La Isla Bonita: beaches, retreats and... chicken drops?

Ah... I think the feeling of heaven must be akin to being in the town of San Pedro when the sun is beating down in the middle of the day and walking into a swank internet cafe and getting the computer directly under the air conditioning where your body temperature proceeds to drop so low that your brain wonders if, after all these weeks of living in a heat index of over 100, you've suddenly died or have given your body to some cyrogenics experiment (cyrogenics? Did I spell that right?). Well, this is where I am. As luck would have it, while the rest of my fellow teachers are returning home to Benque I'm hanging out on the Cayes for one more night to visit my aunt and uncle who are flying onto Ambergris Caye, San Pedro in about two hours. Definately a fun-maker, all made possible by the fact that as of Friday, my two fourth form classes are over because they have to spend the next two weeks learning how to walk across a stage for graduation and I'm left teaching one class leaving me with more time to spend on the beach... Of, the difficult life of a volunteer!

So, in all seriousness, the past few days have been some of the finest that volunteering in Belize has to offer. I've been "on the road" since last Thursday (yes, all the clothes in my backpack smell like seaweed...)! Ali Robezolli and I left with a fellow teacher on Thursday morning to speak in Belize City Elementary school. We spoke about chastity and dating to a group of eigth graders and it went very well. We were welcomed very warmly there and spoke to a class of girls for about an hour, talking about God's plan for love, marriage and chastity. It was a lot of fun to speak to younger girls and after the talk they all came up to us and asked questions like, "how can you tell if a boy really likes you?" and giggled a lot. They were wicked sharp kids too, it was crazy we walked into the room and they all shot out of their desks, stood up and said, "Good afternoon miss..." before they learned our names. They were so receptive to what we had to say which was good because we asked them what they had after our talk and they said, "sex ed." for which they were switching back into their co-ed classes (what's wrong with this picture, I ask?).

Anyways, after the talk at Belize Elementary Ali and I hopped on a water taxi and went out to San Pedro for a retreat we were leading on Friday. We spent all of Thursday evening getting ready, making icebreakers and songsheets and trying to learn their names from a list we had. We were excited, it was an optional retreat but over half of the class of forty students were signed up to attend. We were also a little nervous, we weren't sure what kind of students we'd find out on San Pedro. Well, these kids were awesome. They've had very little religious ed. in their school and there's no youth group, so our focus was basic evangelization. Ali and I gave talks on God's love, holiness and how sin separates us from God. The hardest thing to see was the looks on their faces when we were talking about the effect of sin-- you could just see how much they needed to hear what we were saying earlier than the present. It's amazing how transparent teenager's expressions are! Anyways, it was great to watch the kid's expressions when they were playing the games we planned for them! They all got so into our little icebreakers, one of the activities we had them do was fold up a sheet and balance as many people as possible on it and all the guys were getting on each others shoulders! Ali brought her guitar and we taught them a few Praise and Worship songs which they sang (even the boys!) and the day closed with mass with Fr. Dan. The only sad part about the retreat was that of the group of about twenty two, only one student recieved communion. It's a problem in Benque, but it appears to be worse on San Pedro. They're Catholic, but they know when they're not in a state of grace and we weren't able to offer confession because Fr. Dan couldn't come out until the end of the retreat. It's heart wrenching to see so many kids so young not go to communion.

