There is a way we can easily tell the time here. At least we can twice a day. Every day about 1 PM and then at 6 PM we see a wave of boys (hundreds of them… thousands of them) wearing the dark pants and maroon sweater of their school uniform walk home from school. They are two different groups of students. A morning session and an evening session. There´s a lot of them, and they are hard to miss.

Audra and I asked somone about the school. It´s a public school called Santa Isabel and is located about four blocks east of us. The primary grades have both boys and girls, but the secondary school is all boys (the girls go somewhere else). “How many students do they have?”

“5,500,” she said. “They are in sections from A through Z. Some grades even have to start the alphabet again.”

“I can´t imagine that,” I said. “How many kids are in each classroom?”

“About 50. Sometimes more,” she said, not really surprised, I think.

“With one teacher?”

“With one teacher. There are two sessions of school each day.”

“With the same teachers for each session?” Audra asked.

“Yes.”

“That´s a lot of kids to try to teach…at least a 100 students.”

“Or more,” our friend said. “Because the teachers not only teach two sessions, they also teacher three or four classes during each session.”

As I look back on my time as a school teacher (a time I look back on with joy), I can´t help but think at just how blessed I was!

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