How time flies... over half way done in Honduras

Our whole volunteer group together at the goodbye party before saying goodbye to four.

Sharing the Ranch with my family.

Relaxing on the beautiful beaches of Cayos Cochinos, Bay Islands, Honduras.

Exploring Guatemala and Honduras with friends Linnea, Erik, and Beth.

In front of our sand-floor hut on and island called "Peanut"

Parker made fast friends with the girls in my Hogar.

Rafting the Rio Cangrejal in the northern jungle of Honduras.

Proud to be an American... in Honduras.

June ended with me completing 24 years of life and celebrating my first Honduran birthday.  I would like to add that the birthday song they sing here is the longest I have ever encountered. And all my hogar girls screeched with great pleasure as they cracked 5 eggs over my head (Honduran tradition). They decided to take it a step further and dumped milk and mud-water mixture on me as well. Whose birthday were we supposed to be celebrating anyway? A week later I also celebrated my first USA Independence Day out of the country. The volunteers had a big bonfire in the center garden of our house where we roasted bargain Honduran hotdogs and ate a delicious American flag cake. I was also told “Congratulations” by several Honduran employees, which made me giggle.

On July 15^th I started a week-long vacation and headed to Guatemala to meet up with some FLBC camp friends, Beth (who is in the Peace Corps there) and Erik and Linnea Johnson. After getting delayed at the border because I forgot my residency card and my passport looked like I had been illegally in the country for 4 months, I finally made it across the border and reunited with my friends a day later. We traveled through Antigua, Panajachel, down to the giant Lake Atitlan, and stayed the night at a beautiful hotel overlooking the lake and several volcanoes. We spent the next four days traveling though Honduras seeing Mayan ruins and enjoying the beaches on the northern coast, before retuning back to the Ranch to spend the weekend here. It was such a blast to spend time with friends from back home and explore new parts of Central America.

The day they left marked the start of a surgical/medical brigade of 68 doctors, nurses, auxiliary personnel and families, here on the Ranch. The first day of the brigade I spent assisting and translating for a Dermatologist who came and treated hundreds of children and their skin problems. The most common issues being foot funguses or “athlete’s foot,” warts, and skin rashes. The other days of the brigade I worked in the surgery center in the admissions room helping to prep all the patients for surgery. It is always hard work and long days starting at 5:30am and working until evening, but really rewarding. Two of my hogar girls had surgery during this week, and it was a pleasure to be able to follow them through the whole pre-op, inter-op, and post-operative process, and even get to observe their surgeries. Many of the patients that receive orthopedic or general surgery when the brigade comes are patients that at some point have passed through the external clinic, where I work. For many of these people who come to the external clinic in need of surgery, we can only offer basic pain medication and write their name down in the “Brigade Book” to contact in 3-6 months when the next medical brigade comes. It is very rewarding to see patients walking out of the surgery center (even though it might be on crutches) with a big smile on their faces, finally relieved of a disability or illness that they may have lived with for years, when they never thought surgery would be an affordable option.

We get two groups of new volunteers each year and they overlap by one month with the outgoing volunteers to better facilitate training and orientation into their new jobs. While no new nurses came in this group, we had 5 fabulous ladies arrive the first week in July to start their 13 months of service. Therefore, the day after the medical brigade ended, it was time for four of our volunteers to close their service and we celebrated our last night together with a big goodbye party in Tegucigalpa. It was sad to say goodbye to these volunteers whom I have lived and worked with for the last 7 months, and weird to realize that the next Goodbye party will be my own. The next morning I got on a bus and headed north 5 hours to meet my mom, dad, brother, and sister who flew in to embark on 10 days of traveling all over Honduras. They were great sports through a variety of conditions, including sleeping in a sand-floor, grass-roofed hut on a small island and a lot of riding in the back of pick-up trucks. Visiting Copan Ruinas and my host family where I first attended language school, white-water rafting in the jungle, and hiking and relaxing at a cozy Bed & Breakfast in the cloud forest were definitely highlights. We spent a weekend on the Ranch just relaxing and hanging out with the kids. For my dad and brother, it was their first time seeing where I have lived and worked for the past 7 months. My brother was definitely a big hit with the 11-15 year old girls in my hogar. One, without a shy bone in her body, just sat right down right next to him and didn’t leave his side for the rest of the afternoon. Another stared up at him from her seat when he walked into the room and just uttered one word… “Beautiful!” I also loved it when my dad just sat right down at a table and started coloring with the girls and then exchanged drawings at the end with one of the girls, Yulissa. On Wednesday I said goodbye to my family with a few tears, but it was such a wonderful experience to be together as a family seeing some new parts and sharing my favorite places of Honduras with them.

