Kids

A couple weeks ago Elisa and I were invited to go out on a 'community service project' with some of my students. They told me that they had started a club that went out and planted trees in deforested areas up in the mountains. Deforestation has developed into a significant problem in this little country over the last few decades and it is becoming evident in some areas that once were purely dense jungle. So, Elisa and I were happy to get involved...but, of course, things are not always what they seem.


Allow me to digress a little bit and provide some context. When we got the job here at the American School in Tegucigalpa, we had no idea what we were getting into. To some degree, that can't be avoided when you're moving to a foreign country but I've decided that we were especially ignorant. For example, we knew that we were teaching at a private school in a third world country, so obviously there's going to be some socio-economic disparity there. But Americans tend to think that everybody is pretty much middle class, right? Well, it turns out that we teach the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Astors of Honduras. Our students are rich beyond your wildest dreams. Some of them are rich comparatively...in the third world, 6 figures go a long way. But most of them are just extraordinarily rich in a way that I had never experienced prior to coming here.


Let's put it this way. This is the Beverly Hills High of Honduras. These kids are the rock stars of their country. Their lives are literally chronicled in the tabloids. I'm not kidding (There is a magazine called 'Chromos' that looks just like Vogue or GQ. Last month one of the students appeared on the cover with his father and brother. The caption was: 2 Generations--One Invincible Name. On the inside was a 10 page spread on the Senior Lunch...I was there. So, I'm pretty cool.) These kids are driven to school in bullet-proof Escalades and Rovers. They go to the World Cup for summer vacation, etc. So anyway, you get the picture.


Back to the story... so two of the guys come by on Saturday morning to pick us up (in a bullet proof Lexus SUV). And off we go to redeem this 'deforested area' in Valle de Angeles about a half hour away. Well, we get there and the threatened eco-location turned out to be--one of the kid's vacation homes! Yeah! We are going to be planting trees in the 'deforested' field beside Jote's mountain villa. We were...thrilled.


We had a good time. They're actually really neat kids and have no idea how privileged (and sheltered) they really are. They aren't to blame. They were truly excited to participate in what they thought was a really good thing. So, we hung out (did waaaayyyy more work than all of them combined, as you will see in the pictures) and generally had a really good time.


So, without further ado, I present to you the current teen icons and future oligarchy of the second poorest country in our hemisphere. (Did that sound as cynical as I think it did?)