Bilingual School Archives - Page 8 of 12 - Shoulder to Shoulder, Inc.

June 15, 2016August 4, 2023

Bienvenidos, Mr. Ben y Mr. Yon!

We all, in our formative years, have that epiphanic experience that hurtles us on the trajectory to our field of study and eventual career.
My such experience took place when I accompanied my Dad, Dr. Bruce Gebhardt, on a Shoulder to Shoulder brigade to Santa Lucia in 2009. I was only fourteen at the time and my official position on the brigade roster was “Sherpa”— I really served only to help doctors set up shop and run errands. Nevertheless, it was simply the coolest thing I had ever done! The exposure to the sights and sounds of Intibucá, serving the various communities in the area, the choco-bananas and the riding around in the back of trucks left me with a love of travel and international development. Ever since my brigade experience in 2009, I have focused my studies towards international politics and foreign language, all the while thinking, “man, I hope one day I can go back to Honduras and offer a bit more to the organization and the community than my services as a Sherpa.”

Flash-forward to 2016, and I am spending my summer as a teaching assistant in the Good Shepherd Bilingual School in Camasca—and my long anticipated return to Honduras, in which I will hopefully be able to more substantially contribute to the community, has been wonderful so far.
Anecdotes aside, allow me to introduce myself and the other newly arrived English teaching assistant that will be working at the school this summer—My name is Ben Gebhardt, and I am a rising senior at John Carroll University. With me as an assistant teacher at the bilingual school is my friend John Stefanick, a rising senior at the University of Pittsburgh. The two of us are here to help out at Good Shepherd from May to August, and our first couple of weeks in Intibucá have been great to us.

Camasca is a beautiful little pueblo about three hours away from La Esperanza. Its inhabitants are welcoming, engaging and very proud of the strong reputation that their village has on the frontera. Their pride is well merited—Camasca’s cobble-stoned streets are immaculately clean, there is a restaurant with a killer menu and the village is home to the only gym/weight room in this part of Honduras. But most importantly, the village holds the unique distinction as host of the nation’s only government-sponsored bilingual school.
We have gotten a very warm bienvenidos from just about everybody in the town. In our first days in Camasca, Profe Iris brought us some banana chips as a welcoming present, Profe Edwin invited us to join a teachers-only soccer team and the whole staff at the bilingual school made sure that we felt very invited to their ranks.

And, of course, we have made fast friends with the bright young students of the Good Shepherd Bilingual School. John has thus far been helping out with the second graders (who, amidst their difficulty in pronouncing the “j” in English, have taken to calling him “Mr. Yon”). I have spent much of my time with the Kindergarteners, who, by virtue of their age, have been great fun to work with—very energetic and quick to learn.
Having spoken with the teachers, we have determined that our special contribution to the school this summer will be the implementation of a “Reading Corner.” Starting next week, we will be taking small groups of students aside throughout the course of the day in order to focus on reading books in English language, hoping to hone their skills in vocabulary and grammar as well as to cultivate in them a love of literature.

At any rate, this former Shoulder to Shoulder Sherpa is greatly anticipating the next couple of months’ work in the bilingual school. The eager children, the dedicated teachers and the welcoming village will surely make this summer rewarding on all fronts.

June 6, 2016August 4, 2023

Cultural Exchanges

What does a three year old have to tell us about the complexity and importance of cultural exchange? A great deal more than you would think. Jonathan Waite, three years old, is the grandson of Wayne Waite, the Board President of Shoulder to Shoulder, and his wife Christina. Jonathan lives in Xenia, Ohio with his parents, Daniel Waite and Nidia Belissa Waite. He is presently visiting his grandparents in Camasca, Intibucá, Honduras, accompanied by his mother. His father will join them this week. Daniel and Nidia have organized a one-week sports brigade for the young people of Camasca with their church, AHOP, A House of Prayer. We’re very much looking forward to their arrival.

Last week, Nidia had to take a trip to Tegucigalpa to attend a high school graduation and she left her son Jonathan in the care of her parents. Jonathan is fairly bilingual, accustomed to hearing English and Spanish at home and using them interchangeably in his verbal communication. Still, those who he is speaking with are most often monolingual and he has a ways to go to figure out who knows which language. Additionally, he’s three, and his vocabulary is still a bit limited. Because of this, when his mother went off to Tegucigalpa, he ended up with a bit of a communication impasse. It seems he didn’t have his favorite t-shirt with him in Honduras. His favorite t-shirt sports a picture of a shark on its front and he refers to it as his shark shirt. His consternation at not having his favorite t-shirt was aggravated and exacerbated when his grandparents could not understand what was causing his angst. His attempts at expressing his great dismay literally fell on deaf ears, and that frustrating sense of not being heard nor understood simply eroded into a terrible state of unparalleled crisis.

