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!