I had the extreme pleasure of delivering some wonderful classroom and play goodies to my children and to the children a few weeks ago. A close family friend so generously sent down a large box full of jump ropes, etch-a-sketches, toy cars, books, stuffed animals, paper, pencils, and more.

I'm in love with her and her adorableness.

A rare smile from world's most serious baby Walter.

New fave picture of this awesome 2nd grade duo: Maria Jose and Jose Alberto.

So great to see him all smiles :-)

One Sunday afternoon Deirdre and I took some of the toys over to the orphanage. They were a huge hit. The boys here are CRAZY for hot wheels cars, so the boys loved the new cars. I had so much fun teaching little Gillian how to use the etch-a-sketch. The jump ropes were also a huge hit and so easy to share, which is perfect for an orphanage starved for toys and games. So I spent my afternoon twirling ropes, singing rope rhymes, and challenging the kids to races with the jump ropes. They were all smiles, as was I.

I also took the box of goodies to school as there were some fine classroom treats in the box. My kids were so giddy with excitement to open up and discover their new materials. They were so adorable when we opened up the dry erase markers and paper, they were like OOOOOH!!! And the Miss, the Miss too! La Miss tambien recibio un regalo. Miss got a gift too! Miss needed these new markers, we only have one left. hahaahah.

Love these 2 cuties.

All smiles

The reaction to you're going to receive some awesome gifts...

They were overjoyed to receive new pencils, stickers, and candy canes. The jump ropes, cookie monster, Elmo, books, and puzzles are also big hits. They now bombard me during recess with Miss jump rope please! Miss book please! So now my kids spend their recess playing, reading books to Elmo and Cookie Monster. It's pretty adorable :-)

A HUGE thank you to Diana for the incredibly generous and lovely gifts! First grade loves them :-)

Pen Pals

Amidst the craziness of coming back to Honduras, a wonderful surprise showed up at my house--letters from the first graders at PJP where I taught last year. I was so excited, that in typical Sarah fashion their beautiful and hard work moved me to tears.

The first graders at PJP are so wonderful! They made adorable Christmas cards, wrote bios, and made English word bracelets for my class. I was so excited to share the Christmas cards with my class.

They loved them! When I read the bios to them, they were like, Miss Miss yo tambien!!!! Tengo 6 años tambien! A mi gusta jugar tambien! They loved finding and hearing all the similarities between themselves and the first graders in the US. They were shocked to discover that they were the same age and many also like dolls, sports, playing, have brothers/sisters, etc.

The English word bracelets were also a big hit. It was such a great idea too! Mrs. Meyer had her students write out English words that they knew that they thought my first graders needed to learn. Which is a fantastic learning opportunity for both classes. My kids had so much fun looking at the bracelets and finding words that we had learned too. They were very excited to be reading and felt accomplished that they were actually learning English.

I showed my kids on google Earth where we lived in Honduras and where their school is in Boston. They thought it was awesome as we traveled although way up from Juti to Boston. They were amazed at how "linda" "bonita" and "grande" their school is. I also put together a quick slideshow of some pictures of the school, me teaching in Boston, and my second graders to give them the best picture I could of what the school in Boston is like.

Thank you so much to PJP for all of their continued support. I miss working at PJP and my students there, but I feel so blessed that I can continue sharing and working with them from a far! It was fantastic to share it with my students too. Plus we learned a lot of English and it was a great Social Studies lesson. Luckily I was able to send some return letters back with a friend travelling to the States. I hope that the first graders at PJP enjoy their return letters!

Also, we discovered it for sure works to just send like a manila envelope to me...so if you or your class wants to send me letters please do!

Rapido Cargo

2154 N.W. 23rd Court (Ave.)
Miami Florida 33142
Atencion: Padre Ricardo

For: Sarah Nardozzi

Navidad, Navidad, Hoy es Navidad

Hondurans don't typically don't do things lightly and Christmas, is no exception. As a result, the final three weeks before Christmas at school were absolute insanity. Filled with dress rehearsals, play practices, song singing, Christmas decorations, card making, Advent Angels, and much more. Oh I forgot learning, probably because that was put on the back burner due to all the Christmas activities and the insanity, hyper-active nature that comes with being 6 years old the week before Christmas.

