The Snowball effect

We have a Montessori fetish. It seems a strange fetish but it certainly does exist.

One of the goals of this trip was to explore the idea of how to turn a trip like this into an opportunity to network Montessori schools around the world.
If you don't already know Megan is teacher of children aged three to six using a style called Montessori. If you don't know what that is, this might help. Unfortunately our lifestyle is not conducive to teaching on a nine month schedule so she has had to give up traditional classroom teaching. Therefore, Megan has been trying to figure out a way to still work in this realm and allow us to travel for six months a year. She did a little research on the Internets and found a Montessori school in Honduras to visit. The idea being that we would meet the directress of the school and just see what happens. Like my earlier post on climbing communities and how they make the world feel smaller, Montessori communities are the same way.
[the little computer room- they need some old-new computers] Once we knew about which day we would be in Choluteca, Honduras we emailed Maria at the Choluteca Montessori school and asked if we could come by and check it out.

And check it out we did. Maria not only invited us to her school, she came by the night before to our little hotel and spent and hour chatting with us about her crazy life and the sheer will that she has had to exercise to create this little school. She explained how it almost all fell apart 2 years ago but then a small inheritance from her family was just enough to pay the bills and keep it afloat. 

She talked about the tiny apartment that her and her husband used to keep for visiting volunteers but now they have two kids and needed to take it over. She told us that she can't afford the 100 dollars per month scholarship for kids that can't pay but that she doesn't want turn down a kid. Boy, I feel like Sally Struthers here.
Anyway this woman is fantastic, and when we showed up the next day on our motorcycles in the 100 degree heat (and the power had just gone out for what ended up being a two day power outage) our motorcycles instantly turned into a 1 hour lesson on planning and preparing. Then we gave a little slideshow on our trip and the kids took turns sitting on the bikes.

So about the snowball effect. Maria connected us with a woman in Costa Rica named Marcela who is a Montessorian. So when we came to Costa Rica we contacted her and spent a good three hours sitting under a full moon chatting in Spanish (I think she spoke English just fine but being a teacher she spoke only Spanish with us). Marcela has decided to turn her super powers into training people on how to be Montessori directresses. She regularly goes to Colombia in addition to travelling around Costa Rica training locals on the Montessori philosophy and method. Turns out, Costa Rica has a long tradition of Montessori going back to 1936. After a long and inspiring conversation, she connected us with some schools in Colombia. And the snowball effect continues.

If I may, I'd like to return briefly to Megan's idea on how to stay connected. There are lots of Montessori schools all over the world in need of materials and cash. There are lots of Montessori schools in the US with kids who are motivated to raise money and experience another culture through a sister school. What if we could facilitate that? What if we could travel around finding these school, riding the snowball, if you will, and through the magic of skype or somethig else create connections. Montessori was founded on the idea that mixing children from different cultures and socio-economic backgrounds and teaching them to be independent learner will eventually create world peace. We all want world peace don't we?

[a lesson on motorcycles]

[This is how you ride it- always with a helmet]

[All they really wanted to do was to meet our stuffed animal- Brownie]

[Just way too cute]

[Hooray for helmets]