So now I have just been adjusting back to the work routine and enjoying the new volunteer group. It is also nice to be back in Hogar with the girls. This upcoming week will be a big week for me, as I am helping in both the internal and external clinics and coordinating the activities of 4 visiting nurses. But if there is anything I have learned over these past 7 months, it is how fast time flies by regardless of how much you try to slow it down, so you might as well just carry on and try to love every minute of it.

What a life.

The biggest focus of my work outside the clinic over this past month has been implementing a de-parasite campaign throughout the ranch. This is something that happens every six months, but instead of just passing out pills to everyone, we decided that it would be much more useful and better preventative healthcare if education on parasites was included along with the medication dispensing. So, on most afternoons lately, I can be found walking around the ranch toting my “Parasites” poster and a box full of medications. It has turned out to be a bigger project than initially anticipated since we have been understaffed in the clinic for the past few weeks, and I am sometimes on my own to cover the 20-something sections of kids on the Ranch, all with different schedule. But it has been fun as well to go into each hogar, especially since I am rarely over on the boys’ side of the Ranch. When I give my talk, or ‘charla,’ I mostly educate on how intestinal parasites are passed (Fecal-Oral route) and how to prevent the passing of them = good hand hygiene, only drink potable water (even that is sometimes questionable here, given that ours has been brown for some weeks now), and wash raw fruits and vegetables well before eating. Then all the kids line up and take their first parasite medication and I leave the second batch of medications with the caregiver, doing my best to ensure that everything is clear to reach optimal compliance.

I am continually amazed by some of the skills that the children develop here; maybe because they are skills that not many people acquire in the US or at least until they are much older. One of those would be machete-ing. We don’t even have a verb for it in the English language, but in Spanish, Machetear = to machete chop. This is an ever more frequent weekend work task during the rainy season to keep the grass on the Ranch short, which I am told, in turn decreases the number of mosquitoes. Lawn mowers don’t exist here. I am quite awful at this chore, and it only took me a measly three minutes to get a nice big blister on my knuckle. Despite the extensive efforts of my girls to teach me the proper technique with a machete and a lot of giggles, I think they have finally just given up, and have accepted that it is not a skill that the Gringa is going to acquire.

Last night I had a one-night experience of being a new mother and the lack of sleep that you get with a newborn. We have a new family that just arrived to the ranch, including a pair of 3 month old twins, who really like to cry and wake up in the night about every 2 hours to eat. Good thing they are pretty darn cute, or spending my Friday night in the clinic with them wouldn’t have been as much fun. When they are finally placed into the baby house this next week it will be a big change for the staffing and routines to have the addition of two such young members to the NPH family.

One of the highlights of this month was taking my first real vacation last week (as in traveling for more than a weekend since getting to Honduras 6 months ago). It was wonderful and restful. I went with my good friend from University, Katie Bray, who is just about to finish up her year of service at the NPH Children’s Home in Guatemala. We met up in the northern part of the Honduras and headed up to the coast to enjoy the sun and beaches for a few days. I found out that my sunscreen doesn’t work very well. I slept more than I have since getting to Honduras. And our last day in town, on a Monday, we practically had the whole beach to ourselves. Then I brought Katie back to the Ranch and we spent a few days here comparing the many similarities and differences between the two NPH homes. It was really great to see her since it had been over a year since our last meeting.

 The view from our hostel of the city of Tela, looking toward the ocean.

 Comida tipica... a typical (fancy) Honduran breakfast: eggs, ham or sausage, cheese, cream, avocado, beans, and plantains.

 Exploring the bambo forest at the botanical gardens outside of Tela.

 Enjoying dinner with my friend Katie Bray.

 What is the beach without sunset pictures.

We put Katie to work in the clinic for a morning.

May Madness

I can’t believe May is almost over and along with it, my 5 month mark here in Honduras. I mostly just look back in awe of how fast this time has gone by. The month of May in particular for me was filled with a variety of emotions stretching from fun, joy, sadness, and frustration. The first weekend of May was spent on a much anticipated trip with 4 other volunteers to the National Park La Tigra located a few hours outside of Tegucigalpa. It was a perfectly relaxing, pampering weekend where we spent two nights at a beautiful bed and breakfast, ate some really good non-Honduran food, and explored the cloud forest on a 5 hour hike to a waterfall (lacking a little water after the dry season, although pretty), and just enjoying a little time away from the Ranch.

My last couple weekends as ‘Nurse on-call’ I was stretched emotionally and tested in my ability to function well in new environments and on lack of sleep. The first weekend began on a Friday afternoon taking one of our littlest toddlers into the hospital, and I stayed the evening worrying in the emergency room with her and her caregiver. I got a little bit of sleep staying the night at the NPH University girls’ house. Then next morning I walked to the public city hospital that was just a few blocks away to stay the day with another little NPH girl who had been admitted a few days earlier. After managing to get her finally discharged around mid-day, I made it back to the Ranch just in-time to attend mass. I got to spend a few minutes with my kids in Hogar before I got a phone call that one of the elderly members of NPH living in the Grandparents’ house was sick. Low and behold, I ended up doing back to the hospital for a third time within a day. I stayed the night there with him (still in my church clothes) and sleeping in the ever so comfy emergency room chair. I returned home late morning Sunday emotionally and physically exhausted from spending almost all of the last 48 hours bouncing from one hospital to the next.