We busied ourselves in first grade making Angeles and reindeer for our families. We also did an Advent Angel project, which is one of my favorite things to do with a class. Its kind of like a Secret Santa, except that you're supposed to do acts of kindness for your Angel. During the last week of school we celebrated by making our own Advent Angel gifts and then sharing them with our Advent Angel on the last day of school. Now out-of-the-box creativity, critical, and individual thinking is not always common in a Honduran classroom where students are often found repeating answers, chanting, and copying from the board. In English especially, my kids are always just wanting to copy from the board and do things exactly as I do. I have be very careful when modeling, because I will always just get an exact replica. So asking my first graders to make their own gift was very challenging and a high-anxiety situation for many. I had many kids running up to me and saying but, but, but Miss what do I do???? I was glad to have such an open-ended project to get them thinking creatively. Some came prepared with some real cute craft ideas from home, like a popsicle stick pencil holder and a blown egg Santa Clause. Their projects turned out real cute and they really enjoyed sharing them with one another.

Advent Angel gifts.

Advent Angel gift giving.

My lovely bunch of first graders.

Mis amores

Advent Angel party

Giving out gifts.

Besides the stressed of managing pre-Christmas behavior, First Grade was a pretty stressful place as I struggled to teach them their English Christmas songs in one week. Let me tell you trying to teach 50 English Language Learners "Away in a Manger" and "Angels We Have Heard on High" equals a teacher with no voice left, 50 confused kids, and one worn out teacher. I tried to channel my inner Bill Berg from my Joyful Noise choir days, but it was a difficult battle since my picture clues didn't really help jog their memory as they had no comprehension of what they were singing about. Oh well we did our best. All my kids survived, no one died from hearing my sing acapella all day long and I managed to survive the challenges as well only to discover we learned the wrong songs for the pageant, waaah waaaaaah. Oh well, the songs they did have to sing were super easy and they learned them in Kinder and Prepa so it probably turned out for the best.

The Christmas pageant was absolutely ridiculous and so awesome. We stayed after school working so hard on decorations. Styrofoam, glitter, painting, glitter, snowflakes, glitter, styrofoam, glitter, painting, glitter, snowflakes, glitter, yadda yadda, yadda. We spent an entire afternoon decorating the entire gymnasium for the pageant, when we finished, DANG. It looked awesome, we totally transformed the gym. I worked on the styrofoam/door entry way committee aka hanging crumpled brown paper and putting doble pega on styrofoam cut outs of Santa, Angels, Bells, Snowmen....... The stage had a large nativity, tree, a beautiful painting of Bethlehem, twinkle lights, and a Merry Christmas sign. The ceiling was adorned with snowflakes. It was amazing.

The gym.

The show itself, surprisingly after a rough dress rehearsal, pulled itself together. It was a bilingual show (yay!) that acted out the birth of Jesus from the way beginning aka in traditional Honduran fashion it was nice and long :-) In between the narration, each class did various acts for Christmas. We sang carols in Spanish and English and fyi most Honduran carols are sung to the tune of Jingle Bells (there are 3 different ones). Kinder sang a song and Prepa read a poem. Second grade had a dance for the girls, 3rd grade also did a poem. 4-6 performed in English. Catie's 4 th graders did a fantastic acrostic poem spelling out Merry Christmas, the 5th graders sang rockin' around the Christmas tree, and the 6th graders did a number to Must Be Santa. The first graders with the lovely Profe Rosita always steal the show. My kiddos did a great dance number with the girls dressed like genies and boys like elves, they were so precious. Other 1st graders where angels and shepherds.

Must be Santa Dance

Pageant-ing

The best part though was the arrival to Bethlehem, when Mary came in, riding a, yes, you guessed, a real live donkey. It was crazy a real live donkey! During this procession the song Mi Burrito Sabanero played and is now my favorite Christmas song. Hahahah. In addition there was also a real live baby to be Jesus and yes he laid in a manger and survived (shockingly). After the pageant, us teachers served roughly 1000 nacatamales to the families. It was insanity, but they were sooooo good.

