Projects
HOGAR DE AMOR Children's Home (Orphanage):
In the town of Agua Caliente, The Lisa Lopes Foundation and Helping Honduras Kids are sharing a wish come true. On Monday, May 7, 2007, Helping Honduras Kids welcomed 18 orphaned children to live in a new 10,000 square foot children's home (orphanage) which has been generously made available by the Lisa Lopes Foundation.
About 30 minutes from La Ceiba, this modern building is called, “Hogar de Amor” (Home of Love) and currently houses 20 children, 3 live-in Honduran staff people and 3 international volunteers. It is our plan to accept both infants and older children and every effort will be made to keep siblings together. Within a loving family environment, we can quickly improve the level of dignity, education, health and opportunity for children who would otherwise be in government institutions.
As an ongoing outreach to the local community, Helping Honduras Kids also operates the Lisa Lopes Rural School at the Hogar de Amor. With donations and volunteers, HHK has built beds and tables and installed a safety fence, septic system and outdoor lighting. We welcome long term volunteers to help care for the children and assist in the school.
Our children at Hogar de Amor are provided with educational opportunities such as computer classes and English lessons but, most importantly, they are safe, loved and nurtured so they can enjoy the kind of childhood that every child deserves.
While the Honduran government does not currently allow adoption from private orphanages such as ours, we are looking for sponsors for these children who will help support them. In Latin America this is called a padrino or madrina (godfather or godmother.)
As a sponsor, or godparent, you will be considered to be a member of this child's family, and vise versa. Your emotional support and frequent contact with “your” child is strongly encouraged. Speaking from personal experience, we can assure you that being a padrino or madrina is a rewarding and life changing experience!
Helping Honduras Kids invites you to visit and volunteer at the Hogar de Amor. Individuals and work groups are welcome!
CLICK HERE TO SET UP A SPONSORSHIP.
February 12, 2007 was the first day of school for 31 enthusiastic children from an area of the lower Cangrejal River Watershed, called Herradura, who have never before had an opportunity to attend school. Most of these children live in isolated areas and in marginalized conditions. Their families rely almost entirely on subsistence agriculture and when the crops do poorly, everyone starves.
For these children, a good education is most likely their only opportunity to escape the cycle of poverty and the physical and emotional strain of the life they lead. Yet, with virtually no economic resources, the parents had no option but to keep them at home.
At the Helping Honduras Kids Jungle School, your donations provide students with uniforms, school supplies, a backpack, personal items, medicines, vitamins and a daily hot lunch.
And now . . . Congratulations to our teachers and students on the completion of the first year of operation of the Jungle School and the beginning of the second!! We wish you many, many more!!
You can sponsor a child at the Jungle School for only $25./mo. Your sponsored child will be very happy to receive letters and photos from you. You may wish to visit Honduras and to spend time with your sponsored children. We welcome you! Click here for info on how to sponsor a child at the HHK Jungle School.
We appreciate long and short-term volunteers and especially invite musicians, artists, computer wizards, story-tellers and other talented folks who would like to offer workshops or performances for the children and others in the community.
This photo is of Iris and Angel, the teachers at the Jungle School.
Sadly, HIV/AIDS related diseases are the second most common cause of death in Honduras. This leads to countless orphans who are living with grandmothers or other extended family members with a limited ability to provide quality care. In other cases, children are abandoned when their mothers have just too many children to adequately support. The Grandmas and the children in their custody live a precarious day-to-day existence.
In 2005, Charlie & Amalia Kirkhum and HHK founder, David Ashby, began assisting Grandmas in the north coastal beach town of El Porvenir. Since then, we have grown to support nearly 50 children living with just five Grandmas.
This HHK program identifies family groups at risk and provides material and emotional support to the caregivers. - - - By financially helping the children to stay in school, by helping to improve living quarters, by providing clothing, school supplies and uniforms, and by supplementing the children's' diet with nutritious foods from the local markets, it is hoped that family units will stay intact, thus avoiding the heartbreak of sending children to institutions.
The name of the town these children live in is El Porvenir. It translates as, “the future”. Sponsor a Grandma's Family and with your help, these children will certainly have a brighter future! Your sponsorship will provide nutritional & emotional support for a Grandma and the many children she cares for. HHK will identify and provide for these family units to the limit of available funding. With your help, we will add support for additional Grandma’s families in 2008 when our Nutrition Center / Day-Care (below) is complete.
Sponsor Grandma's Kids for $25/child/month or a Grandma’s family for $100/month. (Please let us know if you have a preference for the age or gender of the child or children you wish to sponsor.)
