time we had it all taped together, the posterboards had slowly gotten taped together farther and farther down so that when we tried to nail them on the wooden frames.... it was disastrous. I'm sure there was a better way to have done it, but by the time we got to that point of realization it was too far into the process. We were all tired and ready to go to bed and we were only halfway through our day! The principals had estimated we'd be done setting up by 4:30, but 4:30 turned into 5:30 and we had to eat supper before the kids started coming at 6:45. We ran to the same place as lunch and I left early to find some safety pins in case my girls skirts decided to fall down. I went to several, several stores looking for 'ganchos'. One store, the guy brought me to hangers, clothes pins, bobby pins, and diaper pins-- apparently all are called ganchos but there weren't any actual safety pins. Very frustrating. It was getting kind of late, and I still needed to get ready so I decided to give up and walk back to the church. Surprise.... I got totally lost. Gracias is not a big town, there's no reason I should have gotten lost but I did! I asked lots of different people how to get to the church or the big paint store that I knew was right by the church and every person told me a different direction. Remember how I dropped my phone in Villa Verde? So... no way to contact anyone. Perfect! It was about 6:20 and I needed to be ready at 6:30 so I finally grabbed a mototaxi and he brought me. I was so thankful I gave him 100 lempiras (about $5) which is an obscene amount of money for a taxi ride but I didn't even care I was so happy to be alive and not lost! With about 3 minutes left I threw some clothes on and skipped the very, very necessary 'wash my hair' part of getting ready... I'd been working in a hot church all day so I felt pretty disgusting but! Such is the life of someone who is completely directionally challenged. :) My girls arrived looking lovely and their skirts stayed up so we were saved from that humiliation. The program started out fine, but when it was my girls' turn to get up on stage, I told them to go ahead and go and I started walking over to the floor where I would remind them of motions. Some other teacher (I'm pretty sure someone from Tegucigalpa) was standing by the stage and yelled at my girls that they couldn't start yet and told them to get off the stage.... and as soon as they walked back down, their music had begun and they were supposed to be dancing! They walked/ran to the middle of the stage, stood like they were ready for the song to begin except it was already beginning and... oh it was terrible. I kept mouthing, "JUST START HERE!" and would do the action... and then would say it again while the girls continued to stand there without moving, staring out into the audience. I felt so bad for them! Finally someone in the sound booth started the song over and my girls danced beautifully, but it was a ridiculously stressful moment!

The rest of the program went well, we finished about 10 pm and went home exhausted. I was pretty proud of myself on Tuesday and Wednesday because I actually required that my students work for awhile and they complied! Our party was great, I went home and packed in about 20 minutes (seriously), and hung out with the girls and our neighbors for our last evening in Honduras. Thursday morning, we woke up and drove to San Pedro Sula. Normally we take the bus, but the family of one of my students offered to take us in their van service. It took about 3 hours instead of the usual 5-6 on a bus, so that was awesome! We relaxed in San Pedro for the evening and left for the US in the morning.


So. I'm at home! Wedding stuff is starting, so it should be a busy, fun couple of weeks. I'll be in Em's wedding on January 2, drive to Omaha on January 3, and fly out early on the morning of January 4. See you then!

Estaré en casa para navidad! (i'll be home for christmas!)

WEEK TWO: SHEPHERDS

I will be home in six days. Crazy. We've been working on our Christmas program, so that's been keeping me busy which is good. Monday is the night of the program and we have to be in town at 7:20 am, we're practicing for 4 hours, have a break for lunch, the teachers stay and help decorate until 4, be back to practice again at 5:30 until the program at 7, have the program and stay to clean up afterward! s0.... looking at a very long day with school on Tuesday morning :)

