It’s 5 A.M. and my alarm clock is going off. I hit snooze and ignore reality for another 10 minutes. Somehow, I end up sleeping until 5:35 and now I REALLY have to get up.
I hurry up and pack my lunch (PB&J again. I didn’t wake up in time to make anything healthy.), and make a bowl of oatmeal that I will eat on our ride to school.
Somehow, I thought I escaped the 5 A.M. alarms when I left my job at Sherwin Williams, but this month our bus picks us up at 6:10 A.M. We hop on a school bus packed with little children and make our trek to Santa Clara, a private Catholic bilingual school, where we’ve been assigned to help teach this month.
Our first day, we head into Miss Mauritza’s office for our orientation and teaching assignments. We have been given apple green polos as our uniforms for the month to make us look like legitimate teachers. They give us a tour of the school, and inform us which class we will be working with. “Casie, we read your skills profile, and we believe you will be best with the Pre-K class.” OK, great. I love little kids. I can do that.
We head to our classrooms. I see those adorable faces for the first time. My heart melts a little bit. I’m so excited to be working with the same group of kids every day for an entire month. Miss Gomez (the teacher of that class) introduces me to the little ones, and the kids shout out, “Hello, Miss Kayyyyceeeee.” They give me huge smiles and hugs before I even know them.
Ok, time for me to learn their names. I crouch down, look them each in the eye, and ask them to say their name. They quickly mumble out their first, second first, middle, and last name. After asking them to repeat their name two more times, and still not picking it up through their accent, I realize this month is going to be a bit more challenging than I originally thought. Then I realized the difficulty of Pre-K. I know hardly any Spanish, and these kids hardly know any English (yet).
No big deal. Miss Gomez is here, and she is bilingual. I’ll make this work. Everything is going great until Miss Gomez needs to step out to take care of something. “Can you watch them for a few minutes? You can sing songs with them.” Okayyy, I can do that. The only children’s song I can think of is “Wheels on the Bus.” I hesitantly lead them in a train around the room going through all the verses I can think of. The song ends. Miss Gomez isn’t back yet. The kids start to be come unruly. A few come up to me and speak phrases in Spanish that I can’t understand. One kid is whining and definitely wants something from me. I start to worry. I don’t speak their language, and in this situation, I feel like a failure. A few moment later, Miss Gomez comes back.
“Pheww, I’m glad that’s over. Please don’t leave me again.” I think in my head. The rest of the day goes by with out anything eventful happening.
I don’t know if it was God nudging me to get more out of my comfort zone, but throughout the week, there were several other times where Miss Gomez needed to leave the classroom whether that was to go buy lunch at the cafeteria, go talk to another teacher, etc.
One day it was lunch time with just me and the kiddos. By then I knew the routine, so I was fairly confident I could handle it. In the pre-k classroom, the kids pack their lunch, and the aids microwave their meals before it’s time to eat, so when lunch time comes around it’s back in their lunch box and everything is ready to go.
I had them line up to wash their hands, I squirted soap into each of their hands, and they scurried off to wash their hands before eating. On a typical day, when they get back into the classroom, they grab their lunch boxes from their cubby, sit down at their desk and eat. For whatever reason, they weren’t doing this on this particular day. Out of the 21 kids in the class, only 3 or 4 of them were sitting down and eating. I noticed about half of the kids were running around the room, chasing each other, and doing everything but eating their lunch. “Kids, sit down.” I say. A minute or so goes by, and they still aren’t listening. I notice a few of them start to cry.
The class is chaos. WHAT is going on?? I start to realize a lot of them have their lunch boxes, but no food. I try to ask a few of them what is going on. I can’t understand anything they say, but each child I ask gives me a very opinionated response.
Miss Gomez was out in the hallway doing evaluations, and as much as I hated interrupting her, I needed help. Turns out, the power had been out all morning. We use natural light in the classroom so I had not even noticed. Because the power was out, one of the aids had taken their meals (but not their lunch boxes) down to the administrative office to microwave them with the generator. Because they were using one microwave for the entire school’s meals, it was taking a lot longer than usual. Mystery solved. I would have never figured that out on my own. I had Miss Gomez translate that to the kiddos so that the kids would calm down. 10 minutes later, their lunches showed up, and everything was right in the world again.
I wish I can say that things got easier as the month unfolded, but more and more situations came up where I was out of my comfort zone. There was an entire morning where I had to teach the class without any help. How in the world do I give a 30 minute lesson on the letter B??? And then another lesson on the number 7??
My lesson for the month: I didn’t go into this month with an adaptable mindset. In my mind, I had already experienced some hardships in the first two months of the race, and I was looking for an easy month. I was looking for a month where I hung out with some cute kids, bonded with my team-mates, and felt filled up with the love of God. I wanted easy. I didn’t enjoy feeling like a failure when I still don’t understand Spanish and I’ve been in Central America for 3 months. I had a bad attitude when I worked a 10 hour day on Thanksgiving, when every one was back home celebrating without me. My entitlement showed up front and center in my life. WHY am I getting up at 5AM every morning?? WHY can’t I take a day off for the holiday?? I had to fight to maintain any sense of connection with the Lord (seems like a theme on this trip). I felt disconnected from my team. (They were drained too.) I felt like I was regressing instead of growing. I felt alone and spiritually attacked.
Today is a catching up/packing/cleaning day. We’re getting ready to head to Tegucigalpa for a leader development “weekend” before we fly to the Philippines this coming Sunday. As I type this blog, this is one of the first times I’ve sat down to reflect this entire month. Even in the midst of all the chaos, I realized I missed out on a lot of good stuff this past month simply because I had the wrong lens on. There were a lot of kids on our hour long bus ride I could have poured into, but I held back because I was tired. Good things are happening, and I wasn’t as involved as I could have been because I was so concerned about my own needs being met. It’s an ugly part of myself, but I have faith that God is faithful to finish what he began (Phil 1:6).
Even as I type this blog, I feel God’s heart for me. He’s sad that my identity is so wrapped up in performance and what other people think of me. He wants freedom for me, so that I am fully capable of living out the passions He has given me. Trust me, they are in there. I’m thankful that His mercies truly are new every morning. Even though I don’t get it all right, I won’t up feeling refreshed and loved. 8 days from now we will be in San Mateo, Philippines. I’m ready for a new perspective, new beginnings, and new opportunities to choose “all in”. I’m ready to cast off fake identities, and embrace the quirky, passionate, Casie that He created me to be. So what if I fail in the eyes of some people?? Heck, I didn’t even edit this blog post, so it might not make any sense to anyone but me.
If God is for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31)
^I’m going to miss these little ones, especially the nose picker wearing the sombrero in the front row. See you later Honduras!
^ My classroom for the month.
^ We were surrounded by incredible views.
^ Adventure is out there.
