Happy Graduation!

We've just finished up the school year here in San Nicolas and our neighbor kids tell us that they're bored already. Lucky for them, the elementary and high school graduation ceremonies that happened last weekend, while maybe not alleviating their boredom, at least provided them some big events to get gussied up for.

Promocion, as they call graduation here, is a big deal. It's a big deal in the pomp and circumstance involved, and it's a big deal as an accomplishment. In the seventh grade class that I teach, the year began with around 40 students, which is a normal-sized seventh grade class for San Nicolas. By eleventh grade – the final year of high school here – the class size usually shrinks to around 12 students. So in those intervening years between seventh and eleventh grades, more than half of the class drops out of school. The causes for these drop-outs are numerous; students have to quit school to work at their family's convenience store, or they get married, or they decide that it's too far to walk every day, or they're just kicked out of school for bad behavior.

With the two principals of the school programs and a teacher

Of course, some of the students who drop out of normal, daily high school still have the chance to complete high school by attending a long day of classes only on Saturdays. For the students who live miles and miles away from San Nicolas and whose only mode of transportation is by foot, Saturday school is a good alternative – they can still complete high school, but they only have to walk the 10 or so miles to school and back again just once a week. For this reason, there are over 300 students who attend Saturday school and come from various tiny remote communities surrounding San Nicolas, and only 120 students who attend regular, daily high school. We are still a little skeptical that the quality of education they receive by attending class only once a week is the same as that of students who attend school every day, but it's a good opportunity for them nonetheless.

One of the Sandinista government's newer initiatives is to offer classes on Sundays as well, for adults who want to go back and complete high school. So last Saturday, in one gigantic four-hour long ceremony, seventy students graduated from all three of these high school programs. We went over to the parish the night before to help spruce up the church where the service would be held, and spent several hours painstakingly gluing block letters onto a large piece of cloth to create a banner.

Everyone arrived the next morning an hour late but dolled up in their fanciest clothes. More than 500 people filed into the church, crowding at the back. One of the starkest differences between Nicaraguan and American public school graduations is that here, the graduation ceremony, like all important events in Nicaragua, is preceded by a church service. After the church service, the graduation banner was unfurled in front of Jesus and Mary and the repetitive graduation theme song commenced.

We are so proud of all of our students who graduated from high school last Saturday, and we want to congratulate them and honor their accomplishments by posting a few photos of them.