Getting Closer to Goodbye

My four original students, all demonstrating pretty accurately

their individual personalities. All photo credits go to the amazing
Emily Pettinger.

Once again, far too much time has elapsed between posts. The last time I posted it was just about May and we had all begun to think in earnest about the approach of going home. Now, just a few days away from the two month mark, the thought of leaving occupies more and more of our thoughts. We're planning our goodbyes, setting goals and making to-do lists.

My thoughts and feelings about leaving are, as always, a mix. The last month was harder than I expected. I had hoped, starting out in May, that the last three months would be easy ones, filled with great parting moments with the kids and finally a sense of deep-rooted security in my place here. The month started with our final retreat as a volunteer community. We went to the beach and spent a long weekend in a beautiful practically-beach-front house donated to us by friends of friends. It had air conditioning, hot running water and cable TV, so basically paradise. I spent my 23rd birthday on May 8 floating in the  Caribbean Sea and chowing on spaghetti with meat sauce and red wine. It was a wonderful retreat. We all enjoyed one another's company more than we ever had before and had plenty of down-time to be in it. The retreat consisted mostly of looking back at our time at Amigos. We shared stories, laughed and cried together. And we ate amazing, ultra-gringo food, like bagels and cream cheese and cold-cut sandwiches. (As Amy, our director, observed oh so aptly, Hondurans never eat cold food! Even the milk in breakfast cereal gets heated up).

Over those four days I missed the kids a lot. I wrote down stories of things that had happened and spent a lot of time thinking about the kids who were important to me, the things they had shared with me, their terrible suffering, the ways they had made me laugh so hard, and the intenseness of my love for them.

I came back from retreat ready for the last three months to be one big high culminating in a heart-wrenching goodbye. I still haven't learned that there will always be good and bad, that there has to be. That life here, and everywhere, is always a mix of ups and downs. We aren't, after all, really in paradise yet. The bads make the goods real.

The boys and I present our science fair experiment,
"The Amazing Egg," another good moment in May.

A week after coming back from retreat I got sick. The insidious thing about it was that I was only really bed-ridden, not-able-to-move sick for maybe a day. The rest of the two weeks the darn thing held on I was okay enough to walk around and work, but feeling like I had a giant sack of potatoes on my back. I was tired all the time, always felt nauseous, and never had an appetite. I watched as my clothes got looser as day after day of practically no eating went by and still I wasn't hungry. I finally was able to start taking in earnest the antibiotic I had brought with me in the second week and after about four days I started to feel better. I'll never be quite sure what I had.

The week before I got sick, four new children came to the hogar, a four-year-old boy, two girls aged 8 and 10, and a 10-year-old boy. My main teaching job during the day is working in our transitional classroom, which is theoretically supposed to be just for new kids who come to the hogar, assessing their levels and placing them in appropriate classrooms. The thing is, since our bilingual program can't take new kids after Christmas, kids who might be a fit for one of those classrooms have to stay in transitional. We had gotten three new kids right before Christmas so those three were in my class, plus a fourth with such severe behavioral issues that there was no other place for him. I had had those four boys since starting with the classroom after my vacation in January. It had been tough. Three of the four have learning disabilities, all are at different academic levels, and all have behavior problems. But the four had gelled. I had English goals for them and was working through a science curriculum. In math I worked with just the most advanced two and it was enough because even with two the levels were completely different. Even though behavior was a constant battle, I felt like I had finally begun to get a handle on it and had a system that they at least understood, if they didn't always respect it.