The Christmas pageant was so much fun. A lot of work? yes. A lot of glitter? yes. But, it was so great to see the teachers and parents working sooooo hard to make something so incredibly special come together. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have verrrrry high standards for any Christmas show I encounter in future years, jajjaja. Love it!

Feria de Juticalpa

December 8th, the Immaculate Conception, is a big day for Juticalpa as it begins Juticalpa's fair. Best part is, the beginning of the fair or feria and the Immaculate Conception, warrant a day off school yesssssssss.

I love days off school, especially ones in the middle of the week that are just so random that you have to enjoy it.

Slept in. Slow life breakfast. Slow life reading, journaling, and chilling around the house.

Then we got ready and walked downtown to see all the festivities. We went to the park in the downtown area where we met up with some other girls and went into see the Cathedral. It was beautiful! All decorated for Christmas and the statue of Mary was candlelit, it was mesmerizing. The nativity scene was of course way over the top and more like a village than your typical stable scene, it was awesome.

Cathedral

Nativity Scene

The statue of Mary

Then we headed back out into the park to explore. The kids from the orphanage were on an outing for the parades so we found them and played in some trees for awhile. It was so lovely to see them out and about enjoying things around town.

Luis and I....such a cutie.

The whole park was full of people selling all kinds of goodies. There were food stands everywhere. Luckily Laura loves to splitsies so we shared a gringa (yes, it's really called a gringa and sooooo rico) and Mexican style tacos. Also there was tons of market-style shopping stands filled with shoes, clothes, jewelry, stuffed animals, Honduran trinkets, and more. I love that kind of shopping, so it was fun to walk around and explore surroundings.

All the volunteers.

This picture is legit.

Then the parade began. It was a shorter parade, but nevertheless pretty neat-o. There was the display of Miss Juticalpa and several floats presenting the statue of the Virgin Mary and then there was the parade of the horses. Ahhhh do I love horses.

Pretty amazing day for a parade, yeah?

Mary float

After the parade, we met up with another friend Mario and proceeded to do some more shopping around town which I had been DYING to do. I proceeded to buy some more Christmas presents and some treats for myself.

That night, we met back up to celebrate Deirdre's birthday. The feria has several parts, one of which is a legit fair, much like in the US. Food tents, beer tents, rodeo, live music, dancing, and cows. Pretty great. So we celebrate with some delicious Honduran style meat kebabs and tortillas, some cervezas, and just hanging out and celebrating. As the night progressed a band started playing and they played some great tunes, so of course we started dancing. Now, its not very often that you see gringas in Honduras and as a result we were immediately pulled on stage to dance, waaaah waaaah. But it was a great time. I am still in shock that Juti had a real live, genuine fair. Que rico.

Live band.

Valle de Angeles

Earlier in December us volunteers to a lovely weekend getaway trip to a small town called Valle de los Angeles. It was the perfect getaway weekend.

The foundation we volunteer for was sooooo nice and offered to fund the transportation to save on time and give us more opportunity to see places. So that meant we all got to hop aboard our trust Viktor bus and head out on an adventure.

Along the way we stopped in a tiny village, San Juancinto. It's a smaller village where Columbus once found gold. It had some great views and a nice simple lifestyle to it.

Pretty great views

Some of the group

Planking pic of course

Plaza/Parque

Then we continued on to the Valle. Valle was the perfect December getaway. It's a touristy town so it was full of artesian shops aka Christmas shopping to the max. Also, it was the perfect cure to the "its December, we're going home soon, Chrismtas pageant stress overload" bug.

We spent the day just enjoying each moment and having a blast. We started our adventure off with some delicious pupusas and hammock time at the restaurant.

The rest of the day we spent walking around town, enjoying carefree time together, and my favorite....SHOPPING! It was so fun to look at all the neat crafts, exploring, and of course buying Christmas presents.

