The News

Hello from far 🙂

The school year here in Honduras is almost half way through and I haven’t even told you what my work is and what I have experienced for the past 5 months.

After I came back from my vacation in San Andreas the school year started totally through. I was moved from teaching 2^ndgrade the past year to teaching kindergarten this year.

Thinking that this would be easy, since I am educated as a kindergarten teacher I got overwhelmed pretty quick for following reasons:

The children don’t speak any English, and I basically – at least at the beginning of February – didn’t speak any Spanish. Additionally having the task of teaching the children the alphabet, numbers and colors – all in English! Admitting that I have never done this before, since in kindergartens in Austria we barely teach the children anything of this. So in Austria these things are taught to the children in first grade and not in kindergarten, not to forget: of course in their own language.

Being very challenged with this situation – as well as having 15 children – 10 boys 5 girls, as well as one of them deaf – the school year started. Even though this has been very difficult the last months, I have still been able to learn a lot: teaching children things which I never taught before, finding different methods, ideas etc. as well as learning Spanish and sign language – learning to express myself more with expressions, rather than with words and also teaching the other children to communicate with this child.

The nice thing at this age is though that you can totally see how they learn and grow! They learn how to hold a pencil, follow lines, then write letters, understand numbers etc. etc. all step by step! And it is such a success when they actually understand and remember these things.

An additional blessing was to have the Matteson Mission School Group from January till March with us here. They have brought a lot of joy to this place and helped us in all different departments and areas. They also blessed us with their beautiful voices and their service in the community. I was especially able to enjoy the girls a lot – having some great afternoons, or evenings filled with talking and laughter! As well one of the Matteson girls was there to be an assistant to help me with all these children. She was helping me with the bible classes, and with no experience she did a great great work – I was able to learn a lot of her and be inspired on how to do my bible classes now, that she is not here anymore. She also really impressed me not knowing any Spanish and still working so well with the children!

After they left I received another assistant, who was praise God bilingual, and also great with working with the children. Also she was a really big blessing to me and helped me a lot if it was with translating, with ideas or just working with the kids.

After she left I received an assistant from the Mission School here and specially works with the deaf child. It is though very difficult, since the students, which attend the Mission School are pretty young and usually have no experience working with children. Additionally this student changes every months – so I basically till they really get into it, they are changed to a new department! This makes the work, especially with the deaf child much harder.

Praise God there has been another change, from the government:

For your better understanding of the situation: In my kindergarten group I had 6 children, which were repeating kindergarten. They already did kindergarten in town, but since they haven’t learned any English, they repeat kindergarten at our school. The government though has made a change, that children are not allowed to repeat kindergarten, except a psychologist says so. Therefore these six children had to move to first grade and so I ended up with only 9 children. Even though it is still very hard, especially language wise, I really enjoy just having 9 children.