Volunteer Retreat- The ranch paid for us all to travel to La Esperanza, a place in Honduras, to have a volunteer retreat, basically getting to know each other better, talking about things from the ranch, supporting each other and so forth. The volunteer coordinator set up the weekend with the help of some others and it was really nice. The place we stayed was a beautiful lodge in the mountains. La Esperanza is the coldest place in the country and november is one of the cooler months, so we were all "freezing" in the 50 degree F weather, wearing multiple sweaters [View Full Entry]

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Halloween- So we decided to bring some United States spirit to NPH and have a halloween party for our boys. Jennifer and I make a couple cakes and decorated the room with streamers, balloons and candy. I bought each of my boys a plastic pumpkin bowl and filled it with candy and other little things like those plastic vampire teeth. It was really fun and here are some pictures. The best part I think was bobbing for apples. They loved it. [View Full Entry]

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One of the boys in my hogar, Perez (the one always trying to stick up his middle finger in pictures), has been sick for a while, so they have been trying to do special things for him. One thing was to have a special birthday party for him. His birthday was in August, but they couldn’t get a van reserved and everything organized until today. We left the ranch in a ranch van around 2:30pm. There were about 18 of us total. Our entire hogar (besides Eliezer because he was “castigado” which means hes being punished and can’t do activities due [View Full Entry]

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For our weekend off, we decided to visit the largest lake in Honduras (well, it is one of the only lakes), Lake Yojoa. We started our journey Friday, as soon as we were done with work, around 1pm. We traveled to Tegus from there, got to Tegus, ordered a pizza from pizza hut, picked up a few other things from the store and head off to the lake around 3pm. We finally arrived at our final destination around 7:30pm that evening. We had decided to stay at a “hotel” recommended by other NPH volunteers, called D&D Brewery. It is owned by [View Full Entry]

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At the ranch they have this thing called Proyecto Familiar, or Family Project, run by volunteers. Each volunteer (if they want to, it is not mandatory) can sign up for a couple times a month to do Proyecto. What happens is you usually have a kid in your hogar and all their brothers and sisters assigned to one day and they come to Casa Personal (where all the volunteers live) and hang out and have dinner together. This dinner is cooked by the volunteers and the kids help if they are old enough (the only kinda difficult thing is that we, [View Full Entry]

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Once a year they starting have the Day of Visitors. This is when any of the kids families, if they have them, can come visit the kids who live at the Ranch. They have a lot of fun activities and candy and food and stuff and people just come and spend time with their nieces, nephews, grandchildren, brothers and sisters (whatever their relation is to the kids who live at the ranch). Today, all the volunteers had the job of entertaining the kids who didn’t get visitors. This day tends to be difficult for some kids, and sad or disappointing for [View Full Entry]

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Compras Since there are so many kids at the ranch, they don't really do much on their birthdays for celebrations. However, they do want to recognize their birthdays and do something special, so they do this thing they just call Compras, which means like Shopping. Once every 2 months on a Thursday, they take out ALL the kids who have had a birthday in the past 2 months. We take a ranch bus, which is just a big yellow school bus and we all go into the city. I asked my boss permission to go with, which he said was fine. [View Full Entry]

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So my mother has made several comments that it seems I am not actually working here, just having fun on vacation, so I decided to describe some of my work days so that it is clear that I do indeed work. I am at work 7:30 Monday through Friday. Mondays through Wednesdays I technically am done at 4pm and Thursdays and Fridays I finish at 1pm. Monday through Thursday, I teach 1 English class each morning from 7:50-9amish, I go into their classrooms. After that I spend the days tutoring individual kids who need extra help. I have a little Aula, [View Full Entry]

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Independence Day September 15th For Independence Day they had a huge parade that the ranch was preparing for for like weeks. They had pom-pom girls, cheerleaders, kids dressed up in every kind of thing you can think of, marching bands, dancers, people marching with banners and signs of all kinds. It was pretty crazy. So, it was basically another day off school. At 8am we all left to drive a mile or so down the road and we all got dropped off. Then we marched down the road back to the ranch. There were so many people- we celebrated it on [View Full Entry]

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So as I have already mentioned, I chose working in San Andres, the hogar (or home) for boys with behavioral problems. There are 7 boys, and 3 of the 7 are brothers. Their names are Emanuel, Santos, Ever (those 3 are brothers), Mayron, Eliezer, Perez (actually names Josue, but everyone calls him by his last name), and Kevin. They all have their attitudes and behavioral issues, but overall they are good kids and alot of fun. One of the Tias (what they call the caregivers who are there most of the time) is a sister of the 3 boys. Her name [View Full Entry]

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