Letters from Texas

Well the second bag from Texas arrived in Honduras on Wednesday last week. Thanks to Annette! Back in April Lauren Calabreese told me that Caleb’s 5^th grade class was going to do a missions project and they wanted my class to be their project. The bag finaly arrived….full of pencils, erasers, colored pencils, glue, crayons, stickers, books, scissors, play dough, cassette tapes, pencil sharpeners….and letters for each of my students!

I sat in my living room reading the letters from the students to my kids and cried. I was so excited to present them to the children today. I explained to my class that a package had arrived with blessings for us to use in our classroom. I told them that I would have to clean out my drawers and reorganize the room just so that I could make room for all the books that came. They cheered at this news! They love books and love to read!

Then I began to tell them that the students in this class in Texas had written a letter to each of them. They all looked at me puzzled. I began to pass them out, which caused even more confusion. They were trying to give them back to me. Many of them looked at me and said “what miss?” Which is the question I get when they have absolutely no idea what I am talking to them about.

I tried again to explain that these were letters to them individually from other children at a school in Texas. I showed them that their names were written on them, because it was for them personally, from a new friend in Texas. Some slowly began to catch on. But still some were holding them up to me and saying “what miss?”

I asked for one of the high school students to come down to my classroom to help me explain in Spanish. Anna came down and began to explain it to them in Spanish, still some didn’t understand…because many of them had never seen a written letter. It occurred to me that this is partially because we live in Honduras where there is not mail delivery to your house, but also some of it is the time we live in with the internet. I probably should have told them it was like an email and they might have understood.

Well, once they understood why I was giving them each a letter, they all got excited to read about their new friend, and sharing the information with the other students in the class. I got some great pictures of them reading their letters and reading each other’s letters. They all learned how to pronounce the names of these new friends, and were so excited! It was fun as many of them have names they have never heard before. I told them we would all write letters to our new friends on Monday. They thought that was a great idea!

During our morning break Hanssel came and asked me if he could show his paper from his friend Jeff to his older sister, Krissia. She told me that he had come and gotten her and said “you have to read my paper from my new friend Jeff! “

Lauren, this was such a blessing to my kids and to me! I loved seeing the joy on their face as they connected with other children in another world. So different from theirs, yet so much alike!

Please share with Caleb’s school and classmates that they truly blessed me and my kids! My words cannot express what seeing the joy on my kids’ faces did for me! And we may never know the extent of the joy this brought to each of the children.