Chapter 10: Honduras

CHAPTER 10: HONDURAS

The last chapter ended with us accepting jobs at the International School of Louisiana (ISL), the job where we were working when Hurricane Katrina hit New Oreleans. This chapter mingles experiences at ISL and our transition back to full time teaching in Honduras. 

The first two years at ISL  we seemed to be go from achievement to achievement. We grew by eighty students a year. Carolyn went to France to recruit teachers. I was getting more and more involved with things like lobbying and fundraising. When Katrina changed everything, we were a month away from launching a year long capital campaign to build a middle school on property the school had bought the year before. Mayor Nagin awarded us a grant that allowed us to demolish the existing deserted building on the property. The wrecking equipment was on the lot when Katrina hit. Katrina did no damage to the decades old, asbestos infected, warehouse the school was about to demolish. 

For three years after Katrina we split our time between Florida and New Orleans. Our professional lives were no longer important. We could have tried to hop back on the international teacher or administrator train, but we had to pull the pieces of our flooded lives back together. The first year after we left ISL was about finding who we were again. After decompressing in our Florida beach cottage in the fall of 2006, we rented out the cottage to snowbirds, and returned to our FEMA trailer in New Orleans. In the six months we had been gone a twelve foot tree had grown right in front of the trailer door. We had to saw it down before we could get in.

There were some signs of life in our neighborhood, but the city was still oppressed by Katrina.

Carolyn had a job doing the admission testing for ISL. I was working on the house and doing some substitute teaching. Our house and our career trajectories were in shambles, but we didn’t care. Except for the frustrations caused by the frequent changes and conflicting information that flowed from the government about Katrina recovery, we were happy. The responsibility of running a school or even just a classroom had been washed away. The professional stress and arguments about school decisions that had spilled into our relationship disappeared. Our career choices had been made because we enjoyed a sense of giving back for the greater good. Our primary and almost exclusive priority became our own self-interests.

A substitute job at a Catholic school, St. Louis King of France, in Bucktown led to a permanent position when their middle school math teacher left in the spring of 2007. Carolyn and I had still heard nothing about money from a US government grant to rebuild. It was almost two years since the storm. We lived in a FEMA trailer behind our gutted house. Every morning I would peddle about  ten blocks from our trailer across the infamous 17th Street Canal to St. Louis King of France. This was the canal that broke and flooded my neighborhood. The street with houses that backed up to the canal was now a construction site and every home on our side of the canal was destroyed. The other side had no flood damage. I remember on June 1st turning on the radio in the trailer before going to work. The WWL morning news was saying that the president or governor or somebody who should know had declared the 17th Street Canal repaired and ready for hurricane season as I was simultaneously hearing the pile drivers driving support into the walls of the canal a few blocks away and would be listening to those pile drivers all day as I tried to teach thirteen year olds algebra with summer vacation a week away.

We were relaxing in our Florida beach cottage for the summer and going to spend a good chunk of the next fall in France enjoying the Rugby World Cup. In 2000 I had purchased a five acre mango orchard as an investment. The orchard was very old with large trees. In 2004 the eye of Hurricane Charley had gone right over the orchard. Every tree had the top branches blown away. For two years it was very difficult to even get into the orchard because of all the debris. Some of the debris included the sides of manufactured homes that had previously been in the 55+ community nearby. By 2007 the fallen branches had rotted away, and it was a bumper year for mangoes. There was a produce stand on the beach where we had our cottage. Larry the manager of the stand didn’t pay much for mangoes but he allowed us to swap. That summer we swapped mangoes for everything from tomatoes to fresh fish. Our finances were a little strained. Along with a lot of people we had taken the easy credit available before 2005, and now were paying off the loans while paying property tax on property that was now worth a lot less than what we paid for it. Our personal budget had us on a $40 a day allowance for food, but mango swapping was allowing us to eat well and save money.

