Happy Children

Letter dated October 26, 1954

Any of our earlier worries about whether it was fair to the children to bring them down to British Honduras certainly seem ridiculous now. They adore Belize, have dozens of friends, and have more activities than they can crowd into each day.

School is Alex’s main interest in life, of course. He bounds off happily at least half an hour ahead of time, morning and noon, because he has to meet his friends and play before class begins. He enjoys doing his homework (i.e., writing…for example, “A is for apple,” written six times) and I can’t keep him out of his reader. He not only wants to read ahead of the class, but has “story hours” with Carli when he reads to her from the books he already has finished.

 

Alex has some friends who visit here and whose homes he visits. They are the Maestre boys, ages 4, 6, 8, and 8…two of them Mike’s sons and two of them Gene’s.

The first time they came over was something of a shock to me. Frankly, I was trying to pull a fast one. Alex was at home for a week’s holiday and the days had become pretty dull for him. I was feeling pretty shaky after being in bed a couple of days with flu, and I told him he could go over to the Maestre’s to spend the morning. I thought I had life solved beautifully…till half an hour later Alex returned with all four boys. You know, six children are a lot in this little house, particularly when one is sick.

To my undying amazement, they were angelic. Not once in the three hours that they were here did one of them even raise his voice to another. They shared toys, picked up everything when they were through playing, didn’t get wild for one moment, and while loud in a happy sort of way, never were boisterous.

They promised faithfully to come back the next day! And the did…plus every day till school began again. And I’ve never changed my mind about them. They are perfectly darling little boys, and among the best behaved I’ve ever seen to be such big, husky, boyish children. Carli is madly in love with Richard, the youngest, and spends all her time showing off her toys and her accomplishments to him.

I let Alex go over to their houses, which are a couple of blocks away, and he is terribly proud of his competence at walking through the streets alone. It always is fun for Alex visiting them, since there are four children in one family and five in the other and they all usually end up in the same yard.

 

I wish you could see Alex with the Girls! One of our major pleasures is watching him come home from school. While occasionally he is alone or with one of his friends his age, more usually his is in the middle of from three to ten Big Girls. The Convent, as St. Catherine’s is often called, goes through high school and he apparently has friends in all classes. They are perfectly darling to him and it is ridiculous to see that little boy happily holding two bigger girls’ hands and chattering away down the street as other girls on either side and behind the group try to get into the conversation.

As he left for school the other morning, Alex had trouble trying to latch the front gate. (We have to be very careful of it to keep the dogs in, now that the entire yard is fenced in and we no longer have them in the pen all the time.) The two little Pérez girls, daughters of a doctor here, came dashing across the street to help him. Juana María, the elder, closed the gate for him and Rosemary put her arm around Alex. Juana María threw another arm around Alex’s shoulder, and off the three of them went to school.

The little Pérez children don’t speak English too fluently, since they were born in Spain, have lived here only two or three years, and their mother still speaks only Spanish. However, Alex apparently gets along beautifully with them. He recently went to both of their birthday parties.

 

I really don’t see how the Sisters at St. Catherine’s manage. Some of the children start school (where only English is spoken) speaking only Spanish; others know only Creole, which while basically English, is (to my ears) such a slurred, sing-song version that it is a slight problem to understand. At first Alex said he couldn’t understand half of the children, but now he can get along with any of them.

I’m beginning to find out more about his school. There are approximately fifty children in the grade…I think they call it Pre-First…but they have two teachers and two assistants and are divided into three rough groups for academic work (reading, writing, and arithmetic) but have their games, music, dances, and story-telling, etc., together. And they don’t necessarily stay in just one section the whole time.

I know Alex is in the advance reading group, but back with the secondary group in writing. Actually, they get a good bit of individual attention this way, because they can be broken down to as few as ten to a class.

 

Now about the children’s new accomplishment. Bucher and I have been on a solitaire jag. The children’s great delight has been “putting out the aces.” We each play the game and give them the suits we are building as the appear. They love it.

However, Alex has gotten so that he actually can play an entire game through…from laying out the cards to (in one case) winning it first time through the deck. He is slow, of course. But when he is concentrating, he can do it without a mistake.

And Carli has devised something which she calls “Carli Solitaire.” She goes through the deck and sorts the cards into suits, turning them slowly one at a time. She usually begins with about six piles, but gradually gets into the proper four and she never makes mistakes.