As many of you know, I quit my job at UW-Madison and accepted a volunteer position at the San Jeronimo Bilingual School (SJBS) in Cofradia, Cortes, Honduras. I was happy to move back to Honduras after a decade of living in the states. I hope this blog explains to you what life is like in Cofradia and what I’ll be doing for the next eleven months (I can’t believe that one month has passed already).


Cofradia
The town of Cofradia is located about 45 minutes by car from San Pedro Sula. It is a town of about 20,000 people and the home to two bilingual schools (ours is better ha ha). I live in an apartment right off the town square. The school is about a 15 minute walk one way from the apartments. It is a nice walk but also causes you to sweat A LOT. We walk past a pineapple juice factory (which in turn causes there to be thousands of butterflies on our walking path) and a chicken farm. A nice mixture of smells.

We are in the rainy season right now. The temperature hovers in the low nineties with about ninety percent humidity. It rains almost every day for a few minutes, enough to cause the potholes in the road in front of our apartment to fill and the grass at the school to grow (more about that in a minute).  The rain also cools things down a bit (even if for just a few minutes).

BECA
BECA http://www.becaschools.org/ is the organization I work for and it provides all of the English speaking teachers for the San Jeronimo Bilingual School. This year there are 11 teachers and 2 resource teachers. I am the Administrator (provide support for the teachers, represent BECA’s mission at the school and at board meetings, serve as a liaison to the local community, manage the BECA scholarship program, pay all of the bills and manage the BECA budget in Honduras). BECA provides scholarships to 25% of the students who attend San Jeronimo.

I also work with the scholarship families on contributions they can make to the school. One is by keeping the school yard looking nice. Let me tell you, grass grows really fast when it rains every day. It is amazing to see what people can do with a three wheeled mower and machetes. Let’s say it took us 14 hours (over two Sundays) to just cut the grass to a bearable height and we didn't even get to the whole school yard. . It looks like my dad and mom may save the day and donate money to buy a new lawn mower and save me and the parents about 10 hours a month on cutting grass.

Typical day
Is there one? Since the volunteers arrived a few weeks ago our weekdays have looked like this – Spanish class/individual meetings in the morning and teaching workshops in the afternoons. This last week all of the teachers began teaching at a summer academy in the afternoons with some of San Jeronimo’s students who are taking time away from their summer vacations to take classes. My part of the academy was to coordinate with the parents which students would be there, pick up and drop students off (walking with them to and from the school), and make sure the teachers are fed and have all the supplies they need to teach at the academy. We have one more week of academy and then there are two weeks before school actually begins. Next week we get to go on a group trip. We are starting the conversation tomorrow about where we would like that trip to be.

Today is a classic example of how a day of work in Honduras goes for me: I needed to get money for BECA. Oddly, in Cofradia you can only use VISA debit cards (BECA only has a Mastercard) so I had to go to San Pedro Sula to get money. Easy right? A 45 minute bus ride with 100 other adults on an old school bus from the United States-it can’t be that bad. Today it took longer as the transit police were searching all men on buses. So we had to pull over and unload all of the men. It was weird watching all of the men get searched while women and children stayed on the bus just watching. I get to the mall (its air conditioned – yeah!) and get the money I need. Then off to the bank to pay the bills (every bill gets paid at the bank – no checks or going to the company to pay the bill). Had to wait over an hour in the bank line – at least part of it was inside in the air. Then I caught a cab back to Cofradia (didn’t want to be on the bus with so much money). A mile later the front tire goes flat; he changes the tire and then we go to a tire repair place. I sit in the car for a good 45 minutes sweating and waiting for the tire to be fixed. I finally get home. My point is that things that should be easy and take no time to complete, take time here. I have learned to not stress about time, that things will get done when they get done (they always do).

Food
Baleadas, pupusas, avocados, pineapple, watermelon, bananas, tajadas, need I say more? All good. The only thing that is hard to adjust to is that Hondurans love to serve soup on the hottest of hot days. We’ve politely tried to say we like the soup but when it’s so hot we can’t eat it.

I hope that is a nice introduction to what I’ve been up to; I hope to get my camera out of its case soon and actually take some photos (definitely want one of the 15 chickens behind my apartment building that hang out in the tree).