October 31, 2002

As the soggy first arrivals stepped through the ribbons and balloons covering the school's doors, BwB staff was already thinking of ways to shorten the inauguration ceremony.

The rain had started around eleven o'clock, just early enough to insure that the ground around the school was soupy and sticky for the arrival of the first pair of dress shoes in the early afternoon. Some of the little girls rode in on horseback, their pink and blue dresses covered by plastic tarps. Most families just pushed through the puddles on foot. All were wet.

Nobody would be in the mood to celebrate, or so we thought. Man, were we wrong.

One of the teenagers set pace by casting his baseball hat into the mud and grabbing one of his peers for a quick dance across the school's sidewalk. A few minutes later we cranked up the mayor's generator and flooded the fields with hot light and sound. By the time we broke in with the speeches, the school was packed and the audience ready to burst. Even the unpopular mayor, who spent most of his speech detailing the town hall's road repair strategies, received hefty applause.

The continued enthusiasm following the formal part of the ceremony carried many of the adults to a dance floor that had been set up in one of the empty classrooms. A cement floor and sandals didn't stop them, and they broke it down for more than an hour and a half until the generator abruptly and sadly ran out of gas.

A few of the students who will be using the new school.

Amazingly, amid all the fun, the community never lost sight of the celebration's primary focus: the children. At one point, with no hesitation, the parents slopped out onto the school grounds and started hoisting one of the two piñatas up a pole. The papier-mâché legs on the clown seemed about to fall off, and the rain was so hard and the light so dim that the kids barely needed blindfolds, but their parents stubbornly refused to disappoint them by canceling the games. When the first one cracked open, they strung up the second, and the kids danced and screamed in delight through the entire thing.

A similarly selfless commitment to the happiness and well being of their children carried the people of Porto Banco throughout the construction. They threw themselves into each task like runners preparing for a double marathon, and each complication and hurdle on the work site seemed only to toughen their conviction. Ultimately, their strength has been our model during this project. And if their kids approach education with even half the amount of their parent's enthusiasm, the new school will surely be a success.

Felicidades Porto Banco!

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