News from the Teaching Project!

Hey everybody!
This is what the teaching project (Kathryn, Talia, Jess, and Becca) has been up to these days!
Thanks to Kathryn for writing these notes, take a look!

I'm in Belize as you might know and I've been here for 4 days now. The first couple of days we stayed on an island outside of Belize City to get adjusted to the heat and the Belizean life. The coolest part of that was we got to spend time on the beach and one night we found a rooftop yoga class during sunset; it was incredible! On Sunday we took a 7 hour bus ride to a town in the south of Belize called Punta Gorda. The buses in Belize are old school buses from Texas so the long bus rides are a little rough. We got into town late at night and we're staying in a hotel which is fairly nice, it has air conditioning which is a bonus! During the day we go to rural schools outside of Punta Gorda to teach. The first day we taught in a 3 room school all afternoon. I was a little nervous at first but I got into it by the end. We taught healthy living, drug abuse and puberty. The kids knew nothing about puberty so we had so much to teach them and they really wanted to learn about sex and condoms which is always fun to teach! The kids were pretty shy but they were so grateful that we came because they don't get very many visitors. We taught the same subjects at this school but I was more comfortable teaching this time. When we left the village they all followed us to the bus stop to wave goodbye which was so cute! I'm taking lots of pictures of the kids, they love our cameras and always ask us to take pictures of them so we can show them. We sometimes tell them you can't see the picture right away because they all crowd around to look! I have so much to tell you, but I'm having a great time. It's really eye opening to see the way people live around here and how people go to school, it's way more different than I could ever imagine! I'll keep you updated, hopefully every few days! Much love from Belize!

hey guys! so i've taught in 2 more schools since the last time i got on the internet. the first one was in a village called pueblo veijo (translation= old village). the school was small but we were able to each teach in one classroom all day. i taught in a standard 6 class which is the equivalent of grade 8 in Canada. it was sad because there were only 5 of them, kids only have to go to school until they're 14 and after that most parents don't let their kids go to school anymore because they need them to work on the farms. but i was able to teach them a lot, before i started teaching they thought HIV was a curable virus and by the end they understood that it wasn't. today we taught in a villaged called santa cruz. we got to the school really early so we sat around and Talia chased pigs around. there are pigs and chickens running around everywhere! the school was really small, there were only 3 classrooms so we were able to teach in all of them for about an hour and a half each. tomorrow is our last day in the toledo district. on saturday we're going to sleep in (we wake up at 5:15 every morning!!!!) and we want to see a couple waterfalls and explore the town a little bit more. i also want to eat breakfast at a restaurant. since we have to catch the bus so early we pack a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast and lunch everday (the bread we bought was super stale and gross) and we buy fresh fruit from the market. i really like the plantaines and the mangos, everything tastes super fresh! dinners are good here though. we go out to restaurants every night together and we haven't had a bad meal yet! on sunday we're taking a very very long bus ride to the most northern district of belize called corozal. it's going to be brutal but literally nothing is open on sundays anyways so it's a good day to travel. it should take about 14 hours and it's on a school bus. i'm going to take some gravol to try and sleep i think.... anyways all is well, update me on your life if you can, i don't want to miss out on too much fun stuff while i'm gone! much love!