Dialogue Begins Between Honduran and U.S. Students

Global Playground's Project Honduras, a technology center for the Villa Soleada and Las Brisas communities in El Progreso, Honduras, will open in April 2010. In the meantime, two groups of students in the U.S. have already begun a cross-cultural dialogue with their Honduran counterparts in those communities.

Global Playground board member Becca Sacra, a fourth grade teacher at P.S. 261 in Brooklyn, New York, had her students create booklets about themselves to share with the students in Honduras. When her fellow board members traveled to Honduras in late December, they delivered the booklets and on their return brought back booklets that the Honduran students had made, about their own lives, for the students of P.S. 261.

Lea Kennedy, a Spanish teacher at Stonington High School in Connecticut and advisor of the Global Playground Club there, encouraged her students to make holiday cards for the Honduran students, who in return made New Year's cards. Going beyond just making cards for their counterparts, Stonington students have also pledged to raise $5000 toward the new technology center.

Through the technology center, a critical component of partner organization Students Helping Honduras's larger learning center in Villa Soleada, Global Playground aims to utilize technology to foster cross-cultural exchanges in "real time" between students in Honduras and those in the U.S. as well as those connected to other Global Playground project sites in Cambodia, Thailand, and Uganda.