A nagging cough and congestion that started in New Orleans kept getting worse. By the summer of 2007 it was hard to sleep at night. The doctor in Florida spent all of a minute and a half to say I had bronchitis and prescribed antibiotics. They didn’t work, but he repeated the diagnosis and prescription two more times. My bill for visits, x-rays, and antibiotics was over a thousand dollars. Our new approach of living for the moment for tomorrow everything could be washed away was threatened by a cough and chest congestion that didn’t allow me to sleep more than two hours at a time. We were on the edge of canceling the trip to France, but got another round of antibiotics and got on the plane.

The antibiotics didn’t work any better in France. Our lovely small efficiency apartment in the quaint French village of Leucate was a torture cell at night. I hacked and coughed all night and was worn out in the morning. After a week of this we went to the French doctor in town. There was no nurse or receptionist. We were first in line. The doctor spent thirty minutes piecing together from our very poor French my problem and that we had spent a lot of time in the ruins of buildings in New Orleans. He diagnosed me as having adult onset asthma brought on by Katrina related experiences inhaling  dust, mold, insulation, and who knows what else. He prescribed an inhaler and asked for fifteen Euros. I slept through the night and have not had the problem since. 

After France we returned to the USA. My lungs were free to breathe deeply again. Our career ambitions were now one last teaching experience overseas. We were the other side of our professional hills and just wanted to get back to that daily classroom contact and control of what the children were learning. Chapter one tells the story of us getting hired for jobs in Honduras. 

In the early days of our relationship Carolyn and I started writing a weekly entry in a diary. Usually the entry would be a reflection on our most memorable experience in each of the five senses - taste, feeling, sound, sight, and smell. Katrina washed away all the diaries except the one we took with us for our night in a French Quarter hotel on the eve of Katrina. When we arrived at our beach cottage in Florida after driving through the night, we took out the diary and wrote an entry. We talked about leaving behind the challenges of ISL. We then listed the challenges we expected to be going back to. The entry two weeks later starts, “The world is a much different place since the levees broke.” Two years later we had an entry which was our ten wishes for the next ten years. It started with, “Financial struggles solved.” 

The jobs in Honduras righted our leaning financial ship. With money in a flooded and gutted Lakeview house, a loan to buy the vacant lot next to the Florida beach cottage leveraged by the Florida beach cottage, and no permanent jobs for the last two years we had drained our savings. Honduras was security. The jobs were in the subject areas of our greatest competencies. I was teaching middle school science, and Carolyn had third grade. It was a time when Carolyn and I could build our relationship while doing something we loved and which we felt was for the greater good.

La Lima, Honduras, was a sweet port of call on the river of life. The school provided us housing in a three bedroom house with a large kitchen with a breakfast room. One of the bedrooms was as big as our entire apartment in London our first year there. There was a huge living  room/ dining room combination in the front of the house. It was a short walk to school through a quiet neighborhood where many of the children who went to school lived. The neighborhood was a development built by Chiquita Banana in the 1940s. There was a golf course. As teachers we got a reduced membership rate. There was a swimming pool, but it had been shut down for a few years by the time we arrived. It would open again a couple months before we left.

The United Fruit workers were allowed to buy their houses in the 60s or possibly later and then they passed into general ownership. Our landlord was the office manager at the school. She charged the school whatever allowance the school gave a teacher, but she got the pick of the new teachers. I guess she figured a couple in their fifties was a better choice than the other incoming staff who were mostly young and single. Myrna and her husband lived next door. On the few occasions we had a party, she didn’t complain as it would be a school party. All the people coming were her friends from work. In fact she would borrow her daughter’s IPod and act as disc jockey.

 

We hosted the faculty party each year after the school talent show. The faculty had a dance routine. Carolyn and I added our gringo rhythms to the fluid Latina moves of the Honduran teachers. Our last year we went to bed at 11 pm while the party was in full swing and woke up the next morning to find the place empty and clean.

The golf course was usually deserted in the afternoon. Almost every afternoon we played a pitch-n-putt game for an hour. Our dinner was sometimes prepared by someone who cleaned house and fixed a meal for us twice a week. After dinner we would watch telenovelas on the television or pirated dvds bought on the streets of La Lima on a laptop. Leonardo, our favorite dvd seller, also had a scale. People would pay the equivalent of a nickel to weigh themselves. Leonardo gave you a free dvd and a free weigh for every ten DVD’s purchased. 

