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!