The Case of the Needle-Swallowers

The Case of the Needle Swallowers
How is it that 2 girls have “accidentally” swallowed needles in the same week? One of them even swallowed two within three days of one another. They are both troublemakers already, and the general consensus is that it was no accident. They are okay, but they were hospitalized, and one had to have it surgically removed. I guess they thought it was a clever way to get to go to the city for a few days…

Written in my (Jessie´s) notebook on February 17, 2010:
This seems so backwards. The girls here, well a lot of them, are little terrors. They terrorize everyone around them. They are off the walls in class. It is really strange, the extent of this problem. The boys seem much more orderly in class, generally doing what they´re asked with a few exceptions, of course. The girls, however, are running around talking, hitting the boys and laughing at the people who read more slowly. I just saw one girl get up and knock another boy right out of his chair. He had his hands tucked in his shirt because it is unusually cold in Honduras right now. He just rolled onto the floor. The teacher only says their name loudly…they don´t pay her any mind. One of the volunteers that came with our group is a social worker here, and she works with the girls in particular. She too, is appalled by their behavior, the rudeness and the straight malice of a lot of the girls here. Yes, they have had really rough pasts, and that may be why they act out in the ways that they do, but, she says, there are girls in Germany (where she´s from) that have really rough pasts too. She has worked with many. It is cultural? Is it the way they´re treated here on the ranch? The boys here have tenfold the amount of privileges that the girls do. Does this bother them or are they just used to being inferior? Perhaps they understand why they don´t have these privileges. Perhaps it is because they´re so badly behaved.

Unfortunately, but also very fortunately, I am not working with the girls much at all, except for the few that I have with me in tutoria, so I won´t be able to get as close to this issue as I would like to be able to understand their behavior a little better. They walk all over the female teachers here, too. There is only one male teacher, and I have heard that he has really good class control. I have a strong feeling that this is because they respect the men here more, in general. Men aren´t allowed to be tíos for the girls, but women are allowed to be tías for the boys. Maybe the girls would be more orderly if they had more of a male presence in their lives that they respected. This seems like something they are truly lacking in their upbringing, whereas the boys have both a tío and a tía as their guardians and parents. I am observing a class with fourth grade girls in it right now, and their behavior is just atrocious. A girl is now walking around and banging on every boy´s desk and hitting them. They pay her no mind. The boys are participating in the lesson and raising their hands so they can go solve problems on the board.

Written in Jessie´s notebook 3/3/2010 (so far behind!!)
My job is going really well right now, all things considered. I was really dreading going to work on Monday morning, and then once I got there and started the day I realized how much I actually enjoy this job. Here are some photos of me in my classroom that I worked so hard to decorate!

The kids are not easy, and each of my 12 students has such distinct needs that it takes a lot of planning for each session. I have so many kids, though, that the planning time I do have usually isn´t sufficient. I have some really bad kids that I have to deal with. Here are some of the various situations that I have had to get through:

Two of my students from the fourth grade are friends and wanted to come to tutoria together. I agreed, on the stipulation that they would be separated if they didn´t behave well or do their work. They are learning about 6 digit numbers right now, adding, subtracting, greater than lesser than etc., so we played a dice game together that incorporated all of these processes. One of the boys lost, as is typical to any game, and he pitched a freakin fit. He yelled at me, saying he hated me and never wanted to come back, and then he ran to the door to try to get out and became even more infuriated when he realized that the door was locked and he needed a key to open it. I always lock my door from the inside for this very reason, as I learned early on. I can´t have my kids barging out of the room whenever they damn well feel like it. They´re my responsibility during this time, and I do not want to have to chase a hysterical kid all over the ranch like I probably would have had to in this situation. I also lock it to protect myself. Kids like to walk around and open doors and raid rooms while you´re working. I need it constantly locked from the inside and out. Anyway, this kid was infuriated and started kicking my fragile door. At least I was able to say some things to him before I escorted him back to his class. He wouldn´t talk or look at me for a week afterwards. I had Stephanie, the volunteer in his hogar, to talk to him about it. The next time I took him from class he was amiable and we had a really good session. I didn´t bring it up because it would only have made things worse. I had his tíos and volunteers to talk to him about it which was sufficient. He loses, though, because we have to keep competition out of tutoria. No fun games for him. His tíos said he is always like that. He is a seriously sore loser. Needless to say, they now come separately. He still loses his temper with me quite a bit, over really tiny things. Last session I had with him, he was so angry with him for making him do a subtraction problem where he had to carry the one. He was SO hotheaded that I kept thinking to myself… “Shit I can´t believe I just sharpened his pencil…” I just need to be careful with him.

