Posted on by bethanypasma · 2 Comments

School Update

The week before our vacation, we suddenly heard about the potential for students to return to school. Our students have not been present in school in person since March of 2020. That’s 2020, y’all, not this most recent March. They have now spent 16 months out of school, mostly learning through videos at home. I haven’t even met the vast majority of my students. (I have met two students at church. Two. And I’m pretty sure that one of my students sat across the aisle from me in the bus one time when I was going into town to buy groceries because I got stared at more than the usual level of “You’re a white person in Guatemala, what are you doing on the bus?” It seems strange to me that students may feel like they know me since they see me in videos every week, but I literally don’t know what they look like.) So it was with great excitement that we learned that the government was maybe, possibly going to allow students to return to school. There were just a whole bunch of hoops we had to jump through. 

The first thing was a questionnaire sent home to parents so that they could indicate whether they would want their children to attend in person or whether they would want to continue their learning at home. Parents needed to send that questionnaire back the first week after vacation. (Parents come and pick up/drop off a packet of homework weekly, so that was to be included in the packet that week.)

Parents were pretty divided on the issue, with some parents wanting kids to be back in school but others wanting them to be in the safety of their homes. However, the point has become moot with recent Covid 19 case counts rising rapidly in the country. Our department (region) is very solidly in the red, and restrictions have increased again. Rumours of full hospitals abound, and we will not likely be seeing students in person any time soon. 

While this is a wise safety measure in a country with a struggling health system at the best of times, it’s also frustrating and devastating to not have had students in school for the last sixteen months. Many of you, my dear readers, are parents or teachers. You have seen the effects of at-home learning in your own lives. Many of you have felt the effects of working from home. I’m sure that you can imagine the devastation of those effects compounded over such a long time. 

Those effects are even more devastating with even more compounding factors – students living in homes where parents are dealing with unemployment or underemployment and a very minimal social safety net, parents struggling with alcoholism, parents who both have to go to work meaning older siblings are responsible for younger siblings while trying to make sure everyone gets their school work done, too. 

It’s frustrating to be able to see from the outside how broken the system is and yet to feel so powerless to do anything to change the system.

We do have some students in person – 23, to be exact. The children of staff members come with their parents to school on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. They have in-person classes, and in between teaching those students, we complete all our other duties – filming videos, editing videos, grading papers that came in on the latest Friday, and preparing lessons and homework packets for the upcoming week. 

I love, love, love having students in person. I teach a total of three students in person (bringing the total number of students I actually know to five!), and it brings me a lot of joy to actually build relationships with them, to see them growing in their English skills, to get to know them in a way I just cannot get to know students who are learning from Facebook videos. But what I love most is the way I see the blessing they receive from being here at school, the impact that being in person has on them. I see the impact of them being in class, being able to ask questions and participate, being able to get to know their teachers. More importantly, I see the impact of them being in devotions together at the start of every school day, spending time in worship and prayer, being ministered to and prayed for by staff members. And yet, seeing them impacted in this way, my heart breaks for all of the students who CANNOT be with us, who are missing out on these experiences. 

But every time that I am tempted to despair, God reminds me that God is not limited by students’ presence (or absence). God can work in students’ and families’ lives in the interactions that we do have with students, in whatever medium that happens. 

If you’re not following Global Shore on social media, you should be! But if you aren’t, then you missed a story that reminded me of exactly this fact (posted on July 26 if you’d like to find it to read for yourself). Let me paraphrase for you here. Leo, the school librarian and substitute teacher, told about a new student who was having a hard time. The student wasn’t a Christian and didn’t want to be in a Christian school. But his parents insisted on him attending. As he heard teachers begin class with prayer and explain Bible passages, his heart began to change. When he was invited to attend the every-other-week pre-teen services, he accepted the invitation. His parents are seeing a change in his attitude and life just from these experiences.

This story was a reminder to me that we often don’t know how God is moving, but we can trust that God is. We will move forward in faith and in faithfulness, doing what God is calling us to do in this season. And if you’d like, you can join me in praying for students’ hearts to be receptive to what God is doing, and pray for students to be able to return to school in person. 

Posted on by bethanypasma

Meet My Roommate: Tegan!

Dear readers, please meet my friend, colleague, and roommate, Tegan.

Tegan and I went to lunch one Saturday at a nursery/restaurant. After enjoying our meal, we wandered around enjoying the plants – including these absolutely gigantic cacti.

