Universidad

The Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras (UNAH) campus is not unpleasant, but the classrooms and facilities are quite ugly and unkempt. Just as the old yellow school buses are shipped down here when they are no longer usable in the U.S., I think the old school furniture must be shipped down here as well. The wooden chairs (the kind with the small, personal desk attached) are old and worn. The windows are missing glass. The walls are covered with graffiti. There is no high-tech equipment and no power-point presentations of lectures. We are certainly spoiled at the universities in the U.S.! But on the bright side, at least there IS a public university with a facility to go to, teachers to learn from, and chairs to sit on.

There are about 40 students in my class. I wrote before how it sometimes takes students many extra years to finish university because they have to wait until the desired class is offered, and even then, there’s usually a long waiting list. Fortunately, this particular class is small because it is not a required part of the curricula and because only a small percent of the students choose to enroll during this short, interim session from November 1st – December 23rd. (Normal enrollment is from approximately February – June and June – October.) The material itself is pretty general and familiar (lots of anatomy at the moment), so I have thus far been able to follow along even though everything is in Spanish. I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn some of the technical medical jargon in Spanish.

I also really enjoy the opportunity to meet students my age. Everyone at the clinic where I work in the mornings is much older, and of course all the children at Suzy’s house are much younger. As a result, I have been feeling either really young or really old, instead of feeling like a 22 year-old. Furthermore, I sometimes feel abnormal because I don’t already have children (also because I’m not yet married, though marriage and children don’t really seem to go together here in Flor del Campo). It’s an odd feeling to feel younger than a 14 year-old because she already has a 2 month-old baby. Her immaturity definitely comes out in other ways, but when it comes to mothering a child, she is the one with the experience; I (fortunately) have none. The university students, though they vary greatly in age and some of them do have children, are for the most part around my age and getting an education first before starting a family. Of course, these students are in the minority since less than 5% complete university…

But even in the U.S., what with all the billions of dollars in endowments, modern facilities, superb professors, etc…, the percentage of people who finish university is still a clear minority – approximately 27% in 2003 (U.S. Census Bureau). It is quite unfortunate that the system I (and most of you reading this) know is not the system that the majority of U.S. citizens know. We have much to be thankful for and proud of in the U.S., but we still have much to strive for and improve.