One of my girls is a very hard worker, and she is just precious. She is dyslexic, though, so it takes a while to get work done, and it is quite a challenge for me. I have been doing a lot of research to find different exercises I can do with her and one of my other boys that is also dyslexic. One day, we were doing a worksheet together, and she was working really hard. All of a sudden she stopped and stared into space, stopped talking and started crying. She did so for the next 15 minutes until class was over. I did all I could to console her. I told her she could talk to me about anything—whether it be a problem in class, hogar, life, with me…though it didn´t help that day, she seems to have really warmed up to me more. She gets really excited when I come pick her up from class. I later learned that her mother lives here on the ranch in Casa Pasionista—our HIV/AIDS home, and she is in her advanced stages, slowly dying. This type of thing has happened a few times with her. Since I know she knows that she can talk about it if she wants to, instead of pushing her to work or sending her back to class, I´ve found that it is better to just pick out a book and read to her. She really enjoys it, and it is a good distraction.

Another situation I have with one of my kids is that she just refuses to work. She hasn´t said one thing to me from the time we met except: “I don´t want to do this. I won´t do it.” Even when I pick her up from class I say “Hey Sarah*, how are you? How´s school going?” and she just completely ignores me. I still wave to her and say hello and act like she isn´t acting that way…She won´t budge. The other day she threw her paper on the ground and said she refused to do anything. I put my pen down and said, “OK, we don´t have to work, we can talk about what is bothering you, whether it be an issue in your hogar, with me, with school or your friends…or you can leave. She, of course, didn´t want to talk, so she got up and left, stormed out, until she too reached my locked door and kicked it. My poor door won´t make it through the year, I´m sure. I´ve spoken about this situation with her teachers and tías, who are not surprised by this behavior. We will have a meeting soon to discuss the next step that we should take.

I have another student who apparently is a little hellion in class, always causing a ruckus, but he was absolutely wonderful with me. We always had a great time in tutoria together, and he was really progressing and taking in the lessons I taught him. Then he was so bad in English class one day that the teacher (a fellow volunteer) reported him to his tía, and he got in big trouble. Ever since then, he has hated all the volunteers/teachers and will not come back to tutoria. I think I´ll just give him some time and then try it again. *Update as of 3/20* I finally broke him down! I went to his class to pull him out enough times and he refused enough times and I continued to be nice to him and finally broke him down. We had a great session on Thursday, and I´m sure he will continue to come back. He even came to the optional exam study session that I provided for the whole fourth grade class!

It sometimes feels like I only write about the bad. It´s just what occupies me, challenges me, and makes me have to work harder and be more sensitive to all of the stories I am interfering in. But there is so much good here, too. My absolute favorite student, Mayron*, is my little sunshine here. He is 7 years old and in the 2nd grade. He has some sort of disease—not sure of the name—where he has little non-cancerous tumors growing in various places throughout his body. He has one growing behind his ear which is causing him to lose his hearing. He also has a slight facial deformity—one eye is higher than the other—due to a tumor, and it has caused him to have bad eyesight. He hasn´t had glasses for months though, because he broke them. He is so particular about his appearance. One of the first things I saw about him was so endearing. And he hated those glasses. He always walks around with his shirt tucked in perfectly and always adjusting it. When he goes to mass, he wears a tie and he is always straightening it out. The other day they gave him new uniform pants, and he was so proud of them. He kept looking down at them while we walked to tutoria. Before he would leave my aula, though, I had to roll up his pants (which are about a foot too long) so that the plaid squares matched up perfectly, color and all. This has now become a regular routine. He is just a tiny little guy, but he carries himself in such a mature way. This is him: I need to get a better picture.