This past weekend was almost a repeat, but this time instead of spending the night in a private hospital, I was with one of our boys in the Children’s medical unit of the city, public hospital. This hospital is the teaching hospital and has many specialties, but operates with very little resources. If your family member needs any medical supplies such as a bag of IV fluid or some sort of dressing, you physically have to go across the street to the pharmacy and buy it for them. You also must bring your own towel, toilet paper, soap, water, carry your own labs to the laboratory, etc. You have to work hard to find out any sort of information about any plan of care, otherwise it is very easy to just get lost in the system and be there for days without much being done. Although flawed, it leaves me with much more appreciation for our American healthcare system. So there we were, in a room with 6 beds and each bed had a small chair beside it for the mother (or me as the stand-in for the night). There was quite a social community feeling in the room where the mother’s had made friends with each other, everyone was generously sharing food, stories, and cell phone calls. I read some stories to my patient and the little toddler in the bed next to him, and we even managed to get a group Uno game together. When it was time to sleep, some of the mothers who didn’t prefer their hard plastic sitting chair to sleep in pulled out plastic bags or pieces of cardboard and laid them down on the floor to sleep.  Torn between the better of my three options of squeezing onto the cot with my patient, utilizing his wheelchair, or just settling for the floor, I eventually ended up joining the other mother’s on the floor. To say the least, I didn’t sleep a ton that night, as I would occasionally wake up to the sounds of children vomiting or crying in pain, or the Nurse coming in to give medications. But on the positive side, my little patient did sleep well and stayed in a positive mood through most of the ordeal.

The weekend prior was our Volunteer retreat which was a nice weekend away with the whole staff, which rarely happens because half of us work opposite weekends. We stayed just outside a little touristy town in the mountains called Valle de Angeles. I helped plan the weekend with two other volunteers to include a mixture of reflection time, group discussions, and team building activities. It was a really positive time to get to reflect a little bit about volunteerism and our own personal volunteer experiences, highlights, and struggles, and also to bond together as a group. In just over a month, the July group of new volunteers will come and those who have been here for a year will prepare to leave.

As part of being in the clinic, we receive all the new children who come to the Ranch. Usually they come as a group of siblings and they stay in the clinic for 1 week to be assessed and make sure they are healthy before being placed into their Hogars. It is always interesting to see in what state they come, and their stories are often heartbreaking. Sometimes the children seem a little shell-shocked as they assimilate to the community and culture here on the Ranch, especially if they have come from extreme poverty, to now receiving their own clothes, having their own bed to sleep in, indoor bathrooms, electricity, drinking water, and more. I imagine it is also overwhelming for them to be put into a house with a group of 20 other children roughly their age. As the weeks go on, the kids make friends and learn their way around and the routines here on the ranch and generally do pretty well.

In March, we received a new family to NPH that really touched me and many others. It included 6 children, ages 1 to 12 years old, and their 34 year old mother who was dying of cervical cancer that would have once been operable and treatable, but the family did not have the resources for her to receive treatment. As a result, Juana and her family were brought here so that she could pass away knowing that her children will always be kept together as a family and will be safe and well provided for. The children were all placed in various Hogars, based on their age level, but they came daily to spend time with their mother. The oldest boy, who I admire a lot, sometimes spent the night in the clinic to be near her. He is only 12 and I believe was caring for family before coming here. This was the first time in my life that I had watched somebody actively dying where there was nothing to be done but hospice care. During Jauna’s two months here with us, the clinic staff did their best to pamper her and make her last few days as peaceful and comfortable as possible. Sometimes when I see one of the 6 children I feel sorry for all that they had to go through watching their mother die, but then that quickly melts away when the 7 year old, Marta (who I like to call Martita because she is so tiny), comes running down the sidewalk with her arms wide open and a huge grin on her face, as she careens into me and I give her a great big hug and know that she is in a great place and will grow up to do good things.

 Our view from the Bed & Breakfast that we stayed at in La Tigra.

 The group of volunteers that I spent my weekend in La Tigra with.

 Caro and I embarking on our hike in the cloud forest.

 Admiring the canopy above.

My amazing roommate and emotional lifesaver, Caro.

Welcome the Rainy season and daily afternoon showers (or rather down-pours).

 Preparing the baby shower cake for our Ranch doctor.

 Baby shower festivities with most of the clinic staff.

