This Week Sucks.

This week has sucked. In fact, it’s been kind of a rough month altogether. Lots of rain, lots of mud, lots of work, lots of bleh. But this week has definitely been the worst one for me yet.

First has been the boiling over of my constant frustration with the inadequate support our school receives from its wealthy administrators in Tegucigalpa. (Although I’m sure your curiosity has piqued, I will leave those details out for now, for the sake of brevity and focus and some good old-fashioned self-control.)

A lot of things have not gone the way I would have liked them to go, but it wasn’t really any of those things on its own. It wasn’t the scorpion that briefly decided to join my eighth grade Language class, until its life was stomped out by Star Student of the Week, Nimrod (yes, his name is Nimrod – don’t judge). It wasn’t the two days without water followed by two days without electricity, although they were definitely contributing factors. It wasn’t the US team’s loss to Honduras in the World Cup qualifying match, after I had done my fair share of smack-talking with students. It also wasn’t that we found out about two sets of our fellow teachers (not in La Unión) being robbed at gunpoint.  It wasn’t even that I haven’t left our tiny town since Christmas, although all of these realities have left me feeling a bit antsy and stir-crazy.

What really put me – and everyone nearby – over the edge was a string of deaths that have plagued our village and the small communities surrounding it over the last three weeks. There have been two accidental gun deaths of teenagers (I hate guns, now more than ever).  There has been one not-so-accidental gun death where a young teenage boy repeatedly shot his brother. Then this week brought two more unexpected deaths – one was the wife of our town mayor, a prominent figure here in La Unión and throughout the region. She developed a lung infection and died in the town soccer field, while waiting for a medical helicopter to pick her up. 

About a quarter of our school was related to this woman in some way or another, so it was a tragedy that sent rippling effects throughout the town. The night of her death, as is the custom for all deaths here in La Unión, people came to pay their respects to the family and to say their last goodbyes. The whole town came out, with a line of people streaming out the house and all along the street. We stopped by for a few hours to talk with our many grieving students and to be a part of this intimate town experience. It was a sad but moving communal event, and we felt privileged to be a part of it in some insignificant way. The open house lasted all night, as they always do here, until the next morning when the funeral took place. Then the family and many of the townspeople walked with the body up to the cemetery, as is their custom. Again, what a moving picture of community, demonstrating, “You are not alone; we will walk this long and difficult road with you.”

The day after that funeral, we found out that another death had occurred. The 22-year-old sister of Edan, one of our most volatile and yet most beloved eleventh grade guys, had been killed. What we know of the story is that she was working in a Honduran city a few hours away, got into a taxi after work, and was never heard from again. Her body was found the next day, showing that she had suffered unimaginable horrors before she was murdered: rape, torture, violence, death.

Again we spent an evening with our students at another home wake, trying – and failing – to be comforting and wise in the midst of unspeakable tragedy. It was hard to hug Edan, who was openly weeping, and not be a total mess of my own anger and tears. (I would also like to go on record as saying that – yes, I understand that it is local tradition to ALWAYS have an open casket, no matter what – but sometimes traditions should be abandoned, sometimes things are better left hidden, sometimes my students need to have the chance to sleep at night without seeing the evils of the world evident in a bruised and battered face.)

It’s been a rough week. It’s been hard to know how to teach and reach a bunch of kids who are sad, confused, angry, solemn. I have tried to remind them that this is not the way God intended our world to be, that this is the result of sin and brokenness, that death and evil don’t have the final say. But still the heaviness is hanging over our town, dark and uncomfortable.

And so maybe the best thing we can do is wait. Together. Through the night. Walking. Together. Up the hill. Waiting. Together. Waiting – for the truth of the gospel to fully sink into our grief, and for hope to intermingle with the heaviness.

Ready for a Little Brother

The kids here are always asking me why I don’t have any kids, sounding all too similar to what I assume my and Lenny’s parents are also thinking. “Five years of marriage?! It’s about time you gift us with a grandchild.” (To be fair, they’ve never said anything so overt, but sometimes the eyes say it all…)

A few weeks ago, about eight of the eleventh grade students pulled me aside during lunch and said, “Miss, we have something we need to talk to you about… We’ve decided we’re ready for a little brother. Or a sister.”

To which I said, “I think you’re talking to the wrong person about that. Your parents might be better able to assist you with your request.”

“No, Miss, we mean a little brother from you and Mr. Speiller. You’re like our parents, and we are ready for you to have a baby,” say they, with earnestness brimming from their eyes.