After the retreat Ali and I went to a bar on the beach and enjoyed some a-typical company-- a group of little boys who were selling bracelets. Our new friends: Arnoldo, Ebsen, Rodolfo and Aron approached us about buying bracelets and although we didn't buy anything, we offered them some of our nachos and talked to them for about an hour. They asked us where we lived and we told them we were teachers in Benque. Ebsen squinted up at us and said, "teachers? Well, nice teachers." They told us about how they make the bracelets and sell them every day, so that they can put money towards their education. They all ranged in age from about seven to thirteen. They kept us entertained for a while, some of their stories were sad like the fact that their friend who they call "Garbage" got his name from the fact that he likes to sort through garbage for stuff and doesn't go to school (this boy couldn't be older than ten years) and then the highlight of the conversation which occured when one of them said, "oh, we have to go the the chicken drop tonight!". Now, Ali has given me exclusive blogging rights to this story, so I'm going to tell it as it happened, but let me preface it with the disclaimer that the word "shit" isn't vulgar in Creole (our students at school routinely inform us that they have to go to the bathroom for that reason. The first time your student tells you this you want to pass out and then you get used to it...) Anyways, I asked these kids what a "chicken drop " was and they said, "oh, you havn't gone? the Americans all like them... You go and there's a square with numbers on it and the chicken's walking around on it. If the chicken shits on your number, you win $100. But... " (they add seriously) "You gotta clean it up yourself. They don't clean the chicken shit up for you... but if you just won $100 so you pay someone to do it, sometimes we do it when they pay us!". Try to imagine being told this by a little Belizean kid... It was the funniest thing I had heard all day! As Ali said later on, can you imagine the fact that a bunch of people must have been sitting around trying to think of how to make money and then someone saying, "I know! Let's sell squares on a board and then set a chicken loose on it, and whichever number he drops on, they'll win!" to which everyone would say, "but who wants to clean that up?" and them replying, "well that's the best part! We'll make them do it!

Eventually our little friends left to go sell more bracelets, and when we went into the bar to pay our tab some drunk gringo slurring his speach said to us, "you finally get your little orphans to live you alone? Why don't you take them home, wash them up and put them in school?" I gave him a look that I typically reserve for students acting up during mass out of arm's length and in need of having their blood frozen in their veins... and muttered something about them already being in school... Had he not been drunk I would have liked to have gone on... but it would've been a waste of words. Ali and I discussed later that it's a sad day when people are too wrapped up in themselves to see how precious these little ones are. I mean, they're just kids! Scrawny, disheveled, hungry and trying to make some money for their school supplies and people treat them like they're not human. It was a startling revelation to make on the beach. Anyways, later the kids saw us sitting on the dock and said, "we thought you were other white girls to sell bracelets too! but you're friends!" and they talked to us until it grew really dark out. When they left, they asked us for hugs. It was the highlight of my time in San Pedro, I've seen them several times since then and they've always said "hi".

On Saturday morning a whole group of teachers from Mt. Carmel showed up in San Pedro and the rest of the weekend was focused on having fun. It's been a great time, but after tonight I'll be excited to get back to Benque, the "real world" where my students are preparing for graduation and the teachers are preparing to go home!

some prayer requests...

I just wanted to take a moment to ask for you all to keep a few intentions in your prayers in the next couple days (and to give my sistah Em. a shout out the day before her birthday!)...

While many of you will be seeing the third episode of Star Wars... Ali and I (with some other teachers) will be speaking to some public school students in Belize City about dating, chastity and finding real love. These are standard six students (8th grade), please pray that their hearts will be open to the message that we have to share with them!

Also, an even bigger challenge looms on Friday as we journey out to San Pedro for another retreat, this time a co-ed 4th form (senior) retreat. It's optional for them to attend and we're praying 1) that we get a good attendence, 2) that those who attend hear what they need to hear and 3) that it's an opportunity for conversion for them. Many are not Christian so it will be a challenge!

Finally, the opportunity for a few students from Mount Carmel High School to attend World Youth Day has suddenly presented itself. There's spaces for $1200 u.s. dollars (a deal!) and right now our priest is scrambling to find the resources to take advantage of this possibility (it's a crazy world in the missions, apparently someone who knows someone at American Air got a deal and then someone else knows someone in Germany, etc., etc.) So, keep this in your prayers, as I told the girls who expressed an interest, if they're supposed to go it'll happen... It's all pretty last minute so I'm not holding my breath I've certainly seen God provide in these types of situations!

For the record, I'm not as lazy as my posting record makes me appear. I've actually tried to post an update on this blog three times in the past few weeks, only to have my attempt foiled first by the internet going down, then the power going out and finally "scheduled maintenence" to the Blog website. The last one was slightly frustrating. I was sitting in Benque's newest internet "cafe" (if by "cafe" you mean coke and fanta for sale), in air conditioning (the real reason we like it) with a lightning- fast connection... only to be foiled by the blog site itself! Oh well... Oh, for an interesting bit of internet oddity, I noticed that my site, as well as Ali's and Cathleen's is being targeted by someone somewhere because if you type "blogpsot" instead of "blogspot" in the site, you come up with a Bible study page instead. It makes it look as though I've turned my page into a sort of cyber altar-call. So, if you come up with that by accident, just check how you're typing! As Ali said, better the Bible than porn, eh?