It’s bad enough for an adult to be in this situation and I personally can empathize with Jonathan’s plight. There is nothing more terrible or frightful as to find yourself unattached. Your sense of security, of worth and honor, of integrity, begins to crumble, and as hard as you try, there is nothing you can do to stop this freefall into a dark and lonely place. Jonathan perhaps knew enough that the persons around him, his family, could not solve his terrible dilemma. They could not give him his favorite shirt. But it was a thousand times worse that they could not even appreciate the import of the matter. Jonathan’s crisis soon became everyone’s crisis and seemingly not a soul could make any sense out of the simple annunciation, “Shark shirt.”

But his cousin, Eduardo, a second grader at our bilingual school came to the rescue. The word shark in Spanish is “tiburón.” Being only in the second grade, one would not necessarily expect that Eduardo would know the word tiburón, let alone its translation, shark, in English. But as fate, luck, or simply a well rounded education would have it, Eduardo has a friend in the third grade who is something of a budding artist and also likes to draw sharks. The young artist has a pen pal in the fifth grade at St. Mary’s School in Lee, MA with whom he has been sharing his portfolio of a variety of maritime predators otherwise known as sharks. Thus Eduardo was well acquainted with the word. He simply told his family that Jonathan wants his shark shirt, “camiseta de tiburón,” and the crisis that severely threatened a three year old’s trust in his Honduran family was diffused.

Communication, even among people who speak the same language, is often as challenging as it is critical. It is by communication that we discover and invest in relationships. Sometimes I am asked why we are investing so much time and resources in a bilingual school in Honduras. Isn’t that secondary to the tremendous problems that poverty causes? I don’t know. Perhaps Eduardo and Jonathan, having easily overcome a problem for which all of the adults around them were rendered impotent, will actually find solutions to the causes of poverty. Shark means tiburón. This is more profound than you might think.

March 15, 2016June 16, 2023

Don't Mind Us, We're Fine

Did you ever feel like you were getting lost in the shuffle? Mountain Area Health Education Center (MAHEC) must have felt that way while they were visiting Camasca on their brigade a few weeks ago. They were here for two full weeks, doing amazing work, but we must apologize for not giving them a lot of attention. I feel like I need to put some effort in my excuse for being so inconsiderate. There were only five of them: three physicians, one pharmacist, and one exceptionally talented fifteen-year old named Henry (son of Amy, one of the physicians). Five people can easily get lost, right? Besides, the whole time they were here, we had all sorts of other, bigger brigades coming and going. Our first ever surgical brigade demanded a great deal of our attention. Not to mention Brown/Wingate in Guachipilincito, VCU/FFPCS in Pinares, and a dental brigade jumping back and forth between Concepcion and Santa Lucia. February was one tremendously busy month. So, if the five people who spent time in Camasca felt as if they were neglected, you are probably right, and we’re sorry. But no one ever complained.

Perhaps I’m being a bit hard on myself. Truly, these five individuals were not at all demanding. If the squeaky wheel gets the grease, the quiet wheel simply turns unnoticed. The MAHEC brigade members unpretentiously arrived in town and checked into the local hotel. They got all their meals at the restaurant. Every day, they simply walked over to the health clinic or they spent some time at our bilingual school doing health screenings and playing with the kids. Henry, the fifteen year old who has fallen in love with the little town of Camasca, spent his days at the bilingual school. Henry was doing so well at the bilingual school that we were trying to sign him up as a volunteer. There’s that crazy little catch about having to finish High School.

He and his mom had been here before. MAHEC is very familiar with and well known by the town of Camasca. It wasn’t any big deal for them. I guess they just kind of blended in. Their service was actually profound, but it was administered with such subtlety that it demanded no praise. I realize now why it was that the few times I had the fortune to visit with them I felt so relaxed. It was as if they were saying to me, “Look, just leave the special china in the cabinet. We’re good with the plastic ware.” There’s an integrity in such service that we would all do well to emulate.

They seemed to do it all on their own with very little help from us. But lest you all think that we didn’t notice the amazing work you did, the beauty of the just relationships you committed yourselves to, and the special place you hold in the hearts of the people of Camasca and particularly the students at our bilingual school, we just want to say THANK YOU. I’m sure you’ll be back. Don’t forget to tell us when you’re coming.