This week was shepherds (pastores) and I hid pictures of the Christmas story characters around the school and made the kids a scavenger hunt page to try and find them all. They LOVED it. They were a little better at keeping secrets this week so that's good :) Only 3 people found Baby Jesus, so I was excited about that hiding spot :) The kids were pretty good considering the crazy schedule this week so that was nice. My only frustration was with trying to teach "Research Projects" - which includes bibliographies, sources, taking notes.... bah. Hopefully they are able to understand eventually! It's especially frustrating because there is not a lot of resource books in our library. The project is for the students to research a country (not Honduras or the United States) because that was about the only thing that could be researched with the books, and even those are sadly lacking in information. Example: most of the books have maps with the USSR still labeled. So... who knows how accurate the information is, and I don't know how many of my kids have access to the internet (plus that would make another rich/poor division between my students), but I suppose they can still gain the research project experience even if the information is completely inaccurate!

I'm really happy with things here, but as it gets closer to 'being home' time, I've started thinking about the things I will NOT miss about living here ... here are some of them:
~ not being able to flush toilet paper/having to throw that trash away
~ the billions of mosquitos/spiders/ant bites that I have had for four months now
~ rocky terrain wherever I go
~ having to pay things in exact amounts (everything is done in cash here and no one ever has change)
~ crappy internet
~ I'm going to put 'cold' nights, but I know I can't really complain based on the blizzardy weather in Iowa right now :)
~ not being able to drink tap water
~ no carpets anywhere
~ people not being able to call me back!!
~ not being able to watch Broncos games
~ my family and friends!!

So hopefully not having all these things in the US will balance out the nasty weather that I am not looking forward to AT ALL!

See some of you in a week! The rest of you... whenever :) Have a good 3rd week of Advent!

angels we have heard on high!

First week of Advent: ANGELS

My family celebrates each week of Advent with a different character from the Christmas story (apparently that's not how all families do it :)). The first week we talk about the angels and have Secret Angels (like Secret Santas). So, since the teacher gets to decide everything and I miss Advent with my family.... this week, I had my class participate! We read Luke 2 and learned different Christmas songs each day (they don't know any Christmas carols!) We also drew out Secret Angel names ... by the end of the week every single one of my kids knew who their secret angel was, including mine. So.... we may need to work on the keeping secrets thing. :) But, overall it was a wonderful way to begin getting ready for Christmas. The weather here is so nice and I don't watch tv to see ads, so I kind of forget it's Christmas. The girls and I had a bonfire a few weekends ago and in the middle of chopping down wood for the fire, Kirsty chopped down a tree that we've decorated with lights and ornaments and that's about as winter-y the house has gotten!

I finished teaching the choreography this week, so now we just have to perfect the dance! They have moved the program to be next Monday, December 14, so that gives us a lot more time. Wednesday and Friday of this week we are getting out of classes at noon to go to Gracias and practice on the stage where we'll be performing. The program is a really big deal- people from the school in Tegucigalpa are coming and it's going to be televised. The outfits are 525 lempiras each because a seamstress is making all of them. That's about $25 each which is a LOT of money for the families here. That's kind of frustrating because the students will only wear it once, but if they don't have money to buy them they can't be in the program. As teachers we've pretty much decided to pay for any of our students so that they can be a part of the Christmas ,program, but it's a little frustrating. It's an expensive school so most of the students are from wealthy families, but there are also quite a few scholarship students and I wish there weren't expenses that caused division.

I think it'd be really great to find some families from the United States that would be willing to support students for the Vida Abundante Schools, so if anyone is interested , let me know and maybe when I'm home at Christmas I can get more information out.

Speaking of being home for Christmas.... that's in two weeks! I almost can't believe it. Things have gone so quickly here and I'm sure with our Christmas programming, it will just go faster. I'm really excited to go home but not really excited about the snow. I've almost forgotten what real cold feels like :(

Hope your weekends are wonderful, pray for me and my kids this week that we don't kill each other working on this dance! And that the boys won't die of boredom while I teach the girls for 2 hours a day! Second week of Advent: Shepherds! Woo!