Three years in Honduras seemed like it would be a sweet way to finish our careers in education. After a faculty party before the spring break during our first year, our principal was shot. I tell that story in Chapter One. After he was shot the school limped along. There were lots of meetings to discuss what should be done. Crime was an increasing problem in the nearby city of San Pedro Sula. Some of our students were bussed from San Pedro Sula because there wasn’t space in the larger school there. There was an attempt to kidnap a whole bus of children. Parents were kidnapped occasionally. At one meeting the acting principal repeatedly put forth the new plan to keep from panicking. The plan was to stay calm.

Remaining calm was not a problem for us, but a different matter for the local hired. There were concerns that the school would now close. There was a plan being considered to combine the schools, close our campus, and pay off the teachers on two year contracts. We could have found another two year job and gotten paid double for the first year of our new job. Local hired teachers and other school staff were faced with the sudden end to their livelihood. To escalate the panic and general feelings of uncertainty in the middle of the night in the last week of school an earthquake tossed us out of bed. We struggled to our feet as the house shook and we realized what was happening. When the shaking stopped, we huddled in the street with our neighbors wondering how long we should wait before we could go back to bed. Aftershocks continued through the next week. End of the year events were cancelled.

When we returned to Honduras in August, the president had been recently rousted from his sleep by his military and flown to Costa Rica in his pajamas. The grandfather of one of Carolyn’s students was the head of legislature. He took over. The former president, Zelaya, had been cozying  up to Chavez who was passing out cheap or free Venezuelan oil around the region. While the coup was denounced by President Obama, the US military had been very cozy with the Honduran military since Ollie North’s days illegally funneling Iranian money to the Hondurans for bases and services during the war with the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. Zelaya had been pushing for a referendum that would give him Chavez type power  and extend the time he could remain president. The coup happened on the eve of the referendum which never happened. The threat of a popular uprising was palpable. 

The first week back from summer vacation we drove through a military checkpoint on the way home from a day’s staff development meeting on curriculum mapping or some other new  educational craze. Military checkpoints were not that unusual, but this one was also directing the traffic around the mess the  protestors left. Once through the gated entrance into Zona Americano where the school and our house were located the political challenges of Honduras disappeared.

 A few weeks later the school sponsored a faculty trip to Roatan. We bussed three hours through the winding Honduran coastal countryside from San Pedro Sula to La Ceiba. The early morning bus ride and dramamine clouded ferry ride made the trip to Routan a blur. Pina coladas and the incredible beauty of the Caribbean would soon awaken a feeling of peace and complacency. The country we lived in was struggling with world condemnation for its forced ousting of its elected leader, gangs and violence were an every day concern, our school teetered on the edge of disappearing forever as our principal recovered from being shot, and the acting principal’s plan was to stay calm. Weirdly that wasn’t hard to do with a tropical cocktail in my hand and the turquoise magnificence of the Caribbean around my feet.

In a couple weeks Zelaya would renter the country. The reentry did not inspire a popular uprising,  but we still got three days off school. Our life returned to the routine of work, golf, and Sunday trips to the bigger town of Progreso twenty miles away when the power went off in La Lima. We would spend the day at a restaurant just outside of town.  It had a pool and a cockfighting stadium. After a few hours lounging around the pool we would end the day with a walk around the new mall in town. After the school blocked our access to Facebook we would buy an hours time on a computer at the Internet cafe in the mall and explore the exploding social media phenomenon. Having lost all my photos in Katrina I was planning to use Facebook as my photo album going forward. Future memories would be safe from flooding and available for the world to see. This was 2009, the year Facebook went public. It would expand in a year from 150 million users to over 500 million users. On the way home we stopped for a rotisserie chicken. As the sun set our drive home took us over the half of the bridge left after the earthquake. The drive cut through fields of bananas on both sides of the road that stretched as far as you could see. We would pull through the guard gates into the Zona and park our little Kia under our house.  After being thankful the power was back on we would shower and get ready for another week at Escuela Internacional La Lima.

