School Is Underway

Well, an exciting past few days. I had a neat experience on Sunday travelling to a special service in celebration of the birthday of a priest who had (a couple of hundred years ago) prayed for water in a village and had it come out from a rock there. Will write about that later in one form or another.

Sunday morning the new bridge that linked St. Rita to St. Cruz collapsed. So, the boat boys are back in business. Good Christmas for some.

We had scheduled school to open on Monday. The Board had nominated a number of students and were to ensure that they arrived. I had not spent a great deal of energy following up on their efforts so was totally unsure of what would happen. My best case scenario hopes were five students. Incredibly, twenty students of all ages, from a variety of communities showed up by 9.30. (Schedule said 9.00 – so this was another evidence of the excitement these people felt about the opportunity – they had to travel by public transport and foot to get there on time.) Well, we had a few minutes of speeches ... almost nothing by Honduran standards ... and then got to work on the computers.

Yesterday and today students sorted themselves out as to who would come in the mornings and who would come in the afternoons. Wow. People are arriving at 7.00 a.m. to start work. You figure an hour’s travel in front of that and do the math. These students are serious. The afternoon group stays till after 5.00 p.m. which means they will not reach home till well after dark.

The oldest student is 53 years of age and the youngest is 13. There are two mother and son pairs. One pair is a newly married couple. Another student delivered her first baby 20 days ago. Her mother came along to hold the baby while she worked on the computer.

Word is getting out and each day has seen several new students coming to check out the chances for a place in the school. It is exactly what we had hoped to see happen but it is really gratifying to have it actually take place.

There has been a great deal of work put into this project by people in Canada and Honduras. It is a credit to their efforts that this school is now underway. We hope that the students will take responsibility for their places in the school and finish their course work. Already each of the grades is 25% through the first of four textbooks. They are cruising through 3-5 days worth of work each day. That is good news for all of us.

If you want to see some pictures of the students, send me an email ... or sign up to be a friend on Facebook. I will, in days to come, try to give you a bit of biographical material on a number of the students.

ttyl

BB