Getting Ready to Leave
Allen and I only have three weeks left on the ranch and it is going by way too quickly. The weeks seem to be even busier than before. This week we had a Padrinos Birthday outing during the day and a family project in the evening on Tuesday, all day spiritual retreats on Wednesday and Thursday, and a evening fiesta with music and cultural dance Thursday evening.
It does not leave a lot of time for planning our despedidas or goodbye parties. Everything must be celebrated in Honduras, even (or especially?) goodbyes. Here is a list of must do activities before you leave:
Goodbye speech at the last mass
· Some kind of celebration with our work group
· A despedida with our hogars
· A despedida with the volunteers – including adding our handprints to the wall in the salon.
Allen and I have been thinking about what we want to do for each of these. He takes lots of pictures and wants to put together slide shows for the kids and for his maintenance work group. I have been helping him try to put this together while he is thinking about how and where to project it.
For the work group celebration, Allen is taking the
maintenance crew out to lunch on Thursday of our last week so I will likely try
to arrange that as well. The difference between us is that his group has a car
available and mine will have to rely on limited transportation. There is a
restaurant close to the ranch that will deliver so that may be my back up plan.
We want to have a joint despedida with our two hogars, Divino
Niño and San Mateo, and are planning to make them dinner the Wednesday night
before we leave. We originally proposed Sunday morning breakfast as that is one
of our favorite meals, but Wednesday night is an overlap day for the Tias so that more Tias will be available to celebrate with us. We are keeping a breakfast menu
with an egg casserole, muffins, and lots of fruit. I already have recipes
scoped out and a grocery list of things to buy.
Allen’s Tias also want to take us out to breakfast at a
restaurant close to Tegucigalpa next week so that will be in addition to our
planned despedida.
We plan to go traditional with our volunteer group despedida and just meet after hogar on our last Thursday with potluck snacks and drinks. This will probably be our final occasion to clean out the snacks and drinks in our room and donate any other items as we do not plan to take much back to the states with us. Allen has acquired (bought) a lot of tools and maintenance supplies, some if not all, of which he plans to leave in San Vicente. We have also thought about our handprints: we want to use orange and black (go beavers!) and overlap the thumb prints.
One of the most important items not on the list is to plan for our return visit. Being here for a whole year gives us a perspective on when is the best time to return. Mid November is great since the kids are ending their school year and there are many festivities like graduation, quinceañera, baptism, and confirmation. Normally volunteers are discouraged from returning within the first 6 months so that the kids have more time to adjust to the transition. However, we also want to donate the computer that we bought here and would rather do that sooner than later. We just need time in the US to buy the laptop we want, move the files, and wipe the computer before donating it. Given the circumstances, it is ok for us to return in November. As that is not too far away, we are already looking at flights back!
Comments
Post a Comment