My account on the difference between the United States and Honduras, my home country
I moved to the United States on January 10, 2011 to Weston, Florida, a small city very much unlike Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where I was born and where I lived for 16 years. Weston was occupied by long, very un-difficult roads, perfectly clean sidewalks, and palm trees that towered over the whole city, all the same height and very carefully spaced apart. Tegucigalpa is a city where you saw locally distributed and produced chip bags on the roads and sidewalks, and most often on the attempted city greens. Nonetheless, even with its obvious poverty, greatly polluted roads and sidewalks, and a safety issue that wasn’t saveable, Tegucigalpa was my home. However, things happen in life and we were compelled to move to the U.S.
I was from a background of avid students who worked hard in school. I was in an all-girl Catholic private school and I very much liked the education I was getting. My teachers were passionate, my assignments intriguing, and my extracurricular activities rewarding, and you could very well say I had high expectations for my high school when I moved to Weston. I expected to have everything I had in school in Honduras, but to my great surprise, I didn’t get all of that together.
I will never forget my first English class in the U.S., where a classmate took out a bag of chips while the class was in session. I was completely appalled. I was not allowed under ANY circumstances to eat or drink anything while in class in my other school. Chewing gum? Forget it. You knew you were going home with a note saying you weren’t focused in school. I’m not sure how my classmate didn’t seem disturbed by me looking at her for so long, for I’m sure my look was as puzzled and surprised as a deer in headlights.
I also started taking the bus to school when I moved to the U.S., and it was quite a unique experience the first few days. On the first bus ride back home from school, there was three kids to one seat where only two fit, and a group of kids in the back were yelling out (let’s just call it) the name of male genitalia repeatedly. Coming from a society where being proper, respectful, and most importantly, having the best of manners was a high requirement of any growing teenager, moving to a community where you got to choose your classes and you in fact DID NOT have to take Calculus if you didn’t want to instead of getting a set of books and a schedule for the year, where you could wear denim shorts that looked like underwear, where you could eat chips in class, and where you could get away from a class with an A without putting too much effort was seriously overwhelming to me. In Honduras I was extremely devoted to my classes and had at least five or six hours of homework every night. Anything lower than a 90% on any assignment or test was frowned upon by teachers and school colleagues, and we all aimed especially high. In the United States, a 70% was passing, you could retake a class you had failed, or even drop it so your bad grades didn’t reflect on your GPA.
In Honduras I played volleyball and danced; two of my passions and favorite things to do in the world. For dance I had done various performances in competitions and even choreographed some for friends' birthday parties, and in volleyball, my school team was finalist in the national competition and many of us had been selected to be a part of the juvenile national team; a dream come true. But when I moved to the U.S. I didn't make the cut due to lack of practice and having to go through tryouts, something I had never dealt with in Honduras. Thankfully, I was able to fulfill dance by joining the school's Color Guard team. But even then, I wondered how on earth I didn't make the volleyball team cut, if I was selected for the national team.
I had come from a polar opposite world, and I just didn’t understand. Why would we place such low requirements on our kids so that they didn’t try at all and get a reward for it with a passing grade? The consequence of that is that our kids don’t learn anything, why would we want that? Why do our kids have such low expectations of themselves? Why do kids who are growing up and still have no idea what they want get to choose their classes if they need to be exposed to all subjects of all levels of difficulty in order for them to truly know in what area they belong? These and many more questions I raised and didn’t seem to find anyone to answer them for me.
I don’t mean to be negative about education in the United States, because I’m being rather hypocritical, having spoken about public education in Honduras in my Honduras Charity Trip post in my Volunteering section, but I was so surprised that, while living in Honduras, kids looked up to the United States like it was something so hard to reach and whom we have so much reverence to because of their excellence in everything, yet, I found myself not being able to find many kids in my U.S. school who could have an intelligent political conversation with me. I couldn’t believe this was the United States that I had often wondered about. This is the excellent education I read about?
I’m certain homesickness had much to do with it, and also the lack of familiarity, but I soon realized that if there is anything that the U.S. truly does stand up to is the fact that it is the land of opportunity. I was in a public school in the United States and there was no possible comparison to my private school in Honduras. I was in the top of the pyramid in Honduras, and the middle of the pyramid in the United States, but the difference between U.S. public education and Honduras public education is that I could move up with U.S. public education. I can help public education in Honduras thanks to my public education in the U.S. I am going to a public ivy league school in the fall thanks to my public education in the U.S. I have many things to thank my public education in the U.S. There are two, however, that I’m most thankful for. The first is the idea that I can truly make a difference if I work hard enough; something that in Honduras is almost unreal, and the second is the fact that it made me selfless. At the beginning of my post I spoke about MY education, MY teachers, MY assignments, and MY achievements, and that I must be rewarded and recognized for them. That's how I would've kept thinking had I kept growing up in Honduras, where I had everything I wanted and needed to succeed. But being in competition with my classmates in the U.S. however, made me realize that we're all at the starting line of the life race; competing for college admissions, for grades, for recognition, for connections, for authenticity, for everything. Some will win at some things, and others will lose, but the difference between the same race in Honduras and in the U.S. is that you can still run if you've lost the race in the U.S. If you didn't get a college education in the U.S., you can still do it when you're 90; if you didn't get a house when you could in the U.S., you can work hard enough and get one; if you want to completely leave everything behind and start from scratch, you can do that in the U.S.
Being at the top doesn't say anything about you., but starting from the bottom and finishing at the top does.
I will always be grateful to my education in Honduras for instilling in me passion for learning and becoming a Renaissance woman, but I am forever grateful to my U.S. education for instilling in me the courage to not beat myself up for losing at one race and learn to train for it again.