 

Honduras’s qualification for the World Cup created a euphoria in the country which overshadowed general concern for the elected president’s problems trying to get back in the country. It opened a little window for us to appeal to this nationalistic mania for sport to obtain a day off work. The acting principal was persuaded that it was critical for us to be in Ft. Lauderdale for the Rugby World Cup qualifying match between the USA and Uruguay. We caught the Thursday night Spirit flight, spent a night at our Florida cottage, and then two nights in Ft Lauderdale before flight back to Honduras. Most of the citizens of the USA  had no idea they had a national rugby team and were thus oblivious to the USA’s victory over Uruguay and qualification for the Rugby World Cup. The trip was a needed break. We returned ready to sign-up for another year teaching in La Lima with a clear focus on a dream trip to New Zealand the year after for the World Cup.

For our very first vacation our first year in Honduras we drove to Nueva Ocotepeque. We had been in Honduras less than two months and were already thinking the job might only last a year. Nueva Ocotepeque was located conveniently in the corner of Honduras which bordered both Guatemala and El Salvador. One goal of the trip was to check those two countries off our countries we had visited list. Early in the morning we left our hotel to visit all three countries in one day. We crossed first into El Salvador and visited the brightly painted village of La Palma. We were back in our hotel by noon and questioning why we cared if we checked Guatemala off our country visited list. After a cool Salva Vida beer we headed to the Guatemala border. The long line of trucks on both sides of the border made us reconsider trying to cross. We parked in a duty-free shop and went inside. We asked the girl behind the counter questions about crossing the border. She told us to leave our car in their lot and just walk across. We caught a bus on the Guatemala side to the nearby town of Esquipulas. Esquipulas is renowned for its basilica which has a statue of a black Jesus. The line to see the statue dissuaded us from trying to see it. We were satisfied with all the photos of the statue on postcards in gift shops around the basilica. 

We returned to our hotel room in Honduras tired but a little proud that we had pursued the goal, but the trip to Guatemala could have been skipped. A year later we would return for a longer holiday in the country and an experience that would inspire an activity that would enrich our retirement for years. On that vacation we flew from Pedro Sula to Tegucigalpa to San Salvador to Guatemala City. Upon arrival in Guatemala’s capital city after our Central American puddle jumping we took a cab to the town of Antigua. It was full of tourists and lots of Spanish schools for gringos. We moved on to a little village on Lago de Atitlan. The town was suffering and would continue to suffer for years because the lake was polluted with cyanobacteria. The year before our arrival the lake had won the distinction of being named “Threatened Lake of the Year” at the World Water Forum. In 2005 a hurricane destroyed the sewage treatment plant of the largest town on the  lake, and the raw sewage tipped the environmental balance. The combined effect of sewage and fertilizer covered the lake in algae and a poor region of Guatemala became poorer. When we were there the lake looked beautiful,  bacteria clumps were floating in spots, but if you looked past these the water sparkled in the sunlight, brightly colored boats motored around the vast lake, and a huge volcano towered over the far shore. The year before almost the entire lake was covered in an algae bloom.

For our first dinner in town we chose a restaurant on stilts on the edge of the lake. We ordered corvina, a saltwater fish that definitely didn’t come from the lake. As we were looking at our menus two young girls came through the restaurant selling handicrafts. When we said we didn’t want a tablecloth, one of the ten year olds cheekily said, “If you won’t buy a tablecloth, buy us dinner.”

So we did. 

They were delightful dinner company. Their consumption of food while telling us about their  lives was prodigious.  They had finished their chicken and fries while talking non-stop. We were barely half way through our fish dinners as they pushed the last French fries into their mouths and stared at the food left on our plates.  We pushed the remains of our dinner over. Seconds later they happily agreed that they had room for dessert.