Tegan is one of my fellow TEFL (English) teachers here in Guatemala. Today you’ll get to know her a little bit, find out a bit of her story, and get another glimpse into life here through her perspective. 

Before coming to Guatemala, Tegan was working as a middle school math teacher in Dayton, Ohio. Teaching middle school can be difficult at the best of times, but when you’re doing it in the inner city as a beginner teacher, it can be downright draining. Tegan loved her students, but the teaching wasn’t what she had imagined it to be. She had also reached the extent of what the public school administration would let her do as a Christian teaching in their midst. Tegan has a heart very much focused on bringing people into the Kingdom of God, and her work at the middle school wasn’t giving her the opportunity to do this. Eventually, Tegan made up her mind to leave her school at the Christmas break of 2020 and look for what God might have in store for her next. 

During the week of American Thanksgiving, Dayton made the unique decision to close their public schools due to the most recent wave of Covid spreading through Ohio. They didn’t move to online classes; they just took a month of vacation. This was essentially summer break, taken early. (I know. It’s a mind-boggling decision.) Since Tegan had already been planning to leave the school, this felt like fortuitous timing. She did something she otherwise wouldn’t normally have done: she scrolled through her numerous unread emails. And there, waiting for her in God’s timing, was an email from Beth at Global Shore. (Not me – our boss, Beth, the TEFL director here!)

Tegan had sent an inquiry email via a missions website some time earlier and had more or less forgotten about Global Shore. But God was working out the details behind the scenes. 

Within days, Tegan had interviewed with Beth, been hired, and began the process of planning to move to another country. 

Having a very English name in a non-English country means sometimes you look at your Starbucks cup and just laugh. Tegan = Steven?

So now, Tegan works here at GSO with me! We live in the ministry house in the school compound. We go for a 5k run through the hills together each Saturday morning. And while I teach middle school English classes here, Tegan has discovered a love for the primary grades. She’s responsible for the JK through grade 3 classes. 

I wish pictures did a better job of depicting how steep hills are… the second half of this run is no joke!

Tegan refers to her new work as being a “part time Dora the Explorer”. We joke that with our newfound video-editing skills, we will be able to have part-time side hustles as YouTubers. Like me, Tegan has the students of staff members in person three days a week, and around those classes and on the days without students, she’s busily writing lesson plans for both in-person and at home students, recording videos with her cohost Mr. Monkey, editing videos (complete with a lot of clip art for those primary students), grading student work, and all of the host of other things that make up a teacher’s life. Tegan is a wonderful primary teacher, playing games with her students, engaging them in different learning experiences, figuring out how they best learn, and discovering all of the things that work differently in primary classes. I am so glad for Tegan – and I also wish her all the best. I will stick happily with my middle school classes, thank you very much! 

Tegan’s Spanish is much more advanced than mine, which has given her the desire and opportunity to jump wholeheartedly into a connection group (or small group) from the church. She loves to worship, loves to serve, and loves to see Christ glorified. 

I’m so glad we’re here together, colleagues, roommates, and now friends. 

On our way to church

Tegan is also finishing up her fundraising for this year. If you have even $10 or $20 extra that you can donate to her costs here, I know she would appreciate it! (And no, she didn’t ask me to say that!) 

Posted on by bethanypasma · 9 Comments

Catching Up: Vacations and Vaccinations

Sorry, friends! It’s been a little while! When I went to my blog to post this, I was actually a little shocked at just how long! I was taking an AQ course online from mid-April through mid-June, and as the workload ramped up toward the end of the course, all of my free time outside of school was dedicated to homework and projects, and not to blog writing. Then we had our mid-year break from school here, and I took the opportunity to rest and relax, but now I have a lot to catch you up on!

Let’s start with that reference to a mid-year break. Remember that our school year in Guatemala runs from January through October. We had a week off for semana santa (holy week) – sort of like March break in its timing and length. We have two weeks off mid-year – sort of like Christmas break in its length and in its relative timing, but obviously corresponding with the start of summer break in North America. And then kids will have two months off in November and December. 

Normally, mid-year break would be a time to go back to Canada. I can imagine that in a normal year, I would have excitedly been setting up times to meet and hang out with as many people as I could, as well as carefully considering what supplies I needed here to get me through the rest of the year – things that are pretty hard to find in Guatemala. 

My roommates and me in the airport waiting for our flights. Since they are both American, a negative Covid test was the only protocol they needed to get back home for vacation.