He works SO hard in tutoria. He loves learning, and he tries so hard. When he writes, he sticks his tongue out. The other day while we were walking to the classroom he asked if I could give him homework today, which I´m not supposed to do. He begged me though, so while he was working I made him a worksheet with addition and word problems. He carried it so proudly back to his classroom and slipped it neatly into his backpack. When we play games, he always makes me choose a different country to represent each time. He is always Honduras. He always draws flags for each team. Once he drew a cross between a Honduras flag and an American flag and gave it to me, with both our names on the back. I just got back from walking him to the church for bible study, because his hogar left him behind and he didn´t want to walk alone in the dark. I just love him! I wish I could say his real name here because I even love that! The funny part about it is that his sister is the one who gives me the most trouble in tutoria. She is the one that refuses to work and won´t come back. They are so different, yet they do have matching freckles.

I love the boys in my hogar more than ever. After a frustrating day with the kids at work, I can always look forward to eating, hanging out, playing games and doing homework with them at night. I am writing this in my notebook while they sit around me, doing their work as well. We have a variety of games at the volunteer house (including yahtzee and Spanish scrabble, my favorites!), and I bring different games every night. It´s nice playing games with them, because they love it and Trip hates playing board games and will never play with me! He says they are called “bored” games for a reason. It´s good though, because we both bring different things to the table--different ways of entertaining them. They seem to love us both for different reasons! We are going camping with them for three days on their Semana Santa (spring break), and I´m so psyched! Trip and I are hoping to go to Copán for the rest of the week and staying with a family there that we have a connection with since we can take off work.

One of the boys playing battleship:

All in all, I´m really enjoying my time here. So much so that I really hate going on the internet. First of all, I´m just so tired, and there are so many other things that I´d rather do than walk up to the internet and become absorbed in another world so far away from where I am. Maybe this will pass when I become more homesick later, but for now I don´t feel this yet. We´ve been here for 9 weeks so far, and it feels like two. We´ve pretty much fallen into our rhythm here, which was difficult to do, I think, because to do so we´ve had to interfere in the lives that have been going on here for so long and create our own place here. It took time, but it has been rewarding.

Quick update 3/21/2010
This week has been exhausting! Final exams are next week and unfortunately I had the great idea of offering an optional study session in Spanish and math for the 2-4 grades in their hogares. That means 6 separate sessions (because the boys and girls are separated). Ahh!! I did the math sessions on Thursday, and it was tough, very long hours, but it seems like at least a few of them made some good progress. The Spanish one is tomorrow. Like I really have time to do more planning! The tíos really appreciated the effort though, so I think it was a good thing to do overall. They decided to make it obligatory for their kids, which just meant more mayhem for me to deal with. It was fun, but I will be glad when they´re over!

Greetings from Shref

The tia (aunt, but they use it here for the people who take care of the kids in the hogares) in our hogar had my number in her phone wrong the other day and she wanted me to fix it. When I looked at it she had my name put in as Shref. Not even one letter right. Even after she added an extra which increased her chances.  

Written in my [Trip’s] notebook 2/27/2010:

Last Monday, I decided to work in the mountains, because I really didn’t have any pressing projects, and I really wanted it to be clean when my real boss, Tonin, gets back this week. On my way up there, I ran into the Ranch’s project coordinator, Armin. He is a Swiss gentleman who has lived here for many years and is married to an el salvadorean woman and they have two teenage boys that live here. He asked me if I could go to Tegus tomorrow to start fixing things in the disabled children’s home and the university girls’ home which are side by side and to help a painter he has hired with some things he needs. So I put on my gloves, put on Superfreakonomics, and raked and cleaned all day. Tuesday I packed my necessary tools into my big Europe backpack and made my way into the city, a trip which took two hours. I could have just taken a taxi, but they’re relatively expensive and they get on my nerves so bad, especially when I’m wearing my Europe backpack. They immediately identify me as a gringo and start honking their horn, to which I signal them no in some way. Regardless of my signals, they continue beeping because they just know that I want a taxi because I’m a gringo, and I guess they think gringos all have money and they don’t walk.. They’re incessant, and it irritates me to death. A bus will take me all the way across the city for 15 cents, but it will take me two hours.

