martes

This has been another busy day working in several parts of El Hogar. The aches and pains of yesterday have been mainly cured thanks to our wonderful private medical staff (Louise, Carolyn and Janice) and once again we have been able to accomplish a great deal. After a filling breakfast of thin crepe-like pancakes with syrup and fresh bananas with peanut butter we got to work. 

 Tom, our Mr. Fixit, worked on several electrical problems with Ramon (a graduate in electrical technology from the Technical school) and plans are in the works to provide more lighting in the classrooms this week.  Tom has a gift for being able to fix anything and he is our Go-to guy for anything that doesn't work.
 





The main work crew continued to work on the school's Art Room. Michael and Bruce finished the walls and then were joined by Alan, Louise and Janice to start painting the floor.

  Rick started on the porch floor while Carolyn, Carrie and Terry continued painting the outside play structure.  Sometimes all that work just requires a little rest.  Ayyway, it is very hot!

After several hours of work in both the morning and the afternoon the inside painting, the playhouse and half of the porch floor was completed. Hopefully, tomorrow the floor will be varnished, the rest of the floor painted, and the outside play structure will be put back together.

 There was also a lot of work done with the children today. Lynne and Ros observed in the grade one and two classrooms in the morning and in the afternoon they withdrew students to assess them for reading readiness and reading skills.

Also in the afternoon, Carrie and Erika observed some of the new students in their classrooms to see how they are coping with their new situations.



 

Ros and Janice worked with another group of students on the painting of their individual canvases for the mosaic which they continued well into the evening. They are pleased with the progress and the fact that the students are really involved in this project.  The individual canvases will come back to Canada to b a fund raiser for an event in the fall.

 Louise and Carolyn spent another day in the clinic dispensing medicine and providing TLC for a sick little boy in grade two.   Rita is the teacher/nurse who holds clinic hours most days and so was glad to have our two nurses to help her for a few days.








 
The craft group after dinner was the girls (from grade one to grade six). They created ribbon gymnastics wands, worked with beads, coloured and some had great fun with the bubble jars. The young ones, especially, were delighted with their gymnastic ribbons and really enjoyed twirling around and around. The girls also really enjoyed making coloured pipe cleaner bracelets. 

As a finale, they danced around on the stage to create a brief video! When their time was complete, they enjoyed homemade treats made by Jane and Tom. As usual there were many warm goodnights. 

 
 Before our daily evening devotion, Ros presented a big surprise from Directora Claudia. Tomorrow the school will be celebrating Earth Day and she would like all the children to be wearing green or brown. So as we are sitting outside at the "Internet Cafe" sending this blog (as in the picture on the left), 



 


the rest of the team are at the "Bodega" (warehouse of donated items on site) to try and find 102 pieces of green or brown clothing to be worn by all the children on this special day).

 Our rallying cry this week continues "Be flexible and thou shalt not break"!   We are shown how to use our gifts and give us the awareness to notice the gifts of others that you will use to bless us.

Posted by Terry and Carrie    

lunes.

Monday 20 April 2015

We all had to be inventive today with our morning ablutions, as there was no water available which has been off since yesterday. At 7:00 a.m., we began our day attending an assembly of the whole student body in the auditorium for opening exercises and  a civics lesson to prepare the students to vote for a school president and class presidents. 

 

Our team (seen here at Breakfast) will act as international observers for the election on Friday. After breakfast we all reconvened in the conference room to meet with Directora Claudia for an introduction to El Hogar. She also provided  further information about the upcoming election and the purposes behind it. She reported on the recent marathon fundraiser and related the histories of several new students. Erika brought in a group of new student to meet us. There was a family with a boy aged 14 and his two sisters; as well as, a pair of sisters. Another girl told us that her father had died when she was a baby and her mother died when she
was aged 7 years. Recently she found herself on the streets at aged 13 and she was picked up by the police before coming to El Hogar several weeks ago. 

In the afternoon Alan, Bruce, Terry, Carrie, Rick, Louise and Caroline began painting the Art Room and a play area.

(with a couple of observers who were just dying to get hold of those paint brushes to help out.

After the painting, Louise and Carolyn put on their nurses caps and spent time in the clinica receiving sick children!











