on resurrection

My dear ones,

School got called off early for rain on Monday this past week. I watched as a collective grin quickly spread over the faces of my sixth graders as our school administrator came to my classroom to tell me, in English, that the rivers were quickly rising and soon it would be unsafe to send the little ones home. My students let out a cheer. “Profa, we know what she said!” they told me with glee in their eyes – although their English isn't quite good enough to understand, the wind and rain that had been invading my classroom all day, forcing me to move all the desks into the middle of the room and loan my sweatshirt to shivering students, were tell-tale signs of early dismissal. And so, with laughter, I told them there would be no English homework, and bid them farewell, and watched them run across the school grounds, through wind and rain and storm, scampering away to their houses, some of which would provide them with less refuge from the storm than my two-walled classroom does.

Yesterday I finished my very first quarter as a first-year teacher. I suppose I would sum these past eight weeks up as frustrating, exhausting, filled with laughter and lots of failures and a few successes, a struggle on oh-so-many fronts, but, overall, blessed. First-year teaching, as many of my ACE friends have affirmed, is essentially a fight for survival, an effort to simply keep your head above the water as you are thrust headfirst into something you are completely unprepared for. First-year teaching, I am told, in ANY school, language, or culture, is an incredibly difficult task. But I teach in a classroom that, for all extensive purposes, has two walls, and is the size of my bedroom in Winter Springs, where a squirrel in the tree outside or neighbors buying Coca-Cola at the pulperia next door can be the downfall of a well-planned lesson. I teach in a school where many of my students walk a half hour or more to class each morning, where half of them won't show up on a rainy day because the rivers become too high to cross, where one of my fifth graders missed over a week of classes because she had to take care of her family members who were all sick with malaria. I teach in Spanish, in a school without new textbooks or fancy scientific equipment, where the snack my students receive at recess may be the first thing many of them will eat on a given day. I also, though, teach in a school that is considered the best and most rigorous in the entire northern third of the country, where I spend hours with my students not only in my tiny little classroom but in their houses, on the soccer field or in the ocean, or together in the chapel in prayer, a school where genuine relationships are invited and welcome, where my students have become much more to me than simply my job. From 7:15 am to 12:30 pm, Monday through Friday, I attempt to teach and they attempt (sometimes) to learn, and we laugh and struggle through decimals and the scientific method, and sometimes I lose my patience and raise my voice and want to throw my hands in the air with frustration. Most days seem like a wrestling match, and sometimes I feel pinned down by the weight of what's asked of me, or my seeming inability to really teach them anything at all. But somehow, in the thousands of tiny moments that we have spent together, in spite of all the frustration and my lack of patience, we are building real relationships, and because of that, it's well-worth the late nights and the early mornings and the fact that the fifteen of them consume nearly all of my thoughts and efforts and prayers and energy.

School mail is alive and well at Escuela San Pedro, and my fifth graders always look forward to Fridays when I distribute the cards and letters that have been written for them that week. I, too, look forward to that handful of construction paper which is delivered to me each week, because I generally receive a fistful of cards from my students which always make for a good laugh and are fun to share at the volunteer lunch table. A few weeks ago I received a tiny note scribbled with blue marker on lined paper from Jessica – the same “Profa, six weeks?! That's almost a month!!!” Jessica who you may remember from my last email update, who is now one of my fifth graders and the source of so much of my frustration and joy and headaches and laughter. The card, which I will undoubtedly treasure for years and think pretty accurately wraps up our first quarter together, reads:

“Profa, Usted es muy, muy bonita y muy buena, y, bueno, a veces es enojada. La quiero mucho, Jessica.” (“Teacher, you are very, very pretty, and very good, and, well, sometimes you are mad. I love you a lot, Jessica.”)

Oh, the honesty! :) The truth is that I suppose I hoped it would happen, but I didn't expect that I would love them so much so quickly, that my life would become so inextricably intertwined with theirs so soon. On Saturday night I will stand behind this very same Jessica, and I will watch and pray and probably cry as she is baptized at the Easter Vigil, and I will promise to love her and guide her in faith as I agree to be her madrina, her godmother. Oh, God, you are funny and surprising. I suppose there really is no turning back now. I watch Ana, who is fourteen and too beautiful for her own good, walk around with the neighbor boys who are probably not up to anything very nice, and I shake my head in a very mother-like way and pray that she keeps studying and stays out of trouble. I watch Zulena help a kindergartener tie his shoes, and I see Moises hauling wood to his house after school, and I miss Edwin, the little one with the big ears and the eager eyes who left school one day to go live with his mother who lives an hour away and who will not be coming back. The truth of it all is that my own life is now so intimately, so sacramentally wrapped up in not only Jessica's, but in all of theirs... and it is a very beautiful cross.

There is so much to tell you all from the past few months that I hardly know where to begin or what to say. I could tell you about my vacation with Nelly, one of our oldest girls, to visit her mother over our Christmas vacation, about sleeping with ten people in one room, on cardboard on the ground, because there are no beds or chairs. I could tell you about Roni, Dorfa and Luz, our three newest children at the Farm, and the transformation I have seen in them in their two and a half short months as part of this new family. I could tell you about hosting three incredible visitors – first my dad in January, and two friends from Notre Dame, Kristi and Nick, in March, and what a beautiful gift their time here was to me, and how much it has helped me to see this place with new eyes. There is so much to say, and somehow no words to express it all. But the short of it all is that I can honestly tell you that I think I have finally found a home here, that I truly am doing well, that it is very, very, VERY hard, but that God is good and present and I am learning and growing and dying and rising, so much, so many times, over and over again.

As we enter this most Holy of weeks, I reflect on the Paschal mystery in each of our lives, in our own death and resurrection. Here at the Finca, we enter deeply into the Way of the Cross. Veronica wipes the face of Jesus, and our nurse stitches up the forehead of a child who got hit in the head with a baseball. Simon helps Jesus carry the cross, and an older girl helps a struggling younger student with her homework. Jesus falls the first time; He is down now, and He will fall again. And so do we. But in the end, there is joy, there is hope, there is an empty tomb. We wait with hope because we know what is to come.

Know that I love you all so much, and I miss you dearly, and I am really, really sorry that it has been so long since I've written. I FEEL your thoughts and your prayers and your support, being lifted up and carried across oceans, enveloping me when I have fallen and I need someone to help me carry my own cross. Know how grateful I am, and how often I think of you here. I will be home for my first vacation in May and I hope to see/hug/have a nice long phone chat with many of you then. Until then, may you find, name and celebrate the Paschal mystery in your own life, and know that you are loved so very much from a tiny little two-walled classroom on the coast of Honduras, so many miles away.

In the Joy of what is to come,
Erin

ps: I've posted some pictures of my last few months' adventures and misadventures on my picasa page: http://picasaweb.google.com/erin.ramsey.1

pps: the newest edition of the Farm newsletter (of which I am the coordinator!) :) isn't yet out to print as of this email, but I'm betting it'll be up soon and it is beautiful. When it gets posted, it'll be available online at http://www.farmofthechild.org/scrapbook_newsletter.php