So, enough of my excuses, let me tell you all (the patient readers still out there who haven't given up on my slllooooowww updating skills!) about the past few weeks I've had. I feel as though I've reached a new level in being an adult/ teacher/ catechist/ missionary/ human being in general. Why is this you ask? Well, I just survived not one, not two but three overnights with my students in the past three Fridays. How did this happen, you ask? I'm still trying to figure that out myself. See, in the past the fourth form retreats (senior retreats) have always been overnights. Last year, because of budget, they were just for the day. A few months ago, when fourth form retreats was simly a metaphysical concept and not a scheduled reality, the teachers thought, in a moment of weakness, "why not pursue an overnight retreat again?" It sounds so spiritual, so nice, so enriching to talk about it. The right people talked to the right people and bingo, we had two nights booked for the girls and boys retreat.

Planning an overnight retreat is fun. You have plenty of time during the day and we devised a basic outline of talks, games, mass and confession, an order that one teacher described as being, "funspiritualfunspiritualfunspiritualfunspiritual,spiritual, spiritual, bedtime". The idea was that if you got kids prayerful enough and close the day with mass, they'd emmerge in a trancelike state saying, "well, I'm going to go straight to my room, meditate on the days events silently and sleep for the next eight hours until breakfast". Hah. Teachers should be smarter.

We had the boy's retreat first, figuring that we'd end our career high school retreat masters with girls who are always more expressive about how wonderful they think anything their teachers do is (did that sentence make sense? You know what I mean...) Anyways, I really didn't know the fourth form boys that well, but I was so impressed by them on their retreat! The best part to see was how excited they were to be going somewhere overnight with their friends. Slumber parties and sleepovers aren't really very common in this culture and for many of the boys and girls it was their first time away from home overnight! So, just to see how thrilled they were to be spending the night somewhere was really fun for the teachers (especially when they asked for a night light). We had some great talks for them from various teachers, some team building games and then mass and confession for them in the evening. A lot of them went to confession or talked to the priests, which was so exciting for us to see (as a teacher, seeing your students receive the sacraments is incredible! I havn't quite gotten over that part yet, it's one of the best parts of the job!). Anyways, it was the hours following mass that made me realize why my youth ministers dreaded overnight trips with us so much when I was in high school... The three girls who spent the night (myself included) were able to lock themselves up and hide for the night, but very little sleep was enjoyed on our part! These guys never slept! It was amazing, I've forgotten the energy that high schoolers have! The boys next door to us were up, laughing and talking until about 3:00 a.m. and then up with the sun at 5:00 a.m., playing football in the hallway outside the room. This early awakening was punctuated by the fact that when I went into the bathroom in our room, there was a large green frog hopping around the toilet. Hmm. Not quite the best part of waking up but luckily one of the boys was easily talked into comming into his teachers room and rescuing them from the frog in the toilet. The best part of the retreat besides the sacramental aspect was that we always have teachers on staff write each student a letter of encouragement/ affirmation to give them at the close and it's great to watch the kids receive and read the letters. The boys had a great time and said it was the best retreat ever...

