Teaching Street Children In Honduras

From August 2005 until June of 2006, I lived in a place named Roatan, a small island (one of the three Bay Islands) 14 kilometres off the coast of Honduras.

I worked as a regular teacher at a Christian school during the day, but after school around 4pm was my favorite time because it was when I met up in a field to give classes to the street children. On any given day, 20 or 30 kids would show up for class even though we did not have an actual classroom and we had to cancel if it rained. We did many activities such as drawing, creative writing, reading and arithmetic, all in Spanish of course.

In April, I went and spoke with the Pastor of a small church who agreed to let me use the basement as a classroom. It even had a blackboard and desks!! Needless to say, the kids were ecstatic and so was their teacher!!!

We had class 5 times a week and soon some of the kids would bring their friends and the classes were always full. It was so touching when one of the students showed me how they used a stick to write their name in the sand!

There was one child named Brandon who at 12 years old, decided he wanted to go to school even if his mother was a drug addict who wanted him to sell things on the streets. She agreed to let him go to school if his $20 uniform (for the year) was purchased for him. I bought it for him and Brandon wore the uniform proudly on his first day in grade 2 and beamed a smile at me that made even the sun seem dim in comparison.