The nuns have a man who guards the school and drives their car. It’s this man who comes to pick us up each morning in the old tarp-covered pick-up truck, the men sitting on the pila behind and the women crammed into the front.
Every morning we drive down the broken dirt roads of Vida Nueva and every evening we’re driven out again.They call it Vida Nueva and which means New Life because it was founded just only a decade ago when Hurricane Mitch swept through Honduras and left thousands of people without a home. Just the hope for some new life and a new beginning where everything might yet be alright.
And what a new life there is. Vida Nueva has grown ever since, with poor Honduran workers coming here to look for work – that same new life in the big, mindless máquila factories that circle San Pedro Sula.
When the truck pulls up to the big black portón, I climb down and Don Jose hands me the keys. For a minute I’m standing on the streets of this town and the gates are open and inside the school is green, and quiet, and an island in this place, in this country, maybe.
And it’s here that we’ve been working – working to teach the kids of these families who live in this undeveloped society; working to make a place where they can be safe and laugh and be children; working so that they and their families might find at last a place where they can meet and talk and be together without fear and start to see something of that New Life so long promised to them.
Every kid in this school is on scholarship, on the “beca” from which we take our name. This community is far poorer than many of the towns just down the road so nobody could afford to pay if it was not so.
But at school, in the classrooms, the kids are kids and nothing more.. and that is the way it’s meant to be. They run up to hug their teachers like kids in any other town, in any part of the world. While the day runs on, we hardly know where we are and only do what every teacher does and the children only do what all children do.
We have now only four grades, and each year another is added. There are children here who are sharp and full of fire; children who this town and country and the whole world need. There is the sound of children laughing, children playing and children telling long illegible stories – stories in Spanish to which you can only nod and laugh.
And maybe, there is a new life here. Maybe, just maybe, we’re a part of that.
