Monday, February 23, 2009

A Shadow from the past.

Carlos Malcon Matute Castillo.
Writing Workshop.

A Good Memory From My Past.


One of the most exciting moments that has made me feel really nervous, has been my National Enthone. This is an enthone from Honduras that has a choir and seven stanzas with eight verses into each. It happens that in my country everyone of us before leaving elementary school, high schools or universities has to learn the national enthone by using singing, directing and memorizing explanations. It is hard for everybody to go through, this type of testing, even though on the last part of the university graduation. This enthone tells about the Honduran history from before the discovery performed by Christopher Columbus and many other Spanish people. It also tell us about how were the indians, how the central americans tried the union of five nations, the arrival of the Spanish people, the conquers, the French Revolution, the fights between Indians and the spanish, the time of slavary and how we got the indepence from Spain. Besides, how Los Criollos (Spanish people borned in Honduras)got rid of the spanish rules. Eventhough we use to take long hours of seminars of training on this learning is still hard to face the teachers who use to come up asking tricky questions about history that is into the enthone. The worse part comes when individually or in couples, they, the teachers, inquire us to sing and direct. I remember that day when I graduated from high school. I was beyond nervous, I felt I needed a horse tranquilizer to get rid of that feeling. Nevertheless, one of my classmates was assigned to be my partner for the singing and directing part on the enthone. We practiced a half an hour and before facing the three teachers who were going to evaluate us. And... by the time we got the call, my friend wanted to go to the bathroom. I said, you are not going now, we have to make it happen. So, we entered the cold room and started singing the assigned stanza. We sang, but while I was singing. I felt I was holding my breathing and finally when we finished our part of evaluation and we got a great score, we left the place with my friend, and she told me she forgot what she wanted. I said, i needed a glass of water because my throat was so dried. My hands were sweating and watered because of this nervous experience. At the end of the year, one of the most excited to undergo with graduate students, teachers make a big issue out of this. Students, all of the graduated do have to undergo this test that allows them to perform finals. This also means that if they do not aprove the National Enthone exam, they are not allow to perform other testing to graduate. That is why the experience is excited. But is not that tough at all, if someone fails, there one possibility to take a recovery exam. It happened to one of my friend, she failed from the first time but she made up on the latter. Yeah..... thanks God is over for me, i do not longer have to go through that. It is over for me. I hope the government will take this evaluation away from schools and universities.

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