School Days

After spending a few weeks hanging around different parts of La Ceiba with the kids, two things became really apparent; one, they all really missed their families (especially their mothers) and two; they all wanted to be in school learning something. We decided as a group to rent a house since at that time they were all living on the street, mainly sleeping in a group like an ant hill on church steps down by the beach. The cement house was cheap by today's standards - in the mid 90's it only cost about $90.00 a month - which I paid the owner in traveler's checks for a lease of 6 months. I was not wealthy, just a student backpacker with not much cash on hand. However, the street kids were excited, and once we went and purchased some school uniforms from local vendors in the rundown and dirty Ceiba market, there was no containing them. The next day I started the first of many visits to different schools in Ceiba to see if I could enroll the kids without papers, or having their parents involved. 

Honduras was (and is) a very bureaucratic country and workers really like to focus on missing paperwork, so the entire process was not easy. The school administrators were really concerned about who I was, and what I was doing there. I'll admit, looking back on it, it was a little strange and arrogant of me to think that I could just show up at a school with some abandoned kids and have them immediately accepted! They asked a lot of questions. Was I a social worker? An organization? A weirdo? A hippie? They wanted to know why I was doing this, especially since these kids were often considered very troublesome - like wild animals. After much haggling I was able to convince them that the kids would not cause any problems (not true, as I found out later), and that they just wanted to learn something (mainly to read). 

Most of the schools relented on allowing them to enroll after I showed them the uniforms and schools supplies that we had purchased .... on one condition, they said - that I somehow obtain the original copy of each child's birth certificate from the family for certification. This was not an easy task as many of the kids couldn't even remember where they lived, let alone how to get in touch with their mothers. Some had family members that were just as destitute as they were and had no records at all. 

I separated the kids into groups of 2 or 3 so they wouldn't form a clique at the schools and act like mini gangs and bother the teachers or other students. In the following days a few of the kids caused minor problems, but one child, nicknamed Mando, literally learned to read in a week. After that he was unstoppable, sounding out words and trying to read local newspapers that I often bought.

Photo of the first day of school in front of the Ceiba house.

Antonio, Chino, Giovanni, Darwin, Mando, Alberto Sadai, and Flaco - 1996