For more pix of kids in El Porvenir, look at Charlie & Amalia's website, honduraschildren.com.
Charlie and Amalia Kirkhum who live locally in El Porvenir, have opened their home to about 20 local children and are teaching them basic skills. Because many children have never attended school, some of these 'kindergarten' students are in their teens. Amalia and Charlie also provide them with a daily nutritious meal and a safe place to play and "hang out."
The Need for a Nutrition Center and Day-care:
Honduras has now surpassed Haiti in the incidence of malnourished children and almost half of the Honduran population is 15 years old or younger. A nutritious daily meal, vitamins and medical care provided in a nurturing and safe environment are crucial components to helping these children reach their full potential.
El Porvenir is only 18 kilometers from the city of La Ceiba yet most employed adults work at the nearby pineapple fields. Their jobs often require a six-day workweek with long hours. For a single mother or grandmother this means leaving children to fend for themselves. It is not unusual to find young children on their own in the neighborhood. Older children typically miss school to care for younger brothers and sisters.
On donated land we are building and will operate a kinder/ day care center for the children of poor families working in the pineapple fields and packing plants. A healthy and nutritious meal will be served at noon every weekday to about 30-40 children. This may be the only nutritious meal that they receive. The center will also provide a respite for grandmas who are struggling to care for young children.
Ryan Daniels, a 17-year-old high school student from Utah made it possible to begin construction on this kinder. Ryan and ten friends traveled to Honduras accompanied by Ryan's parents, Lee and Terry, to begin the construction process for the facility. These high school students donated a substantial amount from a fundraising dinner they held in their hometown as well as their energy and hard work at the construction site!
Charlie has organized and is overseeing the work on the kinder. It's almost complete and will open in the next few months!
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For more pix of the kids in El Porvenir, take a look at Charlie & Amalia's website. honduraschildren.com/
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Dental & Medical Clinics in El Naranjo & Agua Caliente:
Helping Honduras Kids operates a dental clinic every Monday in the public school in the mountain village of El Naranjo. On Tuesday the clinic is held in the Lisa Lopes building, Hogar de Amor, in Agua Caliente with a variety of medical specialists scheduled to visit regularly as well. Funds and volunteers are needed to keep these clinics open and free to the thousands of children in the area, who otherwise would have no dental or medical care.
Financial and material support to help disadvantaged children remain in school:
Many children in rural areas do not attend school. This is especially true of girls, since in large families, when it comes time for the parents to make a choice; they send their sons to school and keep their daughters at home. Helping Honduras Kids encourages boys and girls in elementary and high school to remain in school by providing some elements of their uniforms and school supplies and subsidizing their transportation costs.
In the mountain village of El Pital, there is an elementary school with 150 students and a high school with 70. This village has a donated bus to transport school children from other villages in the Cangrejal river watershed, but they must charge a fee to cover fuel and maintenance. This fee is often what prevents children from staying in school. Other children don’t attend classes because they don’t have a uniform, notebooks or other simple school supplies.
It is estimated that to pay the full cost for a child in elementary school would require about $75/yr. The cost for high school is about $125. This is out of reach for many rural parents, particularly if they have a number of school age children.
Helping Honduras subsidizes these costs to help as many children as possible remain in school. This is done, not by giving out money, but rather by providing selected school supplies (backpacks, notebooks, calculators, etc) and items of school uniforms, as well as by paying for part of the operating costs of the school bus. We are currently subsidizing the transportation costs of 5 children who live near the La Ceiba dump. This number will grow as funding becomes available. HHK has also provided more than 500 navy blue pants and skirts to students in the El Pital elementary and high schools.
Your donation to this project reaches many children and especially promotes school attendance for Honduran girls.
All of the children in our care are taken on frequent outings. We go to the beach or to the rivers in the mountains for swimming and we often finish up at a local restaurant for a meal and play-time on the restaurant’s jungle gym. Sometimes we take a trip to the mall and have some ice cream.
The children from the mountains are awed by the ocean and those from the beach relish the coolness of the mountain rivers. Most of these children have never eaten in a restaurant, been in an air conditioned mall or ridden an escalator. For these children to thrive outside their local communities, they must experience and be able to make good choices about the modern world.
We hope you will consider funding these projects and/or sponsoring a child. Together we can provide a bright future for these kids. Please indicate the project you wish to support and check the Sponsor a Child page for details on the children who need sponsors. - - - Please see the Volunteer page for more info on how you can help!
We are pleased to inform you that donations to Helping Honduras Kids are tax deductible.