Stefan, the director, met me shortly after I arrived and showed me what he needed fixed. There are a myriad of problems between the two houses that need to be taken care of, including plumbing, electrical, carpentry and welding. I fixed a couple sinks and things that were easy fixes and then put together a triple bunk bed for the university girls who live there when they’re in school. There were more girls than there were beds. On the way home, I stopped at the store for some things. I used one of the public buses [which are usually just retired US school buses] to go back to the city center for 3 lempiras. This is where we do most everything in the city, including shopping. From there we take a 15 passenger van about 5 miles up a steep hill to a gas station on the outskirts of the city where we catch a bus to Talanga and get off at the Ranch. On the way up the mountain, the van got hung up for a while because a tractor trailer was having issues. The hill is so steep that we had to chock behind the tire with a big rock to get started up the hill again. The van was stick shift. By this time I was getting worried about making it back to the ranch, because it was getting dark out and Jessie had already called me twice because she was worried. She had stayed home from work that day, because she caught strep throat from one of the kids. When I got to the bus stop it was dark, and there was a huge line of people pushing to get onto the already packed bus.

My backpack had around 50-60 pounds in it, and by the time I muscled it onto my shoulders, I was in the back of the line, and the bus was pulling off with four or five guys still trying to push their way on in front of me. I was pressed for a decision, so I decided that it wasn’t an option to miss the last bus. With that, I grabbed the bar under the side view mirror [the same bar which some of you already know my history with if you have heard my Morocco bus story], while jogging with my backpack and grocery bags in my left hand. I hopped my left foot onto the platform and swung my right foot onto the front bumper. The guy beside me was also completely outside of the bus, and he was still pushing. We got up to 25 or 30 mph before they had all pushed on and realized that they had a gringo on the bumper. The guy grabbed the grocery bags and my backpack strap and hauled me aboard. Since I’ve been here, I’ve seen many things Hondurans have done and do every day, which Americans think is crazy, but I imagine that it is rare that Hondurans think an American is crazy, except when they are volunteering. I talked about this with the guys I work with while we were mucking out the toilets. They can’t understand why I would muck out toilets for $130 a month when I could be making thousands of dollars pushing paper in the US. I didn’t end up getting home until after 8 and I still had to hike a mile to our house. I barely touched the work I had in Tegus, so I returned on Wednesday. I knocked out the most pressing problems and told them I would come back next week. After all of the work on Monday then the long day on Tuesday topped off by another hard day on Wednesday, I felt more worn out than a deck of uno cards here on the ranch.

This is the potable water filtration plant. Which is the biggest part of what I call ¨the mountains¨

            Thursday, I decided to go back up to the mountains so they would be really clean for Tonin. When I listen to a book I´m so focused I just work. I´m like a machine set on go. While cleaning, Lenny came up and surprised me. He seemed excited and told me he had a project for me if I could do carpentry. He said, “You did tell me you could do carpentry, right?” I affirmed, and he was so excited to give me a project. Around 1230 I finished and broke for lunch. On the way down, I met Armin, and we chatted about what I had done in Tegus. Then he asked me if Lenny had told me about the other job. I told him no, but he just mentioned that it was a carpentry job but sounded like something I would be interested in helping him with if he could just show me what he needed. Stefan had the idea to buy grain silos so we could store grain when it is cheap and save money buy using the stored grain when the prices are high. He and Armin looked into buying silos, and when Stefan asked around the ranch where would be a good place to store silos, the kitchen staff told him, “in the room behind the kitchen where the silos are.” So he and Armin looked into this room for the first time and found that they already had seven silos, each about 7 feet tall and 4 feet in diameter.

They just needed to lift them off the concrete so water could not seep in. So they wanted me to build wood slats to do this. Armin asked me to do this just before lunch on Thursday so I spent the whole afternoon running around and getting stuff for the project.

            I got some short scrap pieces of 1x 6 lumber and took it to the wood taller (workshop), and they ripped it longways into 3 inch wide strips. Doing this is very involved, because I have to borrow a Motorola two-way radio from one of the important people who has a ranch radio and call for transport. It is a little intimidating to speak Spanish over the radio knowing that all the important people on the ranch are listening. Then I load all the lumber into the truck, unload it, cut it, load it again, then take it to the site where I unload it again. It’s good because I´ve learned quickly how to get favors here from people. Every time I ask for something from the bodega here it´s like I´m asking for a favor, even though it´s my job. So it´s important that I maintain strong relationships with so many different people here on the ranch. I also tried to get everything else I needed together, like screws and taco fitres and a hammer drill since my cordless drill was too small for this project.

