Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Rainy season

This year´s rainy season has come in with a bang. It has rained every day for a month, and not your usually rainy season rain, but big long storms, filling the whole country with water. There´s not a road without puddles, lakes, streams in them. More interestingly, due to the massive amount of water this season, our mountain road seems to be falling apart. It started with nothing abnormal, such as mudslides into the road, rocks and dirt sliding down into the pavement. Inevitable and easy enough to fix within a day or two. However, two days ago, massive rains caused a stream to flood, which caused part of the road of one of the mountain curves to just fall off. There´s a hole in the side of the road, and they are worried about the whole road going down.




So, to take a bus to the capital, I have to get off about 50 feet from the spot, walk to the other side, and take another bus. They won´t let them pass until they figure out what to do.


I´d like to say this is the only place where the road wants to slide off the mountain, but on the other side of our site, the other exit, they have been working on a similar road problem for over a year....doesn´t build a lot of confidence, except, at least for now, the other side is still pasable by buses. It is interesting, because it is conditions like this, with the country saturated, that can cause a national disaster like the havoc reaked by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. It put the country back at least a decade. My biggest prayer right now is that the rain lets up a little bit and no more tropical depressions or hurricanes dump on the country for a few weeks. Rain, rain, go away, come again another day.....

Friday, October 3, 2008

Project Citizen Update

I am standing in front of a roomful of people. I remind myself I did this to myself as I nervously watch my project manager finish her part of the speaking. I’m nervous because when she finishes, it’s my turn, then Alice. Alice has her part memorized because she hates being in front of people. I only practiced 3 or 4 times, but I was planning on just talking normally. I don’t know why I thought that I would be comfortable talking in Spanish in front of a group of 100 educators. I am half thankful that over half the invitees have skipped the second day of the meeting to participate in the teacher strikes that have shut down the public schools for the past 2 days. I speak Spanish like I’m 7. I’ve got a decent vocabulary and pronunciation, but I still haven’t had 8 years of grammar classes reminding me when to use preterit or imperfect.

The group of people I am standing in front of is the national congress on civic education. This is a congress from the old definition, the one where it was just a meeting of concerned parties, not national law makers. Of course, this doesn’t make it much easier to talk to them. We are still trying to get them to adopt project citizen as part of the national curriculum, which means they might as well be lawmakers. They are the top authority. With over 200 invitees, only 120 showed the first day. Today is the second day and I guess there is somewhere between 80 and 110. I’ve never had to estimate numbers of people this high. I’ve never been expected to talk to this many people either. Not even in college.

Along with my wife and boss, we also have eight of our students with us. They don’t know how good they’ve made us look. Even when they didn’t really have a clue what they were doing because we rushed them through 4 weeks of the program, they still made us look good by showing up at our whim. Instead of spending their afternoons and weekends relaxing or getting into trouble, they’ve spent 13 of the last 21 days in our office preparing for this presentation. I should mention it takes Alice and me at least 20 minutes to travel from their school to our office when we have direct transportation. It probably takes the students at least 35 minutes, but they show up consistently and don’t complain. The other 22 students in the class were only interested in doing work in class, which is more standard for students here. Anyways, I am watching them prepare in the last few moments before I say a few words and praying everything goes well for them when they present their work in a few minutes.

My boss is finished and shoots me a look probably meant to say good luck, but I barely see it. She worked hard to be a part of this congress and the last thing I want to hear later is that everything went well until Drew spoke. I’m walking to the microphone. I have to adjust it. In my entire time here, I’ve met 2 Hondurans as tall as me, but never anyone taller. I am a giant amongst men here, but right now I feel my confidence somewhere around my feet.

“Good morning” Yeah, I’m nervous, but at least I assigned the right gender to morning, should be all downhill from here.

“First, I’d like to introduce my wife and co-worker, Alice.” I am getting more nervous, despite the flawless execution of my greeting and first sentence. I silently bask in the pleasure of having assigned the appropriate gender to both wife and co-worker. If nothing else, at least this group of highly educated Hondurans will I know I’m aware that my wife is a female. I am awesome.

I continue on and tell people that we are Peace Corps volunteers in Valle de Angeles and we have a year left. Oddly enough, it is exactly one year to the day. I start into the meat of things and manage to execute a few decent sentences about how we started with project citizen in different school with another teacher, and now we are trying to expand it to 2 other schools.

I find myself temporarily distracted while I am talking and lose my place. I have what I am going to say written down, but I hate such restrictions when talking in front of groups. I usually do make note cards, but today I’ve just printed off a paper, since what I have planned to say is less than a half sheet of paper.

I look down at the paper and mumble “where am I?” The people laugh and I am immediately glad I screwed up. The students can now see it is not fatal to mess up and I am no longer hiding behind my rehearsed infallibility. I get through the second half of the paper much easier, even though I realize I left out a large chunk in the beginning. I pass the floor to Alice and I slink off the stage relieved. If I were a better husband I would have stood next to her for moral support, but the idea doesn’t occur to me until I’ve walked off.

