“A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.”  Marcus Aurelius 

By: Hudax Hendrix
General Director
International School of El Salavador

Amor fati is a mindset from the Stoic philosophers for making the best out of anything that happens: Treating each and every moment—no matter how challenging—as something to be embraced, not avoided. 

Little did I know that back-to-back WhatsApp messages during the evening of March 10, 2020 would be the beginning of the end of normalcy.  All schools would be closing on Wednesday and the airport would be closing on Thursday morning.  Not only did I need a plan for classes but I also need to find a way to insure the safe travel of a student group and 2 faculty members back from Washington DC.  Distance learning would be easy, I thought, since schools in El Salvador prepare for school closures due to tropical weather conditions on a yearly basis.  Getting the kids/teachers home…...that was a little tricky for sure but they arrived in the early morning hours of the airport closure date and avoided the mandatory 21-day quarantine.  A collective sigh of relief provided a brief respite from what would be forthcoming…...

And so “it” began.  School closure quickly became a 90-day lockdown and distance learning became the new normal.  A short-term plan undergirded by a delusional sense of seasoned competence was soon upended by the myriad of complications of providing an education through a ZOOM chat and Google classroom.  Plans were created, implemented and modified as the rapidly evolving situation toppled all our best efforts.  A few months of virtual learning soon became a long-term expectation and an entire school year started and almost reached completion before we were allowed to implement yet another plan, the hybrid model.  

As the 2021 school year began, a very uneasy anticipation of what we had been craving for 18 months now permeated our collective consciousness.  The elusive “normalcy” was our go-to descriptor for these yearnings when actually the real goal was togetherness.  I believe that any school community only thrives when the participants are convened so shared experiences can provide this catalyzing sense of community.  But how can we “be together” when all the safety protocols dictate that separation is the key to ongoing success.  Is the risk worth the reward?  Absolutely.

The greatest lesson of the last 20 months for me was a newfound appreciation for the seemingly mundane experiences that populated our day to day lives. Like a series of mystical stones from an adventure movie, all the school’s elements can only make the magic when together.  I now know that the source of all the magic in school comes from the everyday time spent together………learning, living, experiencing, and the shared rituals that traverse all groups in the school community.   Managing the risk, we safely celebrated being back together again with our annual costume parade and even though the masks hide the smiles, these photos capture all the joy and magic that was felt on that special day.