Day 1 - Leadership Development Conference, Flores, Guatemala

"Hola to all our friends and family! We have just completed the first day of our conference here in the Peten region of Guatemala . We are excited and thanking God for the excellent turnout of the teachers here in this region, some who traveled as many as four hours early this morning to be here for this leadership conference. Also, the teacher’s union here in Guatemala began a national teachers’ strike over the weekend, and possibly caused some of the teachers invited to the conference from being able to get here. But still, our conference room had well over 100 teachers in attendance and they were attentive and participating enthusiastically throughout the long day.

We began our day early, with teachers beginning to register for the conference at 7:30 a.m. After the presentation of the Guatemalan flag, the Peten Region of Education flag, and the singing of the Guatemalan national anthem, the Regional Director of Education officially opened the conference. He welcomed all of our ISP team to Peten, and thanked us for coming to share and “to enrich the teachers of the Peten region.” He encouraged the teachers in attendance to take the information from this conference and translate it to the children in their classrooms who will benefit from it the most. He said “We are going to take advantage of this training to help with our teaching of morals and ethics and also to help us spiritually. Our youth need these things! Sincerely, I thank all of the ISP team for this opportunity. May this week be a great blessing to you teachers and a benefit to the students in your classrooms.”

Our schedule today began with wonderful and encouraging sessions: Country Director Anibal Duarte began with a session on “Why We Teach Values” followed by Dr. Alan Scholes presenting the topic “The Best Basis for Teaching Morality.“ The final session for the morning was Paul Neumann’s, beginning his series on “Practical Learning and Communication Skills”.

After a wonderful lunch in which all of the small groups sat together to enjoy the meal and get better acquainted, Bob Wilson and Marilyn McCann began the Inductive Bible study, using the book of Titus. The teachers each received a study Bible if they wanted one, and then in their small groups they read through the entire book of Titus and began the observation phase of this study method as it applied to the first chapter. It was very exciting to see them all so enthused and participating in this study. Following a short break, one of the national Guatemalan staff, Haroldo Arreaga, had the teachers’ total attention as he gave a presentation on Leadership Principles. Haroldo and his wife Martita have been working for many years with teachers here in Guatemala , and Haroldo is truly a gifted teacher; he had the teachers laughing and thoroughly enjoying this session in spite of the rising heat of the afternoon filling the room!

The final presentation of the day was given by the teachers themselves. This was their opportunity to begin sharing with other colleagues just what had happened since they attended the initial ISP conference in Peten in 2008. Many of the teachers from that conference have become champions of the ISP Moral & Ethics curricula and have seen exciting and amazing results from modeling and teaching the principles from the curricula to their students. Here is just a portion of one of these reports we heard today given by a teacher from Flores :

“Two years ago I came to the ISP conference. here in Flores; it was interesting for me because that year I had 40 students from different grades; I was concerned because the values were decaying in the city, but I had the chance to study at the conference the development of the character and I started to work with the students that needed help. I studied about how to apply this curriculum into the reality of our community; I made some experiments. I had some groups of students, and each group was 6 or 7 youth, ages 12-13. I assigned each group a value; each group had the commission to work that value during the school year and they started to do different activities around their value. They had drama activities, art, and others. Every group had as their main purpose to teach the other groups the value they were representing and how to apply it with their own example. There was one student who before this experiment was a bad student and I saw a great change in him. At the end of that year I saw that in these groups of students there were characteristics that I didn’t see in other groups of students at the school. My students had unity; they had a bonding and were helping each other and the bonding between them was really strong; so I started to see how they had adopted these values for themselves.”

And that is exactly what our ISP teams hope for and pray for as we come to Guatemala on this adventure with God; that the ideas, discussions, materials and tools we put into the teacher’s hands and minds will not only be useful and beneficial to them as teachers, but that they also realize the potential these biblical principles have for changing lives. Most every teacher here at the conference this week has a similar story to tell, and I hope to be able to share more of those with you in the coming days.

A great big thank you to all of our supporters, for your continued prayers on our behalf. We are looking forward to another busy and full day tomorrow, and I look forward to sharing some of these exciting moments with you in another update.

Until then, Vaya con Dios,

Linda

For all the team here in Flores"