Fires, Food, Lice, and Losa

I am ready for some rain! Right now we are in the hottest and driest months of the year. This also means that forest fires are running rampant, and the sky has been a thick layer of smoke and haze for the last several weeks. When I go running around the ranch, I pass large patches of forest that are now blackened after recent fires have passed through. Today on my journey into Tegucigalpa, I could barely see the hills off to the side of the road because of the poor air quality. This may also explain why my cough from my cold two weeks ago still seems to be lingering.

I can tell I am getting used to the food here because my cravings for my ‘American favorites’ are diminishing, and I actually get excited when some of the better ranch meals are served, such as casamiento (rice and beans mixed together) or a side of salad (cucumber, which I never liked in the states, green tomato, and a few pieces of lettuce or cabbage). However, my love for cooking has also grown, possibly because I take advantage of any opportunity I have to prepare my own food the way I like it, which only comes once or twice a week. Among the volunteer community, we have Cena Amistosa (family dinner) in which we usually have a themed meal where everyone cooks together or brings something, potluck style. This is always a nice chance to spend time together as a volunteer group. Another special meal occasion is Proyecto Familiar, a program started by a former volunteer to enable sibling groups to spend more time together and prepare a true family dinner. Most volunteers take a turn in cooking with the kids a couple times each month. The kids absolutely love Proyecto because they get to cook food and eat as much as they want; two things that they don’t get to do much of otherwise. NPH is a great place for families because siblings can come here together and know they will never be split up or taken away. Family groups of 4-6 children are not uncommon. The problem is that since there are so many families, they only get Proyecto about every 8 months. I really love Proyecto because I get to know the kids as a family unit and in a smaller group.

Here on the ranch, since everyone lives in a community, lice are very prevalent. It is kind of just a fact of life, and not something that any of the kids would be grossed out by or make a big deal of because that is just how they are used to living. I am very proud to announce that after 3 months here, I am still lice free. One of my very least favorite Saturday activities is ‘de-lousing.’ For the girls, they can’t understand that this is a rare and strange activity for me, and that I feel a little bit like a monkey when I do it. What delousing entails is sitting a girl down in between your legs and slowly searching through their hair for little pearly white eggs that are firmly attached to the base of the hair strand. The only way to get them out, since we have only one lice comb to share amongst 22 girls, is to pinch it between your fingernails and slide it all the way down the hair follicle until it comes off the end. The girls generally like to report to the others how many eggs you found in their hair. If there are many, it is likely that there are live lice as well. So, you put a t-shirt or towel over your lap to cover your clothes and try to obtain the fine-toothed lice comb to brush them out of the hair and onto your lap. At this point they are unhappily scrambling around because they have just been evoked from their hairy hiding place, so you have to kill them by squishing them in between your fingernails. Ideally, everyone would partner up, so I would only have to de-louse one person, however, sometimes that doesn’t work and I end up delousing a handful of girls. I’m itching just writing this.

Tableware, or Losa, in Spanish, is a strange thing here on the ranch. Every child is given a plate/bowl, cup, and spoon or fork as their own which they have to present at every meal in order to eat. Even though everybody is supposed to have their own, there is a severe shortage of losa on the ranch. No matter how many times new losa is bought or gifted to a Hogar, pieces seem to disappear shortly thereafter. I think it is a vicious cycle of things being lost and/or stolen, but I am convinced that there has to be a hidden treasure of plastic plates, cups, and spoons here on the ranch at the rate they disappear. Even my own losa got stolen, but was luckily returned to me several days later. To avoid their spoons from being stolen, some children basically guard these items with their life, and you often see many children walking around with them in their back pockets. One evening on our way to dinner, one of the little girls in my hogar, Fatima, pulled me into the garden, where she began rummaging through a lush flower pot. When I asked her what on earth she was doing, she informed me that this was where she hid her spoon after every meal to keep it safe. I couldn’t help but laugh at what lengths the kids will go to to protect their possessions.

This coming week is Semana Santa, or Holy Week, which means a lot of different things here on the Ranch. School is closed and the children who have had good behavior and have family who can come pick them up are able to go home for the week. This will vary for each child based on whether they have any extended family and whether the family can afford the voyage to the Ranch and has any sort of visitation privileges. Some children have the option to go home, but prefer to stay at the Ranch, possibly because of a negative home situation. All the employees here get all or at least part of the week off which means we volunteers step in to pick up the slack, as well as all the NPH high school and university students studying in Tegucigalpa come back here to work for the week. For most of us, we take over working in our Hogars as Tio or Tia. While I know I have an exhausting week ahead of me, I am excited to get an extended period of time with the girls to just relax, play, and get to know them deeper. Tomorrow we leave with all the girls on the ranch who are about 8 years old and up to go camping for three days. For some reason, someone decided we needed to leave at 4am, so I suppose we will be loading up school buses in the dark. I’m not sure what ‘camping’ with 100 people looks like, but I will be sure to let you know how that goes in my next blog entry.

One of my favorite cuties... Fernando.

Fotos for Fun

 A day in Santa Lucia. Pictured with Micaela, another NPH volunteer.

 My pre-op and Phase I nursing group in the Surgery Center during the March Brigade.

 My favorite patient of the week!

 With two other NPH volunteers, Jason and Deedee

 Baking cake with two adorable girls for proyecto familiar. These were the two children who I spoke about recently loosing their father.

 14 of us squeezed into a tiny pickup truck with all of our supplies for our medical brigade to Tamal y Queso. It was quite a ride.

