My Little Garden

For the past few weeks, I have been growing a garden from seed.  My mother in law, Pam, brought me these seeds when they visited in December, and I finally received some great top soil (thank you Austin!) to start growing them.  And I can say that the season I am in right now, this scripture couldn't say it better!  I am continually reminded that the Lord is my strength and when I am feeling empty or dry, I go to him for a little watering.

The Lord will guide you continually, giving you water when you are dry and restoring your strength. You will be like a well-watered garden, like an ever-flowing spring. Isaiah 58:11

beans 7 days

beans 17 days

 

cilantro 17 days

basil 17 days

tomatoes 17 days

tomatoes 7 days

Happy Birthday Ryan!

We celebrated Ryan's birthday a little differently this year...it seems that most things we celebrate here in Honduras are different, not bad, just different.  For example, I wanted to get Ryan the Lord of the Rings Trilogy set, which I did, but it had to be delivered by the next visiting group since we don't get mail here in Honduras as our official address is: Villa Linda Miller Casa #22 Comayaguela Tegucigalpa Honduras...good luck.  It came about 20 days later with another group. 

We went out to dinner to a crepe place in Tegucigalpa on Ryan's actual birth-date, but we had cake with our English School which we hold in our home Sunday and Wednesday evenings.  Ryan's cake was supposed to be a chalkboard with a math problem (since he is a teacher now!) to show his age since I was lacking in the candle department!  Our English School students sang Happy Birthday in English and their Spanish version, too. 

We have about 11 students total and on any given night, we will have an average of 8 who show up.  We split them into two groups: beginners with me and intermediates with Ryan.  During the one hour, we do various activities, sing songs, watch I Love Lucy episodes (their favorite - even the guys love it!), grammar lessons and of course good ole conversation.

Improvements to the Apartment

 For the past few weekends, Ryan has been making our apartment more user-friendly and equipping us with a few more counter tops in the kitchen and a desk for our bedroom.  It might not seem like that difficult of a task, but down here, everything seems to take longer.  Not to mention the walls he has to use to drill into for support are all made of concrete.  Hanging up a photo is not an easy task (partly why we didn’t hang up very much!).  Here are some before and after photos of his handy work:

After

Before

Some Downs, Lots of Ups!

As Ryan and I were driving home from school a few days ago, I mentioned that I hadn't posted any updates to our blog in quite some time.  I think sometimes it is difficult for me to know what our "readers" really want to know about our time here in Honduras.  Being teachers here at AFE, more than anything, I feel like we don't always have those opportunities to experience something radical or at least to me, "blog worthy."  Another reason I haven’t written anything is because I felt I had more disappointing things to share than were celebratory.  For those of you who don’t know, we lost our 11^th graders (AFE’s senior class).  It was their decision to stop coming, and I don’t know much more than that.  I can only continue to pray for them and invest my time in those students who wake up every morning and choose to come to school.

I guess I will share a few little short stories about what happens in my classroom with my tenth grade students whom I have learned to love so much, Maoly and Douglas (to the left).  I have mostly given power point lectures where from that, I can start mini conversations to help with the concepts that might be a little more abstract or to discuss processes in biology and chemistry further.  The power point gives me a great prompt as to the verbs I am going to use in the discussion, too!  I have had the opportunity, thanks to a generous donation, to complete labs with my students with microscopes and DNA model kits.  It is incredible to me how much these activities aid in learning!

Project of Comparing a Cell to AFE

Everyone always asks how my Spanish is coming along…I would say I can get any concept across that I need to even if I have to explain it in a round-about way.  However, I have made a few mistakes!  One day I was trying to remember the prefixes for describing covalent compounds (mono, di, tri, etc).  It was the compound SF₆.  I couldn’t remember “6,” so I blurted out sexo fluoruro azufre.  Yep, I just said “sex” in class.

Another moment that made me smile.  Douglas came into my classroom and asked to borrow a whiteboard marker, I gave it to him a little suspiciously since I know most of the students just want to draw!  But when I walked into the classroom where Douglas went, he was teaching Maoly what she missed in my biology class the day before.

We have been having some fun lately in chemistry class because we are getting into balancing equations and the concept of moles.  We do a million problems a day and my students keep asking me to make up new problems.  Recently, Maoly has been putting things away after class and said to me, "I had so much fun today!"  Even though she says she wants to become a psychologist, I think we have a little chemist in the making!  There hasn't been one day where they haven't left my classroom saying "Gracias, Erika," leaving me with a huge smile.