“What?!” says shocked me. Long pause. Now where to start a response to this statement. “First of all, I am NOT your parent, and if you ever refer to me as your parent again, there will be serious academic repercussions. Second, I appreciate you telling me that you are ready for a ‘little brother,’ but I am pretty sure that I need to be ready, not you. And right now I am not ready.”

They look at me with disappointment in their eyes, knocked down, but not out for the count. I am sure they will petition me again. They’re perseverant little buggers. Because why wouldn’t I want to birth a child in the rural mountains of Honduras, far from a modern hospital of any sort?

I’ve noticed that the culture here does not seem to understand the concept of waiting to have kids. Teen pregnancy is a big problem here, and young mothers are the norm. In fact, the whole concept of family is different. Marriage is rather uncommon; womanizing men are. Women put up with a lot of crap from men, and the whole idea of the strong, vocal, liberated woman is still pretty new. Lots of parents leave the home to find work in another part of the country, or in another country altogether, and the kids are left with little stability and little oversight as they figure out life on their own.

A few months ago, one of my seventh grade students asked me – in all seriousness –  if Mr. Speiller and I would want to adopt her. Well, just break my heart right before I have to teach the class how to divide fractions! Daniela and her twin brother, Jorge, who has a mental disability that makes him very challenging to manage during class, pretty much raise themselves. Their mother is in the US, working and sending money back to their aging grandma, with whom they live. Their dad is somewhere else in Honduras, doing his own thing. Daniela’s older sister, who was a ninth grader at our school last year, got pregnant, dropped out of school, and is now raising her own child at the very mature age of sixteen.

Knowing that this is quite possibly the future of beautiful, spunky, smart, stubborn Daniela is hard to take in. And if adopting her was a realistic option, we probably would consider it. But it’s not.

There are a lot of things that Lenny and I want to teach these kids. Yes, the Pythagorean Theorem is amazing! Yes, the Bible is full of wisdom and mystery and meaning! But sometimes we wonder if the most important thing we are to teach them is the beauty of a loving, stable family. A family where the man and the woman are equal, and each has a valuable voice. A family where commitment and loyalty are prioritized. A family where you can wait to have kids until you’re in your 30s (gasp, gasp!).

I pray that Daniela will notice that our family is different, and that she will somehow wade through all of her feelings of abandonment and adolescent angst, holding fast to the reality that someday her life and her family could be different too. In the meantime, any boys who come near her will have to answer to me!

Khristmas and Fireworks

It’s been far too long since my last post. I apologize and vow to do better.

Now that that’s out of the way, time for an update…

Lenny and I went with the eleventh grade students
to serve and have a special Christmas celebration
in an impoverished village nearby

December in Honduras was strange. There was no snow, only mud, mud and more mud. Christmas music was not playing incessantly from every available speaker. Gaudy decorations were few and far between (although they were much more prevalent than classy decorations). I did not see a single commercial or sign for Christmas sales or Christmas shopping or Christmas anything. It was very odd.

People in our rural mountain village celebrate Christmas with a big family dinner on Christmas Eve and a late-night church service, and then Sunday is just a relaxed day spent with family, blowing up fireworks.  (They do this for all special occasions – birthdays, anniversaries, finding a lost pig, etc. Usually in the middle of the night. Usually in the park right next to our house. And it usually sounds like a Wild West gun fight.) There might be fireworks galore, but there are no presents; most families here do not have the extra money for luxuries like gifts. For the most part, people here have missed the dreadful commercialization of Christmas. It’s beautiful (except for the fireworks).

Lenny was very excited to take our students
Christmas caroling through town; they were excited
to light fireworks during the caroling
- kind of a new fusion tradition!

When we arrived in the US a few days before Christmas, I felt seasonally disoriented, and I didn’t like it.  Don’t get me wrong; I have rarely been so happy to set foot on American soil and indulge in the luxuries of clean water and fast internet and cheeseburgers, but I instantly was aware of Christmas feeling tainted.

The shock wore off quicker than I would like to admit. The truth is I had missed the decorations (not including those tacky inflatable scenes; the world does NOT need any more of those), as well as the Christmas music and the holiday snacks.  As I contemplated my strange mixture of feelings, I realized that I had missed the constant reminders that Christmas was coming, because in Honduras, sometimes it was hard to remember that Christmas was even near. Life mostly goes on as usual. But I didn’t miss the chaotic hustle-and-bustle of Keeping Up with the Kommercialization of Khristmas.

Lenny and I with a 3-day-old lamb
at our school's Christmas program

As I contemplate the far off reality of celebrating future Christmases, I hope to adopt a more Honduran version of the holiday. Less commercialized, more focused and simple. A more soulful celebration that the Light of the World has come into the darkness. Now that I think about it, I might even throw in a firework or two. It makes perfect sense.