Best retreat ever until the Fourth form girls retreat the next week, that is. I teach one of the fourth form classes and Ali Robezolli teaches the other, so we were really excited about the chance to spend some more time with them. I kept threatening them that it would be a silent retreat, complete with a bread and water fast but they talked us out of it (or at least they think they did) and we opted for the similiar "fun/ spiritual" schedule that we had with the boys. The girls showed up with teddy bears and enough food to feed a small army... We focused the retreat on prayer, and used the song "Sweetness of the Lord" as a theme. They loved learning it, but the first big hit of the day was teaching them the Superman Grace, the one that goes "Thank you Lord, for giving us Food. Thank you Lord, for giving us Food. By his grace we all are fed, thank you God for daily bread, thank you Lord, for giving us food". This has accompanying motions- holding out your hands like Superman- and they all got totally into it. Later, the girls had to write a skit about prayer in a team and one of the teams developed a story about poor people who were fed by a king named Fred and you guessed it, they closed with "Thank you Lord, for giving us food, by his hands we all are fed, from the King whose name is Fred, thank you Lord..." (I don't know if the humour in that translates, but it was great). One of the greatest aspects of the Fourth Form girls classes is the diversity- there's a bunch of girls from Benque and Guatemala who speak Spanish and then there's a contingent from Georgeville, a couple towns away from Benque, and they all speak Creole to each other. To see the two groups interact is pretty entertaining, for example during another skit one of the groups was speaking spanish to each other and the Georgeville girls all pretended to get out remote controls and saying, "we wanna change from the Spanish Language channel, where the English one go?" Anyways, the girls enjoyed the day a lot, the only thing they complained about was that they were served burgers and fries for lunch because as they all said, "miss, we are not in America. Where are the rice and beans?" They would have prefered that for lunch and dinner! The highlight of the afternoon was a "name that tune" contest, Teachers vs. students with the losers having to dance. Mr. George, their science teacher whom they're all madly in love with lost twice and much to our surprise, he busted out with some crazy dance moves! The girls screamed so loudly you'd think you were at an n'sync concert with a bunch of adolescents instead of a senior retreat!

The evening of the retreat was awesome, one of my students who's been very vocal in her lack of faith (she was the one who announced to me, "miss, you gotta teach me good cause I got no faith") had a long talk with one of the priests (she was so excited to talk to them that she asked to speak to both priests, "cause they different men and they may have different things to say" and rather than explain to her the fact that Catholic teaching on the existence of God would be consistent between both priests, I suggested that she limit herself to one discussion for the night and catch the other priest at a later time). The girls had some great prayer time with adoration and they were really touched. One girl said to me, "miss, this retreat makes me feel like crying because I'm so happy". I had some really great conversations with some of them, a couple of my most "sophisticated" girls were conversing quite seriously about how much they appreciated the fact that they were at a school where they could pray and learn more about spirituality. They were talking to each other in Creole about how at other schools, "every night you got a bash at different places" ("bash" or "bashment" is a party) and how they liked the fact that the rules were stricter for them at Mount Carmel. They had mass together and then... they did not sleep.

It was on this second Friday night spent with high schoolers that I realized, as we were preparing for mass at around 11:30 p.m., fighting serious fatigue and knowing our night wasn't near over, that some people have normal jobs that they beging at 9:00 and end at 5:00. They go to work, work and leave all their work there. It's only crazy people who at 11:30 p.m. on a Friday night find themselves sitting on grass next to a pond full of screeching bullfrogs answering the questions of fourth form girls preparing to graduate that include, "miss, how do you know God exists? Miss, how do you know what God wants for you? Miss, how do you know if a boy really loves you? Miss, why does Mr. Jay and Mr. Patrick have to become priests?" It's the moments like that which make being a teacher, and especially the teacher that they come to with their "God questions" the best job in the world. Ok, put away your tissues because my thoughts were quickly shifting back to "why am I the crazy one who chooses a job like this" when it was 1:30 a.m. and these girls were running around their rooms no where near going to sleep. Father Dan, Father Mark and some of the teachers were heading home and Father Dan looked at the six of us spending the night, standing in the kitchen of the retreat house looking at our watches and at the girls running around and said, "yeah, this was a great idea. This was a GREAT idea. In fact, I think overnight retreats were the BEST idea EVER". He kept talking, grinning more and more as our scowls got deeper and deeper. "Good night everyone, God bless you". And they left us.