Tuk Tuks around the town with some pretty chill mosaics.

Shops

The best part of the day, however, was when my friend Laura found this guy who was giving horseback rides. She knows how much I LOVE horses, so she jumped on the chance. So we mounted our horses and our horse man, lead us around the streets of town. Deirdre and Katie proceeded to hop into a horse drawn carriage and attempt to race us around the streets. Ahhhh....I love horseback riding and I knew coming here that I needed to get on a horse in Honduras. I hope to do it again, but this time was pretty rico.

Best. feeling. ever.

Laura, horse man, horsies, and I

For dinner, we all headed back into town. Valle is a very small place and the majority of the town is surrounded by the central plaza where there are gazebos benches, the church, tables, and gardens. The plaza is surrounded by restaurants. We stopped into one for some traditional Honduran kebabs....so delicious.

Hotel Motel

We stayed at an adorable little cabin style hotel. Best part, hammocks outside and hot showers inside. It was nice to just be all together away from the stress of school hanging out under the stars chatting about life and enjoying the beauty of Honduras. It was a much needed, perfect getaway!

Poco a Poco

I believe I have another entry entitled poco a poco, but it seems only fitting that my return to blogging share the same title since this continues to be my mantra for 3rd world, Honduran life. There are many reasons I haven't updated recently. I wanted to catch up and write about the joys of Christmas, but that seemed challenging to do since the post-Christmas return to Honduras has been anything but joyous. Then I didn't want to post about the return because I didn't want to write out all the crazy stuff that has been happening, but I guess it's reality. And real life deserves to be shared, maybe in sharing more prayers can be said and more lessons can be learned.

December was a fantastic month in Juti. I promise to give it the time and attention it deserves when life settles down a bit. But December included Deirdre's birthday celebrations, a weekend volunteer trip, Bridget's visit, la Feria de Juticalpa, and of course Christmas celebrations. I think it was the first month in which the general volunteer consensus was, "Wow! This is a great life! We love Honduras! We can totally do this!" That changed for me, however, a week before heading home from Christmas. One of my roommates Catie made the very challenging choice that she would not be able to return to Honduras after Christmas. Life lesson number 1 that you cannot get comfortable with life in Honduras. Suddenly, sorry mom and dad, I was dreading going home for Christmas because it would mean saying goodbye to Catie.

But then life lesson number 2 from Honduras, you always find away to adapt, be flexible, persevere, and be resilient. I found out from Peggy that I would be able to move downtown and that my other roommate Jess and I would have to split up and move in with the other girls. If there was one thing that I wanted to change about my Honduran experience it was the location of my house. I never liked nor felt comfortable building community so far away from everyone else. So, I went into the return from Christmas, ready for a challenge, expecting to have to deal with the loss of Catie, but excited at the prospect that this event could transpire into my desire to move and build stronger community here.

So my return to Juticalpa was an interesting one. I was sad to leave home, as I always am to leave behind a wonderful home life. But, upon my return to my home here in Honduras, I felt a rush of peace upon resettling into Honduran life. That sense of peace continued until Wednesday. Normally I hate cleaning, but I joyfully got to work Monday and Tuesday night sweeping, mopping, cleaning out the refrig, bleaching the pila, etc. On Wednesday, Jess and I walked downtown to stock up on food and I remembered how much I love walking around and going to the market and eating baleadas and enjoying a slow life. My kids were absolutely FANTASTIC. They were more full of love and life and joy than ever before. We fell right back into a rhythm and they just could not stop giving me hugs!

Wednesday night, however, saw a repeat of Life lesson #1 and my Honduran life got flipped upside down. Unfortunately, 2 of my fellow volunteers were robbed in their home. That incident combined with the fact that the Peace Corps is going on administrative leave from Honduras, forced our program to enact our emergency plan. That evening my house was determined to be the safest location and all the volunteers and 2 security guards were moved into my house.