The next day we took a bus with a group of tourists to the famous market town of Chichicastenango. We knew the end of our career was close. Honduras had been such an overall positive experience, we were now planning to have one more teaching experience and then retire. The joy of being back in our own classrooms with no administrative concerns had inspired us to think maybe we could take another overseas teaching job after our year off to settle the New Orleans house and go to New Zealand. And when the teaching career was finally over, we could start a handicraft business. Chichicastenango could be a big part of our future. 

When I tried the handicraft business decades earlier, Chic, a shop owner in New Orleans, had bought some of my stuff. Chic’s shop was full of Guatemalan handicrafts that he told me he  bought on an annual trip to Chichicastenango. Chic had various talents. He was a type of indigenous medicine man and was renowned for his boudin. He was a food vendor at some of the very first New Orleans Jazz Fests. Chic performed the ceremony for my second marriage. On the day Carolyn and I got married in Vegas, my sister showed us the front of the culture section of the New York Times. A picture of Chic with a story about the Boudin Man covered the page. It seemed the signs were pointing to this Guatemalan village becoming a part of our long term retirement plan.

Stories of gang violence were part of almost every conversation. We had been repeatedly cautioned about using public transportation. Gangs would get on the bus and then rob everyone. We were told gringos would probably be kidnapped and ransomed. On the drive back from Chichicastenango the bus was detoured off the main road. A little panic began to flow through the bus. Were we about to become the property of a drug gang? The driver began explaining. His Spanish explanation of what was happening was translated by the bilingual folks on the bus. He was taking a detour because there was a protest on the road. The police had caught three gang members  involved in robbing a bus. The driver of the bus had been killed. The gang members were being held in the local jail until the local people set the jail on fire, burning the gang members to death. I never really understood what the protest was for. There were lots of speculation on the bus as we wound through Guatemalan back roads. A few drifted into concerns that the bus driver was actually in cahoots with the gang and was about to deliver a van load of gringos to the gang hideout. The most popular suggestion was they were protesting that they needed a new jail, so they could burn it down again next time they caught some gang members.

In May I had my high school’s forty year reunion in Indiana. My classes were all finished by the time of the reunion. It was that end of school year time when exams are being graded, student reports written, and classrooms are being cleared for the summer cleaning. It took most teachers a day or two to get it all done, but administration needed a week to process everything. Missing a couple days of school was not a problem. I was meeting my two roommates from forty year before, Kevin and Donn. We were sharing a cottage about twenty miles from the school. Kevin and Donn had both visited me in New Orleans during our college years. After college life pulled us apart. Kevin lived outside of Washington, so we saw each other every few years when I was in the Washington area or if Kevin had business in the New Orleans area.  

In our early twenties Kevin and I both had an interest in hot air ballooning. Kevin put me in touch with an instructor in Virginia. The instructor had a two week plan for someone to get licensed. I stayed with the instructor and his wife. We were to take a flight in the morning and the evening and the rest of the day I studied for the test. The first three days the weather was bad. I focused on studying for the test. On the fourth day the weather was perfect for the morning flight. And it was fantastic! Gliding almost silently over the rolling Virginia countryside with the occasional sound of the burner shooting hot air into the balloon as the sun came up was the beautiful magic feeling I had imagined it would be.

For the afternoon flight we were going up with two other balloons. One fellow was going for his commercial license and was taking the required solo flight to ten thousand feet. The other pilot was taking a family of three on a champagne flight. When they landed the driver of the chase vehicle would bring them a bottle of champagne. This pilot called weather. I was listening when my instructor asked what the weather report was. The champagne flight pilot said, “ There are thunder storms in the area. But we will see them and get down. I need this flight.” So we lifted off.

We flew over a series of fields. Each field was separated by a single line of trees. I was controlling the burner. I would try to get as low to the ground as I could over the field and then just add enough heat to jump the trees before dropping close to the ground for the next field. Because we were so low to the ground we didn’t see the clouds. The pilot turned his radio off to save the battery. His wife in the chase vehicle was screaming into her useless radio for us to stay down. When we passed the last field, we began to climb.That is when we saw the massive line of menacing black clouds churning towards us. Ahead of us was a little league baseball game going on just the other side of a power line.  My study had already impressed on me the rule to always climb when you go over an electric line. The game, which must have been trying to rush to get in enough innings before the storm, stopped as all eyes turned to us trying to just get  over the power line and then drop into the outfield.