I was the lucky one who ended up in a room next door to what I nicknamed "little Melchoir" (Melchoir is the town in Guatemala they're all from). Now, there were 7 of these girls and they all wanted to share a room. We said, "no. two rooms, four and three..." but they were so persistant that we gave them the rooms and told them to do whatever they wanted. So, naturally, they all crammed into one room (after riding the busses in Guatemala I wasn't surprised that they took this option). These girls are some of my favorite students, there's a group that I pick on so much who takes it so well, but at 2:30 in the morning even the sounds of your favorite students laughing and talking can be a bit much. So, I knocked on the door for the fourth time that evening and asked them to let me in, threatening them that they wouldn't graduate if they didn't shut their mouths and go to sleep... I discovered another teacher in there, talking to them! Et, tu, Miss Dinorah? Anyways, they explained to me that they weren't talking, they were praying. Evelyn, their unofficial leader, explained to me, "oh yes miss, we had to thank God for the food and the fans in our room". Suspiciously, all the fans in the retreat center were planted around their room. Evelyn then demonstrated their prayer, standing up in a Superman pose and saying, "Thank you Lord, for givign us fans..." Touched by their spirituality, I encouraged them to continue praying and went to bed... NOT. I assured them that if I didn't get some sleep that night because of their talking they better be prepared to deal with a grumpy teacher on Monday morning... Somewhere between 3:00 and 5:00 it quited down (are you seeing a sleeping pattern here?) but apparently Evelyn never slept, because those who did awoke to toothpaste all over themselves. Saturday morning was went really well, one of the teachers gave an inspiring "send-off" talk and they recieved their letters. They all agreed that it was a great weekend, and I've been hearing "thank you Lord, for giving us..." all week.

I thought my Friday night with students was over, but one of the teachers whose beatification I will expedite upon her death decided to organize a sleepover for the second form girls, whom I taught for the last two terms and have missed terribly. I realized that a sleepover is like a retreat without the hard parts like organizing talks and a liturgical schedule, so it was a nice break from the last two weeks. The girls were so excited, many had never spent the night anywhere with their friends and having their teachers there made it even better. They tried to teach us how to dance and we taught them kick ball (a great match for their soccer skills!) and how to make s'mores on a fire. That was awesome, Miss Meghan their English teacher had a friend come in for the week who brought hershey's chocolate, Marshmellows and grahm crackers from the states and she proceeded to teach them 1) that "s'more" is a contraction for "some" and "more" and 2) how to make them and eat them. Many of them had never roasted marshmellows so we had a lot of fires but they enjoyed it once they learned. One girl said, "miss, I saw this on Nickelodean once!" which just goes to show you they learn all about America on T.V.! It looked promising, like they were actually going to sleep as the movie was finishing at 2:00 a.m., but instead they began pranking each other (luckily there was no freezer acessible to them, and if you're a girl you know what I'm talking about) but there was plenty of toothpaste and lipstick and many girls woke up to find their hair/ face/ shoes covered. Teachers were not excluded from this, but I escaped unscathed. How, you ask? Apparently, between the hours of 3:30 and 5:00 when I dozed off I was approached and then I opened my eyes, scaring all my students away from me for the rest of the night. If there's a patron saint of chaperones, I was being watched out for! Something about the fact that girls my sister's age were afraid of waking me up at night made me realize that I was an adult now...

My thoughts on the last few weeks are this: I spent many a night awake and out of my bed, typing a paper or cramming for an exam while I was in college, and I am still quite capable of staying up pretty late for a good conversation, book or movie. However, staying up because you're responsible for high school students who are running around laughing and armed with toothpaste is an entirely different experience. The last three Saturdays as I dragged myself home, nodded to my roomates before crashing into my bed left me with only one thought: how did my youth ministers in high school do this multiple times, for several nights in a row? I was talking with a teacher the night before the second retreat and I found myself saying the exact same thing that one of my youth ministers used to say (jokingly of course, as I was) at the end of a conference or camp... "I hate kids!" I always used to think he was crazy, but now understand! My tellow teacher asked me, "why do you all do these?" and I paused to think of a reason besides "religion teacher job description". I then realized that it was because when I was in high school, there were crazy adults who were willing to spend Friday nights with teenagers, answering their questions about God, life and love and that my time in high school would have been drastically different had they not been as crazy as I now find myself. I was thinking alot about the countless conferences, camps and retreats that I benefitted from when I was younger and it was remembering those endless van rides singing Disney songs and sleepless nights of pranks and conversations that got me excited about the seeds that were being planted in the lives of my students. So, this is getting long and I'm not even sure if I'll be able to post this, so let me finish by saying that if you're working with teens right now, take heart! Todays chattering, giggling, normally abnormal teenager could be tomorrow's volunteer high school religion teacher! We'll never know until heaven how far the effects of our actions extend.

Oh, and a P.S. if you will: Ali and I will be giving a chastity talk to eigth graders in Belize City on Thursday and then a DAY retreat for seniors on San Pedro on Friday. Pray for us!