But 2020 and 2021 have not been normal, have they? Canada’s entry rules have changed recently, but let me remind you that until they did, any Canadian coming home to Canada needed to stay in a hotel quarantine for 3 days at an expense of upwards of $1500. And then, as long as a Covid test came back negative, the rest of the 14 day quarantine could be carried out at home. 

Well, a two week vacation with a 14 day quarantine wouldn’t actually allow me enough time to be quarantined at home before needing to leave the house to get a Covid test to be able to return to Guatemala. And for obvious reasons, I could not afford the $1500 hotel stay. 

As a side note, I have to say that I’m so grateful to live in a country that has taken the pandemic seriously. I think these rules are important (even if I disagree with needing to quarantine in a hotel). I just wish they didn’t apply to ME in this PARTICULAR SITUATION. 

Meanwhile, I had to leave Guatemala. I’m here on a tourist visa. I get paid in Canada, which makes everything CRA- and OHIP-related much easier, and also avoids the need for lots of paperwork to work in Guatemala. And that 90 day tourist visa is why we had to go to the city in March to renew our visas. But after 180 days, you really do need to get out of the country for 72 hours or start paying a fine that accrues daily. 

So I needed to leave the country, but I wouldn’t be able to go to Canada. (Thankfully, if you remember, the regulations were put in place at the end of January, so I’d had a lot of time to anticipate not being able to go home. It would have been a lot harder if it had been a surprise.) If Canadian teachers here at GSO decide not to go to Canada during their mid-year break, they will usually opt for a short flight over to Costa Rica for three days (can’t be Honduras, El Salvador, or Nicaragua due to country agreements) and then a return flight, just long enough to be out of the country for the mandated 72 hours. That’s what I was counting on for a long time. But then my director Beth and I started talking about details, and we hatched a new plan. 

There are direct flights to the US from Guatemala City, and some of the cities where you can fly to are in states that don’t have residency requirements in order to get a vaccine. So… what if I went somewhere in the US for these 72 hours, got vaccinated, and then returned, and could make my eventual return to Canada a lot easier (in addition to obviously being better protected against Covid here in the meantime anyway?!)

If you do some googling about getting a Covid vaccine in the US, it won’t be long before you come across vaccine tourism websites. I clearly was not the only person with this idea. A flight to Miami was out, because Florida required residency in order to receive a vaccine. One of my roommates invited me to come to her place, but her state also had residency requirements. But Houston or Dallas? Texas doesn’t require proof of residency to receive a vaccine! (Probably a wise public health choice if you’re hoping to get a population of undocumented immigrants vaccinated.) I booked a flight and hotel and started researching vaccine appointments. 

Going to the US actually made my break significantly easier in some ways. I had to navigate some extra steps – Covid protocols, procuring a Covid test to re-enter Guatemala, and of course, getting vaccinated, and it was so convenient to be able to do that in English. It was also really nice to go to Target and get some of those things that are hard to find here. And let’s be real, it was also pretty great to go to Starbucks every day!

Actually getting vaccinated was pretty easy. I booked an appointment at a pharmacy (booking ahead of time gave me the peace of mind that I would really be able to accomplish a key objective of my trip). I requested the Johnson and Johnson vaccine – maybe not my first choice if I’d been able to choose anything else, but getting a one-dose vaccine was my only way to end up fully vaccinated. I showed up at the pharmacy, they took my Canadian passport as my official ID without any comment, vaccinated me, and sent me on my way, no questions asked. 

Hooray! I wondered so much about the details of getting vaccinated in a foreign country that just being done with it all was such a relief!

I’ve thought and wondered a lot about the ethical side of getting vaccinated in a country where I’m not a resident, don’t pay taxes, and don’t contribute to the vaccination rate since I got vaccinated and promptly left. I’ve thought a lot about talking about it too. I considered my privilege in being able to get vaccinated before anyone I know here – the privilege of being able to fly into the US (you need a visa if you’re Guatemalan), the privilege of being able to afford the trip even on my stipend. In the end, any doubts I had were far outweighed by the reassurance that I am so much less likely to get Covid, meaning I can be a firebreak in the transmission of Covid. In a country with so few vaccinations so far, I can be one more vaccinated person. It helps a whole lot that with Canada’s most recent regulation changes, I can also be hopeful about not paying for a hotel quarantine when I return. 

Okay. I feel like this is a long enough blog for today. Catching up is going to be a several week long endeavour after two months (😬😬) away. I’ve got a couple of future blog topics planned, including regaling you with stories and pictures of Dallas.

Enjoy your weekend, and if you are an Ontario friend, I look forward to catching up with you in person in November when I really will be able to come back home!