Semana Santa and 4am Mornings

As I write this, I sit in the pitch black, although it is only 7pm, because the power has gone out yet again. I am trying to keep the bugs from swarming my computer screen, since right now that is the only light in the whole house. Since coming to Honduras, I have a new appreciation for our electrical services and technology back in the states, because over the past few weeks, the power outages here have been a daily occurrence. It is often conveniently while I am trying to serve up dinner to the girls in my hogar, when suddenly I can no longer see a single thing in front of my face. Then the Tias scramble for their cell phones to try to dimly light the mess-hall. Another popular time for the power to go out is right when I am trying to cook my dinner, and then, sorry… no dinner for me until the power comes back on, or there is always the back up of PB&J sandwiches.

If you were to ask me what the best thing about this month is… I would have to say Mango Season. The last few weeks, the mangos have been sweet, ripe, and plentiful. Today, for part of lunch, I got handed a huge mango as the side dish. And they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. On most of them, we just eat the skin and all, a good way to add more fiber into the diet here. The ripe mangos are a big treat around here as most of the kids raid all the mango trees months before they are ripe, when they are still green and hard, called mango verde, and they eat them with salt, oil and vinegar.

The week before last of Semana Santa was quite a fun and exhausting week. The first Sunday was our girls’ camping trip. At 4am we loaded up three buses with sleeping cots and thermoses of food and piled in 100 girls, caregivers, and a few volunteers and headed west toward the El Salvador boarder to a town called Caridad. They say that the devil wears shorts here, and I have found this to be true. Luckily for the early start, the 6 hour ride over was pretty cool. For the three days that we were there, we stayed in an indoor/outdoor sort of community meeting hall. To celebrate Palm Sunday we joined Caridad in a procession that started up a hill by a school and we marched all the way down into the center singing songs and waving our palms. The procession began with mostly just our NPH group, but by the time we approached the church so many community members had joined, we had tripled in size.

The second and third days were by far the most fun, and a relief to get out of the heat. We spent the whole day down at the river swimming and playing on the ‘beach.’ I think we must have looked like an inflatable circus with all the floaty toys we had and the shrieks and splashes of the kids. The river was wide and deep, mostly damned off by a rock bridge so that there was no strong current. We roped off a swim area to better keep an eye on the kids who couldn’t swim, and for the older ones who could swim, there was a perfect multi-tiered rock wall to jump off of. Among the children there was a certain sense of liberation and excitement that came with this vacation, maybe just what you would expect to see with any group of kids on spring break. It was overall a blast to spend time with the kids outside of the Ranch and their hogar and have a lot more unstructured play time.

              

The rest of the week, the clinic was closed, so I spent each day with my hogar. The days were filled with mass almost every day, and a variety of other religious activities. In our free time, we did beading or other crafts with the girls, and they would always ask me to bring my laptop so that we could watch movies. It beats me how they enjoy it so much with 20 girls crowded around the tiny screen and speakers of my laptop. They beg the volunteers to do ‘turno’ (taking a turn sleeping in the hogar and being the responsible adult at night) so that they can stay up late and watch movies. They all pull their sleeping pads off their triple-tiered bunk beds and pile them on the floor, like a giant sleep over. When I woke up in the dim light of the morning and all were still sound asleep, all I could see was a tangled pile of little girls scattered about the floor.

              

Easter morning was another early start, as I dragged myself out of bed at 3:30am and everybody congregated on the boy’s side of the Ranch. We began with a bonfire and some songs and prayers. Each with a candle in hand, we processed toward the outdoor chapel in the blackness of night. It was a neat experience to sit through Mass from about 4:45 to 6:45am as the sun came up. I don’t exactly know why the Ranch has a tradition of early morning Easter mass, but rumor has it that that is when Jesus rose from the grave. Whether that is true or not, it didn’t stop the little girl in the row behind me from snoring through a good chunk of the sermon. As we processed out, every kid received a milk chocolate bar, which is rare here, and a real treat for them. And that was Easter… we were done by 7am. I worked with the girls the rest of the morning until their caregivers came back from vacation at noon, and then had the rest of the day off. I took that time to enjoy a nice Sunday chat with my family back at home and here about their outstanding Easter meal in comparison to the rice and milk that I received for dinner that night. Although I did miss my family traditions back home, it was fun spend Easter with the kids and have some unique experiences like 4am mass.

 Processing into Caridad with members of the community for Palm Sunday.

 Outside of the church after mass in Caridad.

 The view of the river where we swam each day on our camping trip.

 This is where we slept for three nights, with cots sprawled all about the community center.

 Some of the tias and older girls enjoying some watermelon for snack.

 One of our Semana Santa activities, visiting each station on the way to the cross on Black Friday.

One of our young actors depicting Jesus on the cross during "The way to the Cross."

Aldo, a recent addition to the NPH family.

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.