Jane, Rosalind, Erika, Janice, and Lynn met with Directora Claudia to identify students needing assessment and/or behavioural  support. Rosalind and Janice also spoke to Directora Claudia about their special mosaic painting fundraising initiative. Tom, Michael and Rick met with Raul before starting work on a list of repairs and troubleshooting projects involving the electrical and water systems. 

 

After dinner, our group split up. Rosalind and Janice began work on their mosaic paintings with six young artists and with the help of the Art teacher, Martha. 

The rest of us headed off to have an activity time with the youngest boys at El Hogar from Dorm 1. The boys got to choose one matchbox car each to keep. Terry started the boys off designing a play mat to use with their vehicles and the boys added various piece parts to set up quite a complicated array of roads and buildings.

In small groups, the boys, assisted by
Brucasaurus Rex,

assembled foam dinosaurs and others spent considerable time colouring pages from commercial colouring books with crayons and markers.


 


















 
To end the evening, Tom and Jane distributed double chocolate blonde brownies prepared at their home in Cincinnati to each of the boys. To end our day, we all met to discuss our impressions of our team’s work today; as well as, to have a devotional.

Posted by Lynne and Jane

DOMINGO

Sunday, April  20, 2015

Today was our first morning in Honduras, there is a 2 hrs time difference here so I naturally awoke around 5am which is 7am our time.  No need for a morning alarm as the wire mesh window screens carry in the lovely songs of the tropical birds, matched with the beep beeps of a few horns and the brewing buzz of traffic.

We eased into the morning with a walk over to the dining hall and enjoyed hot dark roast coffee, pancakes and sweet cantaloupe.  A yummy and satisfying start to the day.  An hour later we were picked up by Raul and all 14 of us including Erika packed in the service van for a trip to Santa Maria de los Angeles Catedral Episcopal.  Church was lively and at the same time peaceful.  I could understand parts of the service, especially the prayers prior to communion. Claudia, the Director, had asked some of the children to sit with us to help us navigate the service, we had Moises by our side smiling and pointing to the words quite often.  It was wonderful to start interacting with the kids, as the night before was very limited.







 Moises is ten and had earned a spot on the children’s bus for church this morning, followed by a special lunch out at Pollo Campero (a fast-food fried chicken restaurant). 




The children who went to church / lunch were rewarded for good behaviour, and also were child sponsors of St. Luke's church. 

Pollo Campero had a play space and after lunch the kids (and Erika) got a chance to climb around the colourful tiered play area.   The smiles on their faces were precious and you got the sense this outing was special and worth it. 

After lunch we drove back to El Hogar and prepared for playtime with the kids.  Frisbee, soccer(Rick and Tom getting ready with the new soccer balls), colouring and tennis ball basketball (I hung a basket in a tree and we bounced or threw it in).  The game was fun and tricky, similar to a game perhaps at an outdoor carnival – you know the one with the springs under the apple baskets.  Carlos mastered it in about a half an hour, and was getting the ball in the tree basket in no time.  Fun!  While we played Ros and Lynn sorted and divided up the donations of necessities (meds, hygiene items) for the 4 centres- Agriculture school, Technical school, High School, and El Hogar Elementary school.  Great team work by all!  After working up and appetite we enjoyed  cheese tortillas and salsa for supper.  At the end of the night we collected our thoughts, shared some stories and ended our day in prayer, followed by a solid nights sleep.  Amen.

Posted by Carolyn

Saturday, April 18, 2015

 With apologies.  This is now day #3 and we have not been able to post so far.  Internet has been down but all seems to be working now.

This blog begins at the beginning - Saturday and we hope to get you caught up as best we can now.

Saturday, April 18, 2015

As we start this blog on our first day at El Hogar, we are waiting for a pizza to arrive as we are not sure what time it is, but know we are hungry!  It has been a long day since our alarm went off at 0230 this morning.  Travel went well after spending two hours in lines (immigration and security) in Toronto.   (Where are all these people going at 0400 in the morning?)  In Atlanta, we met up with Jane and Tom who arrived from Cincinnati, and Lynne (from Kanata) arriving from Los Angeles who had been vacationing in California and Bruce from Colorado whom we met in Tegucigalpa before we headed out on our next leg to Honduras. 

 Landing in Tegucigalpa is always an interesting experience.

 

Gathering all our bags is sometimes a challenge, but all seemed to make the trip OK.  

