Empezando la segunda semana de clases

COPPROME update.
I now have Pati Zaldivar working with me as the co directora of the Centro Educativo. She´s great! She grew up in COPPROME herself and is studying psychology at the uni, and is taking the semester off right now. She and I have been working together to crank out a program budget. She works wonders, especially with the high school girls, and she´s in charge of special programación. We´re planning a talent show for the high school girls, since in their individual interviews a lot of them said they are interested in dancing-singing-acting-etc on stage. On Friday we finished charting out their grades and making files for them. We got the cotización done over the weekend and the tutoring schedule is now established. Soon we´ll be putting up job descriptions for volunteers to replace us in time. For now, we´ve got a couple of international volunteers who for some reason or another are at COPPROME. More on them later.

The vision for this new centro educativo is going to be a sea change for COPPROME´s educational offerings and so far this change is causing less tremors than I had anticipated. Up until now, the only ¨profe¨the kids had was someone who barely held a high school degree, who had been reported on a few occasions for being too physically or verbally rough with the kids, which I see partly as a problem of lack of training and understaffing.

I´m working to try to make the area more accessible to the kids and to get more support for the staff and the center. The computer lab will soon be set up, which will require a good deal of oversight.

Conociendo Honduras.
Over the weekend I went out to San Pedro Sula and saw an awesome rock show at a club called Klein Bohemia. The owner, Chele, is pretty much the dude. The first band was an otherwise so-so punk band whose singer had an awesome heavy metal shriek. The second band was a funk rock band with a certifiably good bass player and a 15 year old drummer who could out rock just about any drummer in Honduras or otherwise. He did a 10 minute drum solo. Saturday we were back in El Progreso, where the Carnaval came to town. Por casualidad, it seems I´ve arrived during a season of feriados - pretty much all month there´s some kind of holiday or something.

OK I´ve got to go to COPPROME soon, but les dejo con esto-

How to speak Honduran
maciso - lindo
de pinta - very niiice
de miedo - the bomb diggity
sipotes - chavales, cabros chicos, muchachos
nombe - no way, man
¿va? - used like the Canadians say eh, eh?
cheque - kind of a space filler
common nicknames - chinito, peludo
vaya pues (baya pueh) - said at the end of conversations or kind of like ¨demás¨ in Chile

Hasta la victoria siempre,
Charly