Asistente de Mantenimiento

Allen’s job at NPH Honduras is Asistente de Mantenimiento (Maintenance Assistant) and even after just a week and a half, he has had some interesting work! The water system on the ranch is drawn from a series of dams that store water from creeks. Water from the dams is piped to different areas on the ranch. Some of the water is treated by filtering and adding chlorine in two different basins, so part of maintenance is to check on water levels and water systems almost every day.  Allen is getting his steps in! Last week he was part of the crew that shoveled out the solids from one of the settling basins, a job that he thinks had never been done before.

                                        Allen After Shoveling Solids from the Basin shown below.

A “code red” maintenance issue occurred Sunday night and Allen got a call from a volunteer that coordinates activities for visitors to the ranch. Water was gushing out of a shower head in a bathroom in the visitors’ facility and the current visitors, a large group of young Italians, could not get the water to shut off. Someone was able to find a shutoff valve before the Italians left for dinner, but Allen and another young man that helps with maintenance went to see if they could fix the issue. After a bit of diagnosing and more water gushing, the guys were able to fix both a broken shower head and loose shut-off valves using the used parts and meager tools at hand.

Needless to say, he is getting a wide variety of work and a good idea of how things function on the ranch. He always has ideas for improvement, but they may require more money or more manpower than is available.

In contrast, my job has been in an office although tomorrow I get to deliver letters from the sponsors to the children and I think in the next month we will be getting out to take new photos of each of the pequenos.

A few notes about the birthday party for the director last Saturday – there was a big party with a special meal, cake, and a pinata with the whole ranch in the early afternoon at one of the pavilions where all the residents attended. In the evening, Allen and I were invited to a smaller birthday dinner in the evening that included mango juice, karaoke and dancing. The event was held in the Abuelas house, which like most of the housing facilities is a large quad shaped building with an open garden area in the middle. This is the house where the abuelas (the elderly people at the ranch – even older than us!) stay and fortunately the evening was called around 10:30 so as not to keep them (or more importantly us) awake later.   

                                                      Maintenance Man Mopping the Floor

Birthday Cakes for the Whole Ranch


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