This terrible event has lead to complete chaos and complete restructuring of our program. After living together crammed, legit crammed, mattress to mattress in our humble La Colonia abode for 3 nights with stress and anxiety levels at an all-time high, the board of the foundation I'm volunteering for met to discuss our future in Honduras. The temporary decision made was to move us into a 5-Star Hotel for the week to help calm stresses and nerves and ease anxiety. Never thought I'd see the day that I would live in a 5-star hotel in Honduras...pool, jacuzzi, hot shower, running water, flat screen TV, pool bar, and free breakfasts.

Try as they might to reduce stress levels, while the luxuries of home were nice, hotel living is not all its cracked up to be. Plus, luxuries do not make problems go away nor do they provide us with lunch and dinner. And so my week at school was a very distracted, disorganized, unprepared, full moon, crazy kids, low patience sort of week. As I could not escape the preoccupations of my parents, family, and friends and my own worries about where I would be living and not only living but most importantly living safely.

If that wasn't enough, Brita decided to go home. She was one of the girls that was robbed and she made the very difficult choice to say goodbye to school and Honduras to return home to her family. I'm proud of Brita for being able to make that choice and I know it's the best one for her, but that doesn't make the additional loss any easier for me. Brita, like Catie and Lucia, will hopefully always remain very close friends of mine as I have come to trust them, open up to them, rely on them, and learn from them so much in this experience.

Yesterday we all had to move back into my house in La Colonia because we couldn't find another house suitable for living in. So now we're all crammed back in. It was less stressful than anticipated as Carlos and some workers came over to the house and moved actual beds in for us, cleaned up, moved in a washing machine, got us a TV, etc. So now each of our bedrooms has 2 people in it and Lacey comes back on Sunday, not real sure where her bed will be going yet......but we'll try to find the best solution. We're hoping to secure another house in our neighborhood so that we can have a little breathing room, but that won't be for 2-3 weeks. So until, then it will be tight living.

We're also still on a lockdown sort of living situation. We are supposed to limit trips out of our little La Colonia for extra safety precaution. So it's pretty much school-home-school-home-school. We are going to get a car and Peggy is learning how to drive in Honduras and a manual car. Otherwise we aren't technically supposed to walk around town ever and we have to be home by 6 or in a car. So, crammed living is made more crammed by the inability to leave.

So Honduran life as usual is at its absolute craziest. I'm missing Brita and Catie like no other. I have no aide in 1st grade again as she is covering other classes. 7 people live in one tiny house. I would love to just get outside and go for a bike ride, but I can't. I had so many plans and hopes and dreams for this 2nd half of my Honduran adventure that I feel are just slipping through my fingers. Lots of traveling, friends visiting, places to go, nights of dancing, moving downtown, school productivity, etc. But, as I've learned, I can't get comfortable with this life and I must be able to continuously persevere, change things up, and keep on keeping on. These are realities of 3rd world life and at least I can say when this is finished that I've truly lived in solidarity with many of my students who also lament about losing people in their lives, living in worry, and feel stuck to a school-home-school-home life as they don't have a car or feel unsafe leaving those areas.

Sometimes I sit down and just laugh at all the craziness that has happened to me here. Because, when I look at it all and see the challenges, I shouldn't want to be here. But yet I still do. I mean I'm not yet okay with this new lifestyle and I wish I could blink my eyes and go back to the way things were, I really, really do. I wonder a lot if I'll be able to make it until June in these new conditions and with the continued amount of challenge and stress and my inability to complement teaching with fun adventures. But I'm working at achieving peace with that. I knew coming here that it was going to be a VERY challenging year, but I never expected it to be THIS challenging. I never expected it to be so full of loss either. I wish I could write a post full of joy and love for my vida hondurena, but right now I can't and thats the reality of living in a 3rd world county. I'm safe, I'm loved, I'm very supported, and I know that I want to keep on doing this. I don't know what tomorrow will bring, but I'm sure whatever it is, it will be another challenge. I'm not ready to face it and I feel as if each challenge will be the last. But what I do know is that the support and faith I have will always see me through and in the end this adventure may be different than the one I anticipated and it may be full of challenge in loss, but it will also be full of growth, learning, and faith.

poco. a. poco.