Winds blow into a thunderstorm. We were being sucked into this monster. It would be the worst thunderstorm the area had had in fifty years.  Just as we got directly over the power lines  the storm took us. For one brief moment we hung  there dead still a couple hundred feet above the upturned faces of the little leaguers. It was like the storm was thinking,”What do I do with this thing?” And then it knew.

We were tossed and dropped and blown all over the sky. We caught a brief glimpse of the other balloons. Everyone’s face had the look. Not that look of fear of the unknown or a scary movie, but the look of silent  fear when you are staring at your imminent death. The skirts at the bottom of the balloon were being blown shut. You couldn’t put hot air in the balloon or you would catch the balloon on fire. The pilot was standing on the edge of the balloon’s gondola five hundred feet off the ground. He was pulling the skirt open with one hand and working the burner with the other as the balloon was tossed about like a toy. I could see the other balloonists doing the same thing. My instructor had me reading the temperature gauge. He said if the balloon got too hot we could shoot up to the top of the thunderstorm. If we didn’t pass out on the sudden ascent, we would suffocate and freeze at the top of the storm. I had no idea what was a good temperature. I just kept reading the number. As I crouched in the corner of the balloon trying to keep focused on the little gauge, my life did not rush in front of my eyes. The thought that kept recurring was, “What a silly way to die.”

Time seemed to stand still and rush by at the same time. The pilot screamed over the roar of the storm, “Do you see that field down there.? Do you think we can make it.”

I looked at the pilot with what  must have been shocked bewilderment. He was asking me on my second flight if I thought we could pull the plug in the top of the balloon and drop several hundred feet and hit a postage stamp sized field below. He didn’t wait for my answer. Usually when a hot air balloon lands the balloon part blows over the gondola. Someone gets out the gondola  and stretches the balloon out as the air slowly escapes. When we landed,  the balloon was stretched out flat behind us. We were alive and conscious. The pilot had been thrown completely out of the balloon.  My left leg took most of the impact. A red haired wild eyed farmer came running across the field a few minutes after our crash. He was yelling about the crazy scene of balloons flying around in the storm and seeing them crash. Then he stopped and stared at our dazed faces for a second and then ran off to get help.

Most of the bones in my foot were broken or displaced and the tendon that connects the femur to the tibia was  a thread. The doctor rushed me to surgery. He said I was very close to losing my leg. I felt very lucky. The father of the family on the champagne flight broke his back. The pilot doing a ten thousand foot flight told the story of standing on the edge of his gondola to hold the skirt open when a gust of wind blew the gondola out from under him. He caught the edge of the gondola as he was falling and dangled outside the gondola thousands of feet in the air for seconds in which his life did pass in front of his eyes.

So much of life turns on chance. Life itself can hang on such a simple thing as a radio being left on or the way a wind may be blowing.  Kevin was one of those friends who tend to be part of major changes in our lives. 

Kevin had rented a car for the reunion. On the night of the reunion we had wine at the whole school event. Our class then moved to a bar in the town of Culver. When that bar closed, Kevin, Donn, and I moved to another bar. We had a lot of catching up to do. When that bar closed at 2, Kevin said he was too drunk to drive. I was too drunk not to volunteer to drive.

At the first red light out of town a police car pulled in behind me. It was dark, and  I wasn’t sure exactly where we were going. For a few miles the police followed us. I knew our turn was coming up. Suddenly a road appeared on the right. I flipped on the blinker and turned into what turned out to be a private drive into a horse stable. The police light came on. I spent the night in jail. The police took my Louisiana drivers license and my Honduran visa. I knew I was not going to get the drivers license back, but I needed the visa to get back in Honduras. The police couldn’t find  it . When I landed in San Pedro Sula, I nervously tried the lie I had prepared on the plane, “ I forgot my visa at my house here when I flew out.” Without another question the immigration agent stamped me in.

