swimming lessons

My dearest friends and family,

Hello, hello, hello – and happy (almost) October to you from Honduras! Here at the Farm, we’ve been celebrating September, the "mes de la patria" (it’s kind of like the 4th of July, except here we have a whole month dedicated to patriotism and citizenship) in due style – in fact, tomorrow is the most important day of the year for my sixth graders. No, it isn’t graduation, nor is it the FCAT or any of those other standardized tests that were so very important in my own primary education. Rather, it’s the day in which my students will be tested on how well they’ve memorized and can sing, conduct and explain Honduras’ gloriously-long, seven-versed national anthem and the 37 obligatory questions and answers that go with it – all required by law for every Honduran sixth grader, and necessary to be able to graduate from our primary school and go on to the colegio.

You could (maybe) call it brainwashing, or say that it doesn’t help our students to learn to think critically and for themselves – those are fair criticisms, and I’d grant you them. But among the things I’ve learned this year are that you should pick your battles, and that there are some things you can’t change, and that when you can’t beat them, it really is a good idea to sometimes join them… so my fellow volunteer teachers and I have patiently grinned and marched our way, quite literally, through the month of September, sporting our Honduras jerseys and singing that gloriously-long national anthem with the best of them all the while. And truly, some of my very best moments of these past few weeks have been spent with my sixth-graders in that tiny little two-walled classroom of mine, laughing with them to calm their nerves and helping them with their conducting patterns – who knew my drum major years would come in handy in Honduras?!

I mention the national anthem to you all because when I write, I so often feel like I need to tell you something big, or beautiful, or exciting. But the truth is that the most of the things that are exciting to me, like getting coffee from Dunkin Donuts in La Ceiba or Thursday mail days, are probably pretty normal to most of you… and the majority of my "every-day", like cooking over a wood-burning fire for nearly 30 people or sharing a moment of simultaneous laughter and disgust with my roommates at 2 am because a rat has invaded our room, you might find note-worthy. In the end, though, it’s the little things, all added up together, that make this experience what it is… like standing on top of a desk and singing the national anthem with a sixth grader, for instance, or successfully driving the Landcruiser to Trujillo without stalling, or laying in the hammock in our courtyard with fellow volunteer Sheena at night, reading a book aloud by the light of a headlamp and simultaneously seeing a bright starry sky and fifteen of my closest friends’ underwear hanging on the laundry lines. What a beautiful, strange experience this past year of my life has been.

Being at the Finca is like a marinade, I think. For a little over two years, we sit and stew in this big, bizarre mixture of grace and suffering and resurrection, love and faithfulness and forgiveness and community. Maybe we offer a little of our own spice every once in a while – maybe in the end, the flavor is a just a little different because we’ve been part of it – but mostly, we sit back, and we listen and watch and learn and soak in the flavors of the experience, letting it touch and affect us. Change us. Transform us. And then, in the end, we go, and we are different just for having experienced these things, for having sat with them for so long, for having let their flavors touch us so deeply that they are inextricicably a part of who we are.

Among the things I have cherished from my first year at the Farm is the experience of teaching swim lessons to our youngest children on Saturday mornings. It’s one of my "small jobs," and I love it for lots of reasons – it’s great time with the kids, the ocean is amazingly calm and beautiful in the morning, and it’s pretty much the only thing I do here that I’m actually qualified for – thank you, Tuscawilla County Club, for preparing me oh-so-well to be a volunteer in rural Honduras! :) On Saturday mornings, Jackson, Darwin, Manuel, Jose Pastor, Brayan and Joel grab me by the hands and hold me tightly around the neck, and I ask them to kick with straight legs and float on their backs and blow bubbles. "Erin, venga!" they say – "come here!" they whimper, half-excited and half-afraid, wanting to show me what they can do now that they didn’t even know they were capable of a few months ago. But our ocean is big, and they are small, and when the water starts reaching their necks they panic and grab for me, and I gently whisper, "I’m here; I’ve got you; I won’t let anything happen to you; I won’t let you go." And soon enough, little by little, they realize they can, that they are enough, that there are hands to hold onto and arms there to catch. And little by little, I let them go farther and farther, swimming out into the big sea and discovering all it has to offer them.

My own sea, so to speak, is getting bigger soon. A few months ago I was asked to consider a change in job placement for this coming year, and come early November I’ll be packing up and moving out of this house which is OH-so full of geckoes and memories and dirty laundry and love, and moving to the big city of La Ceiba to live with our teenage girls who study and work there. My role will be "encargada," the ever-ambiguous mix of house-mom, live-in-social-worker, tutor, disciplinarian and friend, to Dalila (17) and Marina (15), and I have no doubt that it will be a year both of blessings and challenges as I learn to "parent" these two teenage girls, sharing in their joys and laughter, and bearing patiently with their moodiness and their silence. Overall, I think the change is a really good one, but of course my emotions are mixed – excited to share life so much more intimately with the girls, and of course to be closer to Dunkin Donuts :), yet scared to be leaving what has finally become familiar and worried that this physical place isn’t quite done with me yet - but I, like the boys to whom I teach swimming lessons on Saturday mornings, know that I don’t go into the big sea alone, that as Teresa of Avila so wisely says, "God is on the journey, too." So I put my hand in God’s and trust the arms to catch, and dip my toes into the water, tentatively at first, but then further and further still, until I see that, hopefully, the water really is fine.

On Friday, which marks the one-year anniversary of my time at the Farm!, things get a lot crazier around here as we welcome 10 new volunteers into our midst, who will add their own underwear to the clotheslines and undoubtedly slowly work their way into our kids’ hearts. There’s beauty in the chaos – so pray for us as the line for the girls’ shower gets a lot longer and we figure out how to cut the weeks’ chicken rations into 30 equal parts. I miss you and love you and think of you often – really, I do – and hope and pray that you are all WELL in the God who says that it is all very good indeed. I would love to hear from you – the new snail-mail address I’ll be using come early November is below, so please update your address books accordingly!

in much peace and joy,
Erin

Erin Ramsey
Apartado Postal #708
La Ceiba, Atlantida
Honduras, C.A.
C.P. 31101