            My pet peeve with my job has become our maintenance bodega. Along with all our tools in there, we have an expansive arsenal of parts and pieces to fix anything. Aside from the things you´d expect, like every part of a toilet and extensive plumbing and electrical parts, we have a bin full of motherboards for computers, alarm clocks and other small electronics.

This is Nelson in our  maintenance shop. He is my best friend here besides Jessie.

 Here is Nelson posing with our pole climbing gear on his feet.

At first I thought, “Wow this is great, it´s like I´ve died and gone to maintenance heaven.” Then I started going to find things in there instead of going to the big bodega because it is better to reuse these parts and because if I need a toilet part from the bodega, they give me the whole pack with half the parts to the whole toilet. I went digging for an outdoor faucet head and found 20, but the first 15 they told me don´t work. So I asked if I could take two with different broken parts and mix and match to make one good one, because I figured they had to be keeping them for SOME reason. Lenny told me no, and that I should just go ask for one at the bodega. I told him I would rather reuse one of the 20 we have here, and besides, that´s why we´re keeping them, right? Then I asked, “why do we have so much broken stuff here? Like these broken lightbulbs, what can we do with these?” To which he only shrugged and made a hand motion, which I took to mean, “ Nothing, but we´re Honduran. It´s what we do.” This pisses me off, but I keep looking for parts there first. The other day I needed a gasket for a toilet, and we have a three foot length of wire tied in a circle with like 50 gaskets on it. I grabbed one, and Lenny said, “sirve.” Usually he says, “no sirve,” and although it looked good to me, I immediately though he had said that it doesn´t work. So I started to say, “what is the point of keeping a bad rubber gasket?¨He cut me off and repeated, “Si, sirve,” which stopped my ensuing tirade. I would say that organizing there would be a good project for me, but before I would be able to make any sense of the carnage that is that trainwreck, I will be leaving, and it will just go back to the same illogical junkyard that it is.

 Jimmy is the other guy I work with and Lenny is in the background. I don't know the kid.

            On Friday morning, I had to go to the woodshop to get two students to help me, because unfortunately Armin had already arranged that. Jessie and I had bought material to make curtains for our room (the children enjoy standing on the ledge and peeping in our room), and I talked to the sewing teacher who agreed to get students to make it into curtains for us. I was supposed to drop off the material and measurements the same time I picked the boys up. I was cutting it close, so I ran because I didn´t want to piss the teacher off. He already acts like he´s pissed all the time. I think he just does this because he thinks it makes people take him more seriously because he´s only 5 feet tall. So I ran there the whole way, and nobody was there, and I realized that I had forgotten the sewing stuff. I ran back, got it and ran back again. (And Jessie wonders why I never want to run with her in the afternoons). The teacher gave me two boys, each about 16 or 17 years old. One was a boy who just studies at NPH and doesn´t live here. The other is from the Discipulos hogar, the hogar just above our boys who come pick on our boys. I had a hard time getting extension cords and the power was out, so we were running off of the giant generator on top of that. I ended up running well over two miles. We finally got working and the externo boy was alright, but the discipulos boy was too cool to work. He intentionally tried to mess things up and gave the other boy dirty looks because he was trying to help me. Then he took off and I had to track him down. Then when they took a snack break they left for an hour and a half. Meanwhile I finished more by myself than we had all morning. At 12 o´clock the boys had to go to class, so the teacher sent me 5 younger boys, ages 12-15 to replace them. Within 15 minutes, I left them doing the work by themselves because they didn´t need me, and I took one boy (who happens to be one of Jessie and my favorite boys and is from the mischievious hogar) and he and I built some stairs (see photo). He did a lot of the work, I just helped him figure out how to structure them and I cut the boards. Between us, we knocked the whole thing out in a couple of hours. I was happy because I was given the project at lunch on Thursday and it was done by the end of the day on Friday.