Dennis, the principal who had been shot, was back for our last year. If you didn’t know him before, you might not have noticed the damage. He was his same positive, full of enthusiasm leader of the school. He prided himself on an open door policy. If you needed help or a question answered, you just knocked on his open door and walked in. A bullet had shattered bones in his shoulder and sent bone fragments into his brain. He forgot how to read and write and was relearning these skills. The school provided him with a machine that typed what he said. His memory seemed to have been affected, also. He would forget to turn the machine off if someone walked in his office. There was the occasional long, very confusing, email to faculty.

The school was preparing for an accreditation visit during our last year. We were assigned to committees to write the document the visiting accreditation team would review the next year.. At an early meeting the assistant principal, who had been the acting principal for the year Dennis was out, commented that Dennis was talking too much. That was a bit of the kettle calling the  pot black.  Accreditation organizing meetings would ramble between the two commenting on each others’ comments. An hour would go by with nothing accomplished. We began to question if we would want to teach again after our year off to go to New Zealand. 

The almost desperate confusion and uncertainty that pervaded the year Dennis was gone was now replaced by the good natured positive confusion of his return. The school installed a digital reader for staff to use to sign in and out of school. Staff showing up late was almost part of the school culture. Some teachers would even arrive after the bell for the start of school. The digital reader had been in place for a couple of months when we had a faculty meeting with data on tardiness by staff and what the consequences would be going forward. There was an uproar like we had been asked to work weekends with no pay. Teachers actually said they didn’t know we had to be on time. Dennis pointed out the expectation in the faculty handbook and adopted a ‘I mean business’ attitude about the consequences. The tension between a large number of often tardy staff and Dennis increased daily for a couple weeks. The digital reader was right outside Carolyn’s classroom. She saw everyone who came in late. Within a couple weeks the strain of trying to arrive on time was becoming too much for some, and they were sliding back into their old patterns. Nothing else was ever said about it.

In our last couple of months in Honduras the pool at the golf club opened with a bar and restaurant. Our very comfortable life centered around jobs we liked got better. Faculty after school ultimate frisbee games would end with a swim, a cold Salva Vida beer, and a delicious Honduran anafre as the sun set over the palm trees and brightly colored bougainvillea that lined the fairways. And then it was over. When our last school year started, I saw someone writing a blog about their first year teaching. In August I started a blog entitled “ Last Year Teacher.” May 31st, 2010, was going to be my last entry. I wrote of my intention to retire. I wrote about the graduation ceremony and how some of the seventh graders asked me to return the next year. They had been in the class I struggled with all year. A cliquish group mentality in a handful of students created an atmosphere that was much more interested in socializing with peers than anything I was trying to teach.The final entry was an email from Rudolfo, one of the students in the class. It arrived when I was back in Florida. Below is part of it.

“I will honestly Miss you ALLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT because you were one of the best teachers that I have had, and will have in my entire life. And you will know that everything that I have said comes from the deepest part of my heart because If YOU did not mean something for ME, I would not have taken my vacation time to express all the gratitude that I feel towards you.”

What a wonderful end to a career. Rudolfo and I are Facebook friends. Just the other day I saw a post of him pursuing his medical career.

Our approach to solving the financial struggles we had because of Katrina and leaving our jobs in New Orleans  was not to jump back into the relatively high paying administrative life. We wanted a small school within a few hours flight of Florida. We were on the other side of career, identity and finding our life partner, but where were we going? Enjoying our last few years doing the part of our career we enjoyed the most seemed like the wisest thing to do. Later in retired life we would go back to Ecuador to volunteer in a school for a couple weeks and volunteer with an after school program in Florida for a brief period, but it would not be the same. When we left Honduras, we thought it could be our last teaching jobs, but the debate was still going on within us and between us about if we would look for another job after  a year off to settle the house in New Orleans and go to the World Cup in New Zealand.