The Calm Before the Storm

I'm really getting excited for school to start.  The past couple of weeks we have all been diligently working on getting lesson plans and classrooms ready at Minerva.  There have also been a couple of full staff meetings now that the Honduran staff has started back.  I was never really a fan of staff meetings before, so the added dimension of hearing the information in both Spanish and English with everyone talking over one another really makes it hard to pay attention!  

Here are a couple of snapshots of my classroom I took when I just starting to get it ready.

This is the main building of the school.  2nd-6th grade is on the bottom level and 7th-11th is upstairs.

This building houses the Pre-K through 1st grade rooms:

A couple people have asked me what my walk to school is like.  Going to school is great as it's all downhill.  Going home is a different story.  Here are a few pictures of the roads from the school to my house.

In this last picture, the entrance to the school is at the end of the road with the green gates.

This week, we have also spent time with a couple of our neighbor kids.  They just poked their heads in our door one day and haven't stopped coming over since!  Lucia is 9 and Lucio is almost 3 (way to be creative with the names, Mom and Dad).

They love playing with all our "gadgets."  Lucio is now well-versed in how to work the ipad.  Lucia is a great little teacher of Spanish for me, she is very bright and will slow down her speech to help me learn new words.  Lucio, on the other hand, still has some toddler babble going on so sometimes it's just plain hard to understand what he's saying!

We have also witness not one but two parades this week, as they come right by our house.  Man, do they love their parades here!  This one that I got pictures of was in support of one of the presidental candidates, Juan Orlando.  He apparently was in this large cluster of people but I didn't spot him.  Can you imagine why?

As it is the wet season (winter) here, it rains almost every day in the afternoon.  This is what it looks like in our house during a really heavy rain:

And this is why Honduran homes all have tile or cement floors!

Lastly, here are the remaining pictures from our trip to Lago de Yojoa a couple weekends ago.