 Our doctor saw every student in the school and examined them for various illnesses.

 Inside the one room school house. Jason giving antiparasite medication to each kid, and a month´s supply of multivitamins.

 In front of the school.

 Loading back into the truck.

 Marcela and Norma, two Honduras who I work with in the clinic.

 Making birthday cake with some of the girls from my section Estrellas de Belen, for the January, Febuary, and March birthdays.

 Natalia... oh so cute.

My roommate Caro, from Austria.

Brigades and Visitors

I apologize for such a long gap in updates. I have had a very eventful March with very little time to write. I am doing well however, and excited that I made it successfully past my 3 month mark here, which also coincided with a fabulous and long awaited 4 day visit from my mom and sister. It was so much fun to show them around the Ranch, and even a little bit of Honduras, so that they have a better picture of what life is like for both me and the kids her as well. My mom brought me an entire suitcase of goods that I had been missing from the states, such as peanut butter, chocolate, magazines, clothing items, and some crafts for the girls in my hogar. They tagged along with me to my Hogar one night and took lots of pictures and met all 22 kids in my section. Another evening we cooked dinner with a family of four sisters and ate together, their family and mine. The next day my mom came with me bright and early to help open the clinic and stayed all morning assisting with various tasks such as finding patient charts, and counting up and bagging medications to dispense to patients. Tasks, as she pointed out, that would never have been allowed in the states. To make sure my family got the 'true, authentic Honduran experience,' we ventured out for an overnight getaway in public transportation (picture crowded, old, rickety, discarded American school bus) to pass through Tegucigalpa and visit two colonial towns a few hours away. This was personally a nice little get away for me, and allowed for the perfect quality time with my mom and sister. We ate some good food, walked around, and bought some souvenirs. The four days came to an end all too fast, but I excitedly await their return when my whole family can come in August.

At the Ranch we have one of the most state of the art surgery centers in all of Honduras that currently is used only 4 times a year when medical brigades of various specialties come. I always feel like I am transported back to the US when I walk into the center because it looks so nice compared to any other medical facility I have seen in Honduras. Mid-March we had an Orthopedic medical brigade of 60 people from the States (comprised of Surgeons, nurses, families, translators, and other auxiliary personnel) come to operate in our surgical center. In the first 2 days we did 200 consults and 58 surgeries during the following 4 days. I worked at least 12 hour days, sometimes more for the entire week as both nurse and translator, assisting with communication with patients and helping them feel at ease, and also playing nurse helping with pre-surgery sedation and recovery post-op. When things were slow in the recovery room I was able to pop into some of the Operating rooms and watch the surgeries. It made for a very exhausting, but fulfilling week. It was fun to do some 'hospital' type nursing for the week and get to know some new faces and learn a lot from the surgeons, other nurses, and anesthesiologists.

Another successful development was last week, after a month of planning, we formulated our own little medical brigade comprised of many of the healthcare personnel from the clinic and some fellow volunteers to return to the neighboring rural village of Tamal y Queso.  We piled 14 of us and our supplies into a small pickup truck and bumped along the one-track mountain road. Since this was our first visit where we were actually providing healthcare and education, we decided to begin with a manageable population size and just treat the 42 school children, whom we had all done preliminary assessments on during our previous trip. We brought along our physician and our dentist who assessed each child. We taught hand washing skills, dental hygiene, and all the kids received a toothbrush, toothpaste, multivitamins, and antiparasite medication. We also brought a well-equipped first aid kit to donate to the school and educated the teachers and some mothers from the community on basic first aid skills such as wound care, hand hygiene, choking response and the Heimlich maneuver, how to use basic over the counter medications, etc. It was such a rewarding experience to see direct results of healthcare implementation and also be able to focus more on primary/preventative healthcare. We hope to continue a supportive relationship with this community and with each visit expand the demographics of the population that we are able to care for.

I feel like I probably don't talk about the kids as much recently, since I have accustomed myself now to my environment and they have become a part of my life here. And sometimes the quirky or cute things that they do don't always strike me anymore like they did when I first got here because it has become common. And although my daily 'job' is not directly working with the children, it is for them that I came, and from them that I can often renew my energy. So I would like to share a few stories about the resiliency of one family. One night after coming back late from the surgery center during the brigade, we got a radio call that one of the abuelos from the grandparent's house, was not well. By the time we got there, he had passed away minutes earlier. Although he was grandparent' age, he lived on the ranch because he was chronically ill with emphysema and had two young children of his own here whom he could not care for, 8 and 11 years old. The older of the two, Yeimi is in my Hogar. My heart sank when I saw him knowing that this meant two sweet little girls were now parentless. I had the opportunity that night to help take his body up to the clinic and help preserve it and prepare him for his funeral. An experience that I had not yet had. A few days later, I attended my first funeral, and it was interesting standing in the cemetery and being surrounded by an overwhelming majority of children who had already experienced the pain of losing a parent or loved one. A week after the death, I had the opportunity to spend an evening with another volunteer and the two girls cooking dinner together and playing. Despite the recent events they were so joyful and the older one took great care in being like a mother to her slightly younger sister. They would lovingly talk about things their dad would do or had taught them, not with sadness, but with joy for the memories of him. It just made me feel so much hope for these kids that they are able to face and overcome such obstacles and still go on loving life.

My family with a family of four sisters that we spent an evening with cooking dinner. The two smallest are in my hogar.

In the clinic pharmacy room with Coto, my 'year of service' assistant.

Bagged water... slightly more sustainable than bottled water.