I guess I had been more nervous than I thought, because it takes a minute for the details to start becoming clear in my mind again. Alice is already into her speech and I am sitting off to the side next to my boss hoping Alice does a good job. She gets so nervous in front of groups, I start to get nervous for her. She tells about the school we are working in and the students. We tactfully leave out that the teacher has been terrible and only shown up 3 times in 13 weeks.

Alice is talking about the students being nervous and she throws in that she is a bit nervous herself. This is a shock. Alice doesn’t add things in. Alice recites; it makes her more comfortable. The people reward her addition with a pleasant chuckle and she looks more at ease. She finishes up and passes the floor to the students. She did fantastically, and I remind myself I should mention that to her later, but I never do until she asks me about it later. My mind is already on my students.

The eight kids are split up into pairs to represent the four parts of the presentation. The first part is pretty easy. The two girls have to explain the social problem they chose to study, give some background, and explain why they wanted to choose that problem. They chose deforestation and forest fires, and if you see a before and after picture of their community, it is pretty obvious what the background is and why they chose it. At the current rate, the trees and topsoil with both be gone in 5 years, along with the water they all depend on. The two girls look confident and intelligent. They are speaking from memory, but the information doesn’t sounds mechanically memorized.

The second two girls have to explain the current public policy regarding the forest. They had to read 90 pages of the national forestry law to get the information they needed, and it took me and 2 other people at least 5 tries to explain the public policy concept. A law is public policy (most of the time), but a public policy is not always a law. Most groups have a public policy, and it may be the same as the law and it may not. The firemen are not policy makers, but they have a policy that pertains to the subject, so they need to be mentioned in an intelligent policy discussion, but you cannot propose a policy to them in hope they adopt it. Work in the community groups and their relation to public policy and the result was two baffled teen-aged girls. We finally got them where we needed them sometime two days before. The best part of all is you would never be able to tell the concept confused them even in the slightest. They make the second part flow as effortlessly as the first. The only complaint I have is that one of the girls seems to have spent too much time at a local evangelical church and is attempting to swallow the microphone between breaths, making her sounds a lot like she’s giving a sermon.

While the content of the second part was the scariest, the scariest performers were the third group. We did not pick the students who were going to participate, and we were willing to give all of the students an equal chance. The two boys had honestly never done any presentations in front of people, let alone in front of well educated strangers. They are very accustomed to memorizing and reciting, and they were amazing at that, but while they were talking during practices it was painfully obvious they were reciting things word for word. They were the only two to practice during the day off we gave the students to relax. They were still feeling mechanical, but the improvement was visible. One was still really nervous about talking in front of people, so he requested a local preacher open up the church for him on a Thursday, so he could practice his part with a microphone. The other student comes from the community where Alice does her literacy classes on Sundays where the illiteracy rate is sky high. When he graduates next year he will be amongst the most educated men in his community. By the time they got to the microphone, I was no longer scared they were going to mess anything up. I was just scared they would freeze up and all their hard work would end with them being disappointed. They were in charge of describing the public policy the students had come up with to deal with deforestation in their community. The policy was to basically follow the law, which seems silly, but really needs to be said to the powers that be in the municipality. They were perfect, and seemed like they were as comfortable as everybody else on stage. When they finished, I closed my eyes for a second in relief, knowing that I would never forget that experience.

The last pair of boys participated in community theatre during the fair, and we were not very concerned with their ability to talk in front of people. They hadn’t been either, and they probably had the most pauses because they hadn’t practiced as much as the other groups. The talked about their plan of action and it went smoothly. I was a little sad they had decided to talk from an outline, since this means every time they spoke it went a little different. Once, during practice they said the office for the municipal environmental office was smaller than the bathroom, and the person in it was not going to be taken seriously or be able to hold the meetings he needed in it. Honesty is not a valued in politics, and I think my boss mentioned he should change that part, but I would have loved to see him say that. I hope when the students do the presentations at the municipality he puts that back in. At the end we had told the students they needed a conclusion and we assumed that the last group was going to tack it on to the end, so when they announced the first girl was going to conclude, I was confused, and briefly, very worried.

            She did fine, and was probably the best person to do it. She was confident and well rehearsed, and she remembered to thank all the necessary people. The students were all relieved as they walked off stage, half exhausted, half proud. They sat down and for a few minutes they were chatty, asking how they did, feeling relived, but as soon as the net presentation began, they were immediately respectful and quiet.

Shortly after we have to usher them out so they can eat and Alice and I can get to our next activity. The new groups of volunteers were being sworn in, and we were invited. I am slightly disappointed I didn’t stay with the students to congratulate them over and over again, but Alice and I working on a plan to take them to the beach, where we will give them a free day to enjoy themselves. We’ll give them certificates and pictures of their performance, and hopefully, they will have half a clue how much we appreciate them.

            As for the other 22 students in that class, and the 30 students in the other high school, we are waiting out a teachers’ strike that currently has schools nationwide shut down and unused. We only need a little time to really organize the community level event, but the students in the other groups aren’t quite ready. As soon as we get them there, we’ll let everyone know.