Safe and Sound/ Sept 20th

As you probably know I’ve arrived in Honduras safely and am so excited to be here. The kids are absolutely amazing and I feel lucky that I get to play even a small part in their lives. The voluntarios are kind of the local celebs @ SOS and we’re constantly surrounded by loving and curious kids, always eager for a hug and a bit of attention. It’s funny because often we actually have to physically move the kids from the classroom once it’s time for them to leave. My poor Spanish hasn’t been a huge problem for me yet since the kids are more than happy to help us in any way possible. They’re patient and helpful and really helping us pick things up quickly.

Now that I’m here I’ve learned a bit more about the program and support it even more than I did before. The SOS village has 144 kids and 16 homes that they live in (but don’t quote me on that, the number might be slightly off), it is indeed an orphanage but has a bit of a different approach from a typical style. My understanding is that a typical orphanage will have a dormitory style room with boys and girls separated and few adults around to care for them, whereas the SOS tries to imitate the style of a normal family. They have aprox 9 children in a home with a caretaker called a Tia. They do everything in their power to make life as normal as possible for the kids but as you can imagine 1 ‘mother’ and 9 kids can pose a bit of a challenge to give the kids as much attention as they deserve. Despite having a suffered a huge amount of difficulty in their lives the kids are just the most amazing and loving humans I’ve been around... I’ll probably say that 17 million more times in my entries, but I can’t express it enough.

Our house is extremely basic (we have to be very creative with our cleaning techniques and meal preparations), but we’re living with some really great people, the evenings are pretty lazy but we pass the evenings alright with some card games, chatting, reading and practicing our Spanish.

The town is very very very different from what you would find in Canada, there are horses just chilling around town- literally, Tia and I were walking home from the pub on our second night and were greeted by a horse sleeping in the street. Other little delights around town are crabs scuttering down the street, wild dogs, roosters/ chickens, cows and children. We were hoping to explore the town a little bit more this weekend, but the weather had other plans, so will hopefully have some more in depth description next weekend.

Nowwwww, speaking of the weather- have you heard of hurricane Matthew? It was expected to hit our area last night or today, we went into town and stocked up on provisions (plenty of canned food) and prepared for a power outage then woke up this morning with no bad weather in sight. Not sure if it’s late (typical Honduran style) or if it’s skipped us entirely. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

written by

Jennifer-Campbell on September 20, 2010 from El Porvenir, Honduras

from the travel blog: Wherever I May Roam...

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