After a long, extremely relaxing and lazy break I am officially back in the Cof.
I realize this post is a little late but as it is, so much has occurred in the past week and half that I am going to have to use bullet points for some of it just to hit the highlights.
Lets start from the beginning. My journey back began at 3am Monday morning and concluded at 12:33am on Tuesday, the day we began school. 7 of the 20 hours was spent at the Miami airport. That’s not true, 6 of the 20 hours was spent at the Miami airport. 7 turned into 6 after I missed my connecting flight from Dallas to Miami because I was not only in the wrong terminal, but “jamming out on my ipod” as the airport tenant so sweetly put it. I seriously doubt that I was jamming out at 7am in the morning after getting only 3 hours of sleep but that’s beside the point, I digress.
Despite the rocky start there were some noteworthy points to this journey:
Walking out of a Miami airport restaurant, randomly seeing Laurel (another BECA teacher who was already supposed to be in Cofradia by this time) and realizing that not only would I have a buddy to pass the 6 hr stretch with, but I no longer had to take a shady cab, by myself, all the way back to the Cof.
Spending an hour and half trying to navigate the chaos that is the Honduras airport so Laurel could report her bags missing.
Deciding to not take a cab at all and instead, catching a ride with a missionary group on an imported school bus filled with a weeks worth of Honduran food…and by food I of course mean plaintains and rice. Ya know, the essentials.
Getting 4 hours of sleep and still managing to wake up at 5am and fulfill my morning ritual of bringing coffee to Jules. This may not seem noteworthy to you but for manpartment and I this is a morning ritual that continues without fail.
I was beyond exhausted all the next day and in a state of delirium for most of it but it felt really good to be back. It was hard to part with the hot showers and tasty food but I really missed my kids. Even more so, being back made me realize how much I missed the other teachers. In the past six months we truly have become a family. I live with, work with, eat all my meals with, travel with, and ultimately experience everything with these people and have yet to become tired of them.
In fact, I have never been more proud to be a part of this group of gringos than I was this past weekend. Hitting on a more somber note, last Friday we found out that Ms. Sandra, one of the Honduran teachers and a former director, passed away after struggling with a long-term illness. Death is never an easy thing and certainly not something you want to deal with on your first weekend back. Furthermore, because her two sons also attend the school it reached us on an even more personal level.
I hate funerals. I have been to too many funerals in my day and it has never gotten easier, I am a complete and utter mess at them. However, at one point during Ms. Sandra’s funeral I looked up and thought that it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. To see my fellow teachers, our students and a community at large all come together was such a special thing. To actually be able to feel the presence of our organization and see how we’ve become such a huge part of these people’s lives already was such a humbling experience.
While I wish we could’ve started of the second half of this adventure under better circumstances, I am grateful for the light its shed on our group and the BECA organization in general. I think the SJBS community of parents and students would all agree when I say that, though we may just be a group of ‘gringos’, I am proud of what we have accomplished thus far and excited for the things that are yet to come in this New Year.
And for this I must once again say, Vaya Pues.
