After an all-night flight with a momentary layover in San Salvador, we arrived in Tegucigalpa on Saturday morning. I flew down with James and Patricia, an engineer and educational consultant from the Bay Area, and Kyle and Carol, an engineer and a librarian and teacher from Washington, and we met Michael, Patricia’s brother-in-law in Tegucigalpa, and Jenifer, a special-needs teacher from Washington flew in the next day. Photos
Carlos, the administrative director of the school system in Jutigalpa and our main contact met us with his wife, Reina, and two of his three sons, Mario and Andres, and Victor, the driver and security guard. We had arrived at SFO a few hours early to with extra baggage in order to figure out how to divvy up the $8,000 worth of equipment that we brought down, including two projectors and five new laptops, and a bunch of books and teaching materials.
We piled into the mini-bus and stopped at an office supply store in order to purchase about $1,000 worth of materials for Escuela Santa Clara, the elementary/middle school, and 15th de Septiembre, an impoverished public school that had given us a list of supplies they needed in the spring. Embarking on the three-hour trip east to Jutigalpa, we found that the winter (our summer) rains had turned what had been dry, golden hills into lush green hills, and turned what had been extremely bumpy dirt roads into even bumpier dirt roads with huge pot holes, some a few feet deep. Arriving Jutigalpa at about 10pm, we dropped James, Kyle, and most of the supplies off at Escuelita Nazareth, the special-needs school, and then checked into the Hotel Boqueron. After checking in and dropping off our stuff, we all went out to El Pollo Loco, a rotisserie chicken place with really good chicken cooked over a real fire. The restaurant has picnic tables outside nest to sort of a fenced in cement courtyard where teenagers play soccer with some kind of a league. I had a Salva Vida, the common beer of Honduras, back at the hotel bar and had a long conversation with Ariel, the bartender, who is probably 23 or so, about the economic situation in Honduras, and the fact that many people, many of whom survive on less than a dollar a day, turn to the thriving drug trade, or end up heading up to El Norte, where they either disappear, or get killed along the way.
The next morning, we woke up early and went to a small church in Jutiquile, a tiny town outside of Jutigalpa, where Father Richard, the priest from Boston, who started Olancho Aid and the whole school system that we are working in, gives a sermon. As I am not catholic, I don’t participate in the service and communion, but I really enjoyed being with all these warm and thankful people. As I looked around, I noticed that about 90% of the people there were women, and I thought about what Ariel and I had talked about last night. Just as we did in March, we went to a family’s home with Richard for cold drinks and conversation.
We had a busy and productive workweek at the schools, mostly at the bilingual elementary/middle school, Santa Clara, and on Friday at the Spanish-speaking high school, Cardenal. We offered professional development workshops all week in the afternoons at Santa Clara: Patricia taught cooperative learning and differentiating the curriculum, Jennifer taught proactive classroom management to some North American volunteers in English, Michael taught various technological workshops from the internet to Office to Excel; and I taught teacher preparation and critical thinking. Carol was in the library at Santa Clara with Lupita, their librarian, training her on Koha, a library management system that we installed, and James and Kyle were working on the internet towers, improving bandwidth and internet speed, and creating backup system. Wednesday was my free day to do some work on a paper that I am writing for my USF class next week, and translate my Powerpont into English to teach to the volunteers on Thursday, something I had not expected. On Wednesday, we dropped off some basic supplies at 15th de Septiembre, an impoverished school that we had visited in the spring that serves about 150 students in two small windowless rooms with about five tables somehow.
There is quite a difference between the rich and poor here; I believe I read that 10% of the population has 40 or so percent of the money (as opposed to the US, where 10% has 30% or so…). Francisco, one of the school system’s administrators, told me that the average salary for a Honduran with a college degree is around 15,000 Lempiras, which is under $1,000 per year, while the average government worker makes ten times that, which is still not much my US standards of course. He also told me that in Jutigalpa, everyone knows who the drug traffickers are and that the police have no power and go to their huge houses and hang out with them. Particia and I were driving to the high school with Francisco when h pulled behind a new Toyota Tacoma, which is a lot nicer than the average car, and he pointed out that the three guys in back with machine guns in broad daylight were well known narcotraficantes. The police do set up roadblocks in town to harass campesinos for their drivers’ licenses when they make less that a dollar a day. In fact, six people were gunned down in town on Wednesday night including two police officers and apparently people were celebrating the deaths of the police officers.
On Saturday, we drove to Tegucigalpa, stopping by Valle de Angeles, a beautiful mining town in the mountains outside of the city, stayed at the Plaza de San Martin Hotel in Teguciagalpa, and flew out on Sunday, just like the last the trip in March. Overall, it was a fun and productive trip. We will probably return next year and work on some level, perhaps coordinating a book drive, and bringing more ram memory for their computers. . It’s nine pm and I have three hours to go on this TACA flight to get to San Francisco. I’m excited to see Paco and hope to get six hours of sleep before returning to work tomorrow.
