On Tuesday the Okies will be in Rio Viejo early, ready at last to welcome 79 bright, smiling, yellow and khaki clad youngsters into our 15x15 foot, concrete block, wide-windowed, naturally lit aula; and into our 2 rules and 13 classroom procedures. Hopefully we will have a blackboard as well.
We have spent this week in teacher seminars and preparations at Instituto El Rey. There are six Honduran teachers and five North Americans, and we had a lively time coming up with our 13 procedures and talking about what it takes to be a quality teacher. “Calidad total” is what Directora Ester expects from us. We talked about everything from lesson plans to problem students to how many bathroom breaks female students need when they’re menstruating (we have a very candid group).
It is really an exciting place to be. Kelly’s gifts for organizing and planning are extraordinarily useful, and I am looking forward to helping and learning about teaching, as well as working with the kids on their class gardens if it is possible. Kelly and I are grateful to be working alongside such a committed team of teachers, especially to learn from Ester, who radiates the love of Christ and commands the respect of teacher and student alike, and Sharon and Earl.
Larry Smoak and Chris Struna have also moved in at the campus in Las Mangas, and we are looking forward to life together with them as well. Chris, heavy-laden with jokes of all kinds, has taken over the responsibility of being our “social director”, to make sure we don’t get too boring. Larry is making himself at home again after a year’s sabbatical, and his fluent Spanish and spiritual encouragement has been a real gift to us already. We have begun playing “Cities and Knights of Catan”, which is a real humdinger of a board game. And we are eating Larry’s hearty granola, which is a real humdinger of a breakfast: oats, wheat fiber, raisins, whole wheat flour, corn flour, roasted peanuts, oil, molasses sugar, eggs, and more.
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