Brings a smile to my face :)

One of the girl’s from my tercero class, Nancy, is a member of our student leadership group here at NPH, Liderazgo. A few weeks ago she came to me and told me that she was applying for an NPH scholarship to study for a year at a high school in Washington State. The scholarship is going to be given to ONE student out of all the NPH homes who exhibits leadership as well as the desire to work for NPH in the future.

When she told me this I was of course excited to help. A few of the responses need to be written in English so she wanted to make sure she was on the right track with her translations and grammar. We worked on her essays once a few weeks ago and it was pretty rough. The biggest problem I’m finding is that the kids at our home don’t even know how to write ESSAYS properly, let alone translate them into another language… So first we started with how to properly construct an essay. Introduction, body paragraphs, conclusion – main ideas in each with details to follow, make sure you explain yourself thoroughly but not over the top, let your ideas flow from one idea to the next. That was a loooonnnngggg afternoon.

Tuesday night, after finally writing, rewriting, and completely fixing her essays in Spanish, we set out to translate them into English. She was able to translate 2 out of 3 almost completely on her own, with just a few minor grammatical flaws. Overall I definitely acted like the proud “parent” :). When the tias said it was time to turn the lights off we set a date to meet again this weekend. I went to make my way out of the section and ended up in another section, that of Maria Magdalena, where most of the girls from my primero class live. There, I encountered a WHOLLLEEEE slew of other girls who were dying to ask me questions about our upcoming test. Oh boy, so much for an early night.

I made my way around the room answering the girls’ questions, although it seemed like they already had a grasp on it all. And then I came to Dania. Like I wrote in my last post – for the most part, my older 2 classes are good. But sometimes there are those kids that just have the tendency to get on your last nerve. She happens to be one of them.

Regardless, I found myself in Maria Magdalena on Tuesday night, climbing up onto her bunk bed to help her decipher the difference between the articles “a” and “an,” talking about pronouns, and teaching how to properly construct sentences using “to be.” After a few minutes I was starting to get frustrated until all of a sudden her eyes got wide. It totally clicked. She began doing example after example after example, flying through every one of them with a huge grin on her face.

The next day in class, everyone was hunched over their papers scribbling furious. Except Dania. I walked around the class, paused next to her and whispered in her ear “Puedes hacerlo” (you can do it). She looked up at me, smiled, and immediately began writing. That night I graded all the papers – Dania got a 77.25 out of 80 – the second highest grade in the class. I went straight to her section after grading them all, ran up to her and gave her a HUGE hug and said, “Estoy TAN orgullosa de ti” (I am SO proud of you).

It’s definitely been a rough few weeks here for me – feeling a little homesick, thinking about my last few months here and what impact I’m really having. But it’s days like these, the days where you really SEE the difference you make, that make everything vale la pena (worth it) :).