 Our host and friend Raul met us with the only available van, so that it meant two trips to get luggage and people transported. 

The other vehicles were tied up with all 100 children who are spending the day in a park at a pool and having a wonderful day together.  Since there would be no children at El Hogar, Raul took us on a long tour through the old historic part of the city.  We had not seen some sections of the city before so it was a treat to get such a complete tour from Raul.   

It is a very unusual situation to have the whole  campus empty.  Not a child to be seen until the big bus rolled in and all the children rolled out, happy and tired from a wonderful day.   Lots of hugs and greetings and we are happy to see them and especially to see Erika who spent the day with them at the park. What a joy for us to see those happy faces and their excitement in seeing yet a new voluntario team.

The cook had also been at the park all day and since it didn’t seem fair to ask her to find us something to eat after cooking two meals for all 100 children and the teachers, we were glad to order the pizza which arrived on the back of a motorcycle.  Obviously Lynne is excited about her pizza. 

We shared together at the end of the day and offered lots of observations about what we saw today and our first impressions of the country.  We are here to learn and to share what we have as a new volunteer team, following as example the greatest volunteer of all - Jesus.  Everyone was glad to roll into bed after a very long day. 

Posted by Janice

Team Commissioning

  It was a meaningful time at today's worship, when our team was commissioned by Stuart with the help of some of the Alumni members from past years who had been to El Hogar before.  We appreciated Stuart's prayer and the support of the whole congregation as we head out in less than a week.








We received so many good wishes from so many. 

After the service, we packed up all our suitcases with the donations that the congregation had lovingly donated.  Lots of jeans (ALWAYS needed) and medications.

Activities and craft materials for the children, soccer balls (of course!), work gloves, shoes.

and the dolls that we have taken down each year, lovingly made by Kay Rutty and Phyllis Brandon.   



We all departed, we think, with more suitcases than we have people to carry them, but somehow we will get them to Honduras.  See you all in 6 days!

10 days to Go!

It is less than two weeks before leaving for our service team trip to Honduras and the team is working hard in preparations.   We are grateful first of all, for the many who have supported our fundraising.  We are grateful to the whole team who have worked so hard on the Gingerbread churches, the hand-made Chocolate Easter Eggs, The Friend-a-Child Project over Lent, to Marilyn Barnes for her beautiful note cards and for the donations made by numerous people to this ministry.  All of this money raised goes directly to El Hogar projects which includes the sponsorship of the 4 children that St Luke's supports.  We look forward to seeing these children again - in fact - all the children and their smiling faces. We will also pack up the jeans (new or gently used) from the congregation which we will take with us.  At times, it becomes a challenge to keep 100 children in clothes!
 We took a few pictures at our meeting and look forward to having wonderful additions to our St Luke's team join us when we get there.  We will meet up with our mostly regular team members Jane and Tom Habig from St Timothy's in Cincinnati, Lynne Nokes from Kanata who has been with us several years and a new team member - Bruce Johnson from Colorado.

The rest of the team includes: Michael Skafel, Alan Brodie, Janice Skafel, Rick Reycraft, Carrie Raybould, Rosalind Reycraft, Louise Neville, Terry Raybould, Carolyn Wilkie.

There is much to do in preparation - planning and taking supplies for crafts and activities with the children (soccer balls, games, markers, paints), making sure we have a first aid kit and healthy snacks, sunscreen, and materials for the large art project that we are planning with the children (stay tuned for those details - this will become part of an interesting fund raiser here in Canada when we return.). While at the meeting, we skyped Erika at El Hogar who joined us for a discussion and update and tips on what is needed there.  It was fun to have her as part of the planning as she was very helpful.  We often don't know what is needed there ahead of time so she had done a bit of an inventory on what is on the supply shelves which is a bonus this year for us.  She is not privy to any information about what our work project will be exactly, but there will be lots of work for us to do when we get there.  Something about a wall being built....?  These next few days will be spent picking up the last of the things we need to take and we will be packing them up this Sunday after church. 

In our devotional tonight we talked of how we need to make sure we are prepared emotionally, spiritually and physically.  God has opened doors for us to go on this trip, to have this experience, to grow in our faith and to become better than we are right now.  We look forward to the challenges and the experience and the fun.