Luck of the Gringo

Well, I arrived in El Porvenir last night. Now that I’ve arrived I’m safe. And I’m as sound as I was when I left the States, for what that’s worth. But this time the getting here was an exercise in redefining “luck.”

At the airport in DC, I arrived with adequate time to make my flight. Except that the airline had apparently scheduled more early morning flights than it was willing to supply to staff to check in. You see, as the airport doesn’t open until a certain hour, there is only so much arriving early that actually helps. You arrive too early, and there is no one to check you in. You arrive on time, as did everyone else, and there aren’t enough people to check you in. Bad luck! Thankfully, a nice TSA officer passed me forward in the security line (with the required lecture of being earlier next time…sigh!) and I had a decent layover in Miami to let my baggage catch up. Good luck!

I arrived in San Pedro Sula with my 100 pounds of luggage (almost all of it supplies for the PASA workshops) and discovered that the bus company has changed its schedule and the bus to the central bus depot had already left and there wouldn’t be another one leaving the airport until the evening. Bad luck! But, I had plenty of time to take a taxi to the central bus depot and get on the afternoon bus to Ceiba. Good luck!

So, off I go in the taxi. And we are about half way there and I start to send a text message to folks back home that I’ve arrived safely when, BAM! We get into a fender bender. Bad luck! I delete the message, decide to wait to send any news until I make it to El Porvenir, and just not tempt fate. As for the fender bender, the traffic in front of us was stopped due to a police checkpoint in the road. Our driver thought to pull to the right, avoiding it being a head-on collision, and thankfully there was no traffic in the lane to our right. We walked away without a scratch on our bodies and minimal damage to the vehicles. Good luck!

I made it onto the bus for Ceiba and proceeded to watch the movie they were showing, which wasn’t anything amazing or riveting. Bad luck! But it takes place on a tropical island and there were lots of young men in swim trunks to look at. Good luck!

As we neared Ceiba, we found ourselves in the hours of traffic back up after a four car collision on the bridge over the Rio Danto west of town. I couldn’t figure out where I packed the number for my friends who were picking me up to let them know what is happening, and when I arrived, they weren’t there. Bad luck! However, I flagged down the last taxi in the parking lot before it pulled away and it turned out to be Cesar, a taxista I know from El Pino, just the other side of El Porvenir! He gave me a ride into Porvenir and had a numbers for the folks there so I could call to let them know I was coming. We arrived safely, and 18 hours after my adventure started I finally finished it. Good luck!

I guess, when the bad luck gets balanced out by the good luck, you know the universe wants you to be exactly where you are.

First steps...

This is a republication of my first  progress report to the Omprakash Foundation.

In just a few days, PASA workshops (the Spanish acronym for Promoting Improved and Sustained Learning) have gone from being a potential to being an exciting eventuality. Despite some trouble getting to El Porvenir (missing flights) and a day of school closures lost to a teacher work stoppage (in remembrance of the coup three years ago), I managed to turn only three full working days into successful first steps in setting up this pilot project.

It wasn’t easy, and I could not have done it without the wise advice and help of several people from Honduras Children. In all, I was able to:

• meet with and gain the support of the district’s superintendent and several important community leaders,
• arrange for the use of the municipal building as a workshop location,
• visit with teachers at 15 primary schools and 9 kindergartens,
• connect with 3 more primary schools and 7 more kindergartens that I couldn’t visit (several were closed on the days I visited), and
• visit 13 of the 15 townships in the municipality (only missing the last two because of how difficult it is to access them due to distance and poor road infrastructure).

The plan and budget is to work with 30 teachers of kindergarten and first grade in the Municipality of El Porvenir (15 rural townships along the north coast of Honduras) to identify and address common instructional challenges. Interest among teachers is so high that I worry I may find myself turning away participants! I will have to begin looking at options for expanding inclusion and/or which factors to use to decide who gets to participate, with both project objectives and equity being important. After all, the poorest schools may need the workshops the most, but bringing together a mix of schools is part of the plan’s structure to foment change and community building across the demographics.

 My discussions with teachers and observations of classrooms brought home to me many of the challenges the teachers face and that I will be facing in my delivery of the workshops. Honduran culture can be very status-oriented and hierarchical. Education is very much based on the “banking” model, in which students are passive recipients and teachers are the givers of knowledge. Teachers are members of a school culture that follows guidelines and curriculums without often comprehending the reasons why particular aspects thereof may or may not work. Students are responsible for learning, and failure to learn is their fault rather than that of an unresponsive educational system. The realities of child development are poorly understood, motivation is extrinsic, and the usual challenges of any classroom are compounded by poverty and poor health.

All that said, I found many teachers who were eager to improve their practice and gain access to greater knowledge and the potential to change. That is the aim of PASA, keying into that motivation to make a difference and providing the tools to do so in sustainable ways. As I begin the process of laying out a plan for the workshops and for more in-depth work with the teachers, I find myself focusing on how to help teachers get kids more deeply involved in the learning process. This seems to be breaking down into two sub-themes, (1) how to use a deeper understanding of child development to help teachers use children’s learning patterns as an asset rather than a deficit, and (2) how to teach in ways that actually avoid problematic behaviors by children (what I see as a more empowering spin on the idea of “classroom behavior management.”)

I also know that talking about different practices will do little to foment change; instead, the different strategies, from choral response to graphing to using the inquiry process, will have to be built into the workshops themselves, along with opportunities to reflect alone or in small groups. Understanding the cultural nature of teaching and what these teachers are up against in their efforts to improve their own practice is also requiring me to begin mapping out strategies not just for classroom practice but for the motivation and maintenance of the change process, perhaps a simple self-reporting system to help teachers monitor their own progress over time.

I’m excited to keep moving forward with the background research now that I have more exact knowledge of the issues on the ground and the perspectives of the teachers themselves. I’m especially excited to have been so warmly welcomed into the community of educators and I look forward to deepening the relationships I have begun to build.