Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos Honduras

A Student Internship in South America

By Lydia Marie Beyerlein

After a lengthy application process, Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos, or NPH, Honduras accepted me as their physical education teacher, which involved a 13-month commitment. The job at NPH Honduras became my internship to finish my degree in exercise science and health. I graduated from the University of Idaho this spring.

Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos (NPH) is a Catholic Church affiliated orphanage. NPH has homes throughout Central America and a few in South America. The orphanage gives children who come from extreme poverty, abuse, neglect and abandonment, a home, food, education, and love.

The schools educate the children in math, reading and writing, science, computers, religion, English, art, music and physical education. The goal of the school is to educate the children so they are able to move up into Tallers (7th-9th grade), where they continue their education and also learn a trade for part of the day. The children then have the opportunity to go to high school and even university.

My job required teaching 11 different 80-minute classes weekly. The students ranged in age from 2-15 years. The school provided adequate, though limited by U.S. standards, equipment and an outside auditorium to teach classes. There was no structure or curriculum to follow, which allowed me the opportunity to be very creative. I developed a physical education curriculum for the school, which will provide future volunteers with lesson plan ideas and helpful suggestions. Due to my limited Spanish, despite a cram two-week course in Copan and two years of Spanish in high school, communication was difficult initially and it took some time for the students to respect me.

The program I developed includes cooperation, nonlocomotion, body space awareness, dodging and fleeing, fitness/relays and hand/foot/eye coordination. My classes were primarily organized around “games” that got all the students involved. These children come from incredibly deprived backgrounds, and for some of them P.E. is the place where they learn concepts of fair play and sportsmanship for the first time. Some games that seemed like they should work out well were a complete bust; others that I dreamed up on the spur of the moment in a panic turned into favorites.

Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos has been an incredible experience and rewarding in so many ways. I have learned how to work with difficult children. I have learned how to deal with culture differences and have had to deal with the struggles of language barriers.

I’ve worked hard for all of the relationships I developed at Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos, making them so much more gratifying. Probably most importantly, I have far more patience now than I ever have before. I put in many hours with the children and I hope I’ve given them an experience that they will remember with fondness. I know they have given me so much more.