Here is Stefan at our hogar one night:

 

            I didn´t mention that Stefan came by the volunteer house on Thursday night to participate in the proyecto that we had with a boy from our hogar and his family. He asked me how work was going, and I told him that I´d done a lot in the city but I had a lot more to do. I also told him that I was anxious about Tonin coming back, because I felt like I had just gotten into a good rhythm with Lenny and now I have to start over again. He replied,  “You´re not like the last maintenance volunteer. He stayed up in the mountains the whole time, but he couldn´t do the things you can and he didn´t have tools. I don´t want this to happen to you. You should be accomplishing more valuable things, so I´m going to tell Tonin that we´re going to send some boys up there to clean every few weeks so you can focus on other projects.

Having fun at Proyect:

            So by Friday night after busting my ass all week, I felt more worn out and beat up than a soccer ball here on the ranch. I forgot to mention that on Thursday night after proyecto my tio asked me to bring my circular saw and hammer to hogar to help him with something. When I got there, he started telling me about this picnic shelter they want to build. We talked about the dimensions, the structure and the material. Then I said, “Well this sounds like it´s going to be a good project for us.” He said that tomorrow he is going on vacation tomorrow, for a month, and this is something that I could do with the boys. We´d hopefully be finished by the time he gets back. He asked if this was alright. I told him that yeah, I could do it. He just wanted me to bring a saw and a hammer because he thought he´d have to build a miniature model to show me what he wanted.

            I found out about the earthquake in Chile the day after it happened from Lenny when we were up in the mountains in the morning. He asked me if Chile was close to Haiti, so I drew a map for him and showed him. One time he asked me if I knew how to drive. He said he can only drive a little. He also told me that he can´t swim. Monday afternoon he asked me to build a wooden box to house the breakers at the school, because the old one was rotted. On Tuesday afternoon/night I worked with Tonin and the boys for hours replacing the box. It was my first big project that I did with them.

It was funny, because when Tonin climbed the pole to disconnect the power, he said he wished he had gloves on, so I pulled some out of my backpack. Later he asked me if I had a thumb wrench, then pliers, then a level, then a chisel, which topped the cake for him, and I had all of them on me. I don´t know what they had planned on doing without tools, because all they had were a couple screw drivers. He thought it was funny, because everything he needed I had, but I thought it was funny, because everything I had he needed.  Tonin let me climb the electrical pole and reconnect the power. I could tell he was nervous about the height when he disconnected it, and that´s why I offered. All in all, he loved the box I made, and he was so happy with everything I did to help them put it in. I´m relieved because we´ve gotten started on a really good foot.

            After we finished the project, the guys I work with went and climbed a tree for practice with the climbing spikes we have. (See photos).

They think I´m funny, and we always have a great time, but the people I live with don´t think I´m funny for the most part. Jessie says it is sometimes hard to read my sense of humor. I especially have a hard time sometimes with our boss, the volunteer coordinator. For instance, a few weeks back she asked me to fix a sink and hang a mirror when I got a chance. Yesterday, I told her I had time whenever, and she told me that the sink was actually working all of a sudden. So I said, “ Well then maybe we should just wait on the mirror and see if it will hang itself.” She didn´t laugh.

            We have a doctor named Peter Daly who has done so much here for the ranch, including building a surgical center. He is down here now with his family and he is setting up for a surgical brigade to come here next week. They come and do this four times a year, and the Daly family stays for two weeks each time. The first week is crazy with everyone setting up so that everything goes smoothly for the week that the surgeons are here. This is also when Dr. Daly does consultations with hundreds of patients to line up the surgeries. Some he can help right there on the spot, but he doesn´t speak Spanish, so he gets volunteers to translate for him. Jessie helped him from 12-8 Monday afternoon after she had already worked since 730 at the school, and I helped him Tuesday from 9-1 and Wednesday from 8-12. The first patient I interpreted for had a big abscess on the back of her knee, and we drained that right on the spot. By the next morning, I was wearing surgical gloves and cleaning the area before he gave them injections while I talked to them and held their hands. I tried to get a picture of this, but it was a difficult situation. It was a great experience, and I hope to get to see some of the surgeries this coming week.

Go see more photos at http://www.photobucket.com/jessientrip