Allen & Marcel Volunteer in Honduras

  We are taking a week of vacation to explore El Salvador starting Friday. I do not plan to blog during this time because I don’t want to take our new laptop computer. It is heavier and bulkier than our Microsoft Surface that finally gave up a few months ago. I had hoped that it would keep working until August, but it was already nine years old and finally gave up. Although we have smart phones, an IPad, and the Padrinos Office has a work computer for me, another 6 months was too long to wait for a new computer. Especially as we had not submitted our taxes at the time. Before coming to Honduras, I thought keyboards were universal, but it turns out that there is a Spanish language – style keyboard which has a few different commonly used characters like ñ and ¿ so has moved some of the lesser used characters to different places. These symbols are a little hard to find: @ ?. Our new laptop has this style keyboard in addition to being bigger and heavier than the surface, so I think w...

  Allen and I spent the last weekend in Tegucigalpa as it was our “rest” weekend and Allen wanted to explore some plant nurseries in his quest to beautify the courtyard of our living quarters San Vicente. When we arrived last year, the courtyard was overgrown. It had several trees that had not been pruned and some of which were not healthy, many bushes in a similar state, grass that was periodically trimmed with a machete, brickwork for a previous walkway to a firepit, and various planter-type structures most of which were caved in with rotten wood and basically falling down. It needed some TLC and Allen has gradually been transforming it. He has cleared it, removing rocks, decaying structures, and sick trees so you can now see the uneven ground. He plans to have some good dirt brought in and level the ground with a retaining wall in the middle and he hopes to finish this project before the rainy season which generally starts late May. Courtyard Before Clean Slate for Allen to Wo...

  My coworkers rarely contact me on Sundays, so I was surprised to get a What’sApp message from Cintia asking for help. This was after I had spent the morning cleaning San Vicente and then helping Allen with his landscape project in the San Vicente courtyard, so I was ready for a break. Our next Padrino’s birthday celebration is Wednesday, and we needed to order lunch ahead - either pizza or hamburger (hamburguesa). There had been no response from the Tias when my coworkers requested this information last week, so my mission (if I accepted) was to find the list of kids going on the birthday outing and seek them out to get their preference. I first went to Talita Kumi where the older (>12) girls live. As I approached the complex, I could hear prayers coming from the big salon and deduced that they were having some kind of communal prayer service. We already had mass at the church the night before, so this was an extra religious activity. Not wanting to interrupt the service, I ...

  The school year for the kids here starts in February and last week (April 8-12) was the first exam week for the school year. Exam week is taken very seriously, and many other activities are postponed so the kids can focus on their studies. So it was a relatively slow week at the ranch. However, there was a need for 48 cupcakes or “cakitos” as they are known here. One of the kids from my hogar and several from Allen’s hogar had birthdays this week so I made a couple of batches of cupcakes for the occasion. The oven in San Vicente has not been working consistently since before Christmas. Luckily, we have another building close by that has an oven we can use. Allen and the maintenance crew worked on our oven several times and were able to get it to work temporarily, but not permanently. At one point Allen removed a bunch of dead cockroaches from the circuit board to get the oven reworking, but not for long. They even brought in a second (used) oven that worked for a short while be...

I greatly appreciate the advantages in being an older volunteer, having time and financial resources to provide a secure base for choosing the activities from which to share our knowledge and experience. Most of the people that we encounter on the ranch are much younger than us, including the other volunteers who are primarily in their 20s. Allen and I find that this makes us feel younger – we have a hard time remembering that we are now in our late 60s! One of the other great things about being older is that other people tend to underestimate you and it can be easy to surprise them. This was the case with my soccer “skills”. Nobody expected me to be very good, including myself. I only signed up on the volunteer team so that they could get the minimum number needed to form a team. As it turned out, they not only needed me to play, but they also needed a goalie which I have played in the past (before they were born!). The first game I played goalie first half and switched off with ano...