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Written by Caroline Leritz
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Friday, 09 October 2009 |
Caroline is a parishioner at Ste. Genevieve DuBois Parish and a 2009 graduate of Nerinx Hall High School. She is currently volunteering in Punta Gorda, Belize. She is working at St. Peter Claver School and St. Benedict School.
 HELLO FROM BELIZE! Right now I have been here for about a month and a half, so let me fill you in on just how I got here and what I have been up to until now:
I arrived in Belize on August 19th with my sister's friend (now my friend) Casey. We knew we would be spending our time volunteering at St. Peter Claver School in Punta Gorda (PG), Belize.... but that is basically all we knew. We had a host family set up for us to live with and we had been waiting all summer to leave on our trip. The trip down ran pretty smoothly (other than a minor delay at the Dallas airport). We made it to PG at about 9pm, at dinner, and went straight to bed. Casey and I were in complete culture shock. The first night was the worst part of the trip. Waking up the next morning and getting to see everything in the light made things seem so much better than we had thought the night before. The town is RIGHT on the sea (our first house was about a 2 minute walk) and there were palm trees and a beautiful blue sky and the sun was wonderful. Of course there were the less positive things to notice about PG. Our town -- being in the poorest district of Belize (the Toledo district) --- was pretty rundown looking. Lots of the houses were made of wood and were falling apart in front of our eyes, the school system needed as much help as possible, and drugs are definitely a problem. It has only been a few years since paved roads have been put up to get to PG so it is slowly but surely growing and getting better.
We got our job working in the St. Peter Claver (SPC) offices and a few weeks later I picked up teaching my own standard IV (6th grade) class at St. Benedict’s School on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There is almost never down time at SPC... teachers always have loads and loads of copies to run off and things to staple and we have classes to sub for and errands to run -- they know they have us and they are using us for every second they can. As for teaching at St. Benedict’s, it started off as a challenge - but now we have gotten to know each other and they know what I expect from each and every one of them. My class has 16 students in it and they are all at different levels knowledge wise. Some students know what you are teaching even before you explain it to them and some don’t even understand it after an hour of one on one after school or during breaks. Some only want to pay attention and others couldn’t be paid to. The biggest problem I see with the WHOLE class is that they seem to not know how to follow directions very well... they need to be walked thru every single step of every single thing that is assigned to them. For example --- the other day I gave them a step by step paper on the writing process. We went thru each step together as a class, read the handout out loud, and then did examples on the board. Then I assigned them to choose a topic to write about and follow the first 3 steps and not a single person knew what to do. It was quite frustrating but it is something that I know we need to work on.
As for our living situations we are just about to settle into our 3rd and final place on Friday. Our first family was with a Belizean family. The mother’s name was Alexandra and the daughter's name was Cathy (15 years old). They were so great to live with and they showed us the ropes around town. After about a month we moved into another house because we had been offered the opportunity to tutor a 12 year old girl with dyslexia. Casey is majoring in special education and so she was really looking forward to getting to put her skills to use. That worked out really well and the family was great. The other weekend we went searching for apartments just to see what was out there when it got to the time to live on our own. The place that had been recommended to us had just had a peace corps girl leave that morning and it was a 2 bedroom apartment and right on the sea and it was a lot cheaper than rent at either of the houses we had stayed at ---- so we jumped at the opportunity so that no one else could snatch it up and are moving in tomorrow. It is going to be fun to have to buy our own food at the market and cook it ourselves. We have already worked it out: I cook, Casey does the dishes.
There are some really cool things coming up for me and Casey to do and so I hope to keep everyone updated every week or so.
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