BY JACOB GUNNER
Senora Timmerding is a familiar face for most students attending Mariemont High School. Most people simply know her as Senora: the Spanish teacher. But many people do not know her whole story and the sacrifices she has made to help others.
Timmerding spent two and a half years stationed in Puerto Cortes in Northern Honduras as a member of the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps is an organization that serves to provide foreign countries with a positive image of the US through the services they provide.
While she was there, Timmerding helped educate students in a Honduran public school on how to improve their lives by teaching them how to provide for themselves. She helped to give them an understanding of what the US is like.
She recalls one of her favorite memories of teaching the people how to screen print designs onto shirts with materials they could build out of things that they already had. This provided them with a way to make money. “I helped to teach them ways to work with what they had,” she says.
In political turmoil and facing military presence from neighboring countries, Honduras was one of the poorest countries in the world at the time. An impoverished nation, some people struggled to find clean water, let alone food, according to Timmerding.
“I’ll never look at a glass of water the same way after that experience,” says Timmerding. “I find reverence in all the things we have here in the United States,” she adds.
The Honduran people constantly offered as much as they could. She says, “I was astonished by how generous and willing to share they were even though they didn’t have very much of their own.”
She recalls a memory of working with her students to make pinatas for the children on Dia de los Ninos (Day of the Children 4/30). “We built it so well that they weren’t able to break it open themselves,” she adds with a smile.
Timmerding decided to join the cause after becoming a US citizen when she emigrated from Cuba. “I felt like I should do something to repay the US for their generosity,” she says.
Previously living in Cuba came as an advantage to Timmerding in her service in the Peace Corps. “Living in Cuba helped with my language skills and gave me a different viewpoint than others in the Corps,” she says.
Although her job was to educate the people of Puerto Cortes, Timmerding says that she learned just as much from them. She learned traits that she still utilizes in her everyday teaching career.
“I learned how to be patient with people and try to understand and respect different points of view,” she says.
Timmerding is still involved with the Peace Corps. She attends frequent meetings to help new citizens become acclimated to the US.
Sophomore Kyle Mason says, “I’m proud to have Senora as a teacher; I think what she did was very courageous.”