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First off, welcome to our blog.
Who are we? We are volunteers.
We are volunteers that have left our everyday lives back home to travel to the northern coast of Honduras to care for these lost, abandoned, and homeless children.
We are volunteering through a fantastic organization called Helping Honduras Kids that has created many projects for children throughout Northern Honduras and has given us the chance to be a part of this great work.
Below you will find pictures, heart felt stories, and our experiences as we continue to live in an orphanage called the Hogar de Amor, in English translated into "Home of Love".

Volunteering in Honduras - Beautiful Country and Beautiful Children

>> Wednesday, November 21, 2012

By Dana Banderet
November 21, 2012

I have been volunteering with Helping Honduras Kids for 41 days now. It has been a wonderful experience. I recently moved from California to live here in La Ceiba and volunteer on a permanent basis.

This past weekend, the weather was cool and nice. I was so ready to get away from being on the computer working for hours on end all week long. I was tired and needed some time with the kids. Saturday we went to another Children’s Home in the city called Casa del Nino (Boy’s Home). The Hogar de Amor played soccer against the Boy’s Home and they all had a blast. One boy’s sneakers were just too big for him and every time he kicked the ball, one of his sneakers went flying into the air. He was a real trooper though and didn’t let that stop him. Eventually he played without any shoes.
The HHK kids won the game 2-1. Carlos did a back flip and kicked the ball into the goal and made the team’s first goal of the afternoon. Little Mainor and his brother Angelo worked hard to keep up with the older boys and played well. Their bright yellow soccer uniforms were a nice contrast to the other team’s green colors.

This is a video of Carlos making the first goal for HHK. Soccer game

Once the game was over, the kids went inside the Boy’s Home building and played jump rope, card games and other games. There were kids everywhere. These boys at the Casa del Nino Home were really something. They jumped rope like I have never seen before. They would jump as a group but also individually and jumped rope while doing push-ups at the same time. It was all pretty wild, entertaining and impressive.


The kids have all left such an impression on me. They take life as it comes and make the best of everything. They are so unassuming and know how to entertain themselves with little to no props or toys. All the kids play well together too, big and small.

Life wasn’t always so easy or good for them though. All of them are in the Hogar de Amor because of severe abuse of one kind or another. Unimaginable things have happened to all of them. The first five years at the Hogar were rough as they adjusted to new surroundings, learned to trust each other and the caretakers, and live together. Some were extremely violent and had anger so deep that if they could have stabbed someone, they would have. Many of the girls would not speak to the founder of HHK or come near him at first, because they had been so abused by other men in their families.
Several girls have run away, and two others were so violent that they could not stay at the Hogar for fear they would hurt one of the other children or caretakers. It is hard to imagine what they must have gone through, and yet children are so resilient.

Today, as they all play together and have their occasional disagreements, you would never know they had been through so much abuse. God has been so good to these children. As they began to attend church and find out they have a heavenly Father who loves them, they have settled down tremendously. Most of the children are now saved and baptized. It is wonderful to get hugs from them all. One of the older boys, Venancio, is so polite and very gentle. He always comes up to me and says hello and shakes my hand. When he was sick not long ago with fever and really feeling awful, I prayed for him. Tears rolled down his face. It almost brought me to tears too. I wanted him to feel better right then. He went to bed and the next day he told me he was feeling better.  He has reminded me a couple of times in the following days again that he was better. I told him God is good and to praise and thank the One who healed Him.

On Sunday, we went to Peru beach. It was a nice sandy beach with no one around. There was a river that ran into the ocean that the kids played in. Some of the older boys took the 30 year old boogie boards that HHK has been using and went boogie boarding in the ocean. The waves were choppy due to the rain and wind from the day before. It looked like it still wanted to rain that afternoon but the sun held out.


Some of the kids played hopscotch in the sand, some picked fruit and berries from the nearby trees, and one boy, Santos, wrote “I love you Hannah” in the sand. He asked me to take a picture of him next to his art work and send it to his “madrina” (godmother/sponsor). He was so proud of his beach art. He carved the sand with his hand and then broke pieces of wood to fit into all the letters of all the words until it was completed. At first, he misspelled love, and when I pointed it out to him, he just started all over again. It had to be perfect.


The kids get excited when they get a chance to write something to their sponsors on Facebook. I helped several children write small notes to their sponsors. Each day afterwards, they excitedly ask me if there had been a response. They come running to the gate when I show up at the Hogar and that is the first thing they ask me. “Has my sponsor replied yet” What did they say?” Their little smiles just light up the room.
One of the girls, Cherlin, played tickle monster at the beach with me and squeezed me so tight all afternoon that I had sore ribs the next day. She is a sweet but quiet girl usually. This day though, she was hugging and tickling and chasing me around.

As we drove home after a fun afternoon in the sun and surf, I found myself gazing out the window of the car and looking at the jungle trees and mountains as they whizzed by. Honduras is a beautiful country with all its different shades of greens against the blue skies. There are several different types of trees. Some are flowering, some tower high overhead, some overhang and offer a lot of shade and some are pines. Even the clouds and rain have a beauty of their own. Yet, amidst all that beauty was also poverty, lack, despair, and dirty mud & wood huts thrown together with some plastic, wood and metal sheets to keep out the rain and weather. Mothers were watching their children play or washing clothes in dirty water; the only water there was. Kids are dirty and often do not have shoes to wear, and many had extended stomachs from hunger. There were babies with babies; young girls as young as 12, 13 & 14 raising babies they had bore.
I rarely saw men as part of the family unit. In the campesino villages we visited from time to time to give out food and clothes, there were hundreds of children and women. I often wondered where all the men were. There were a few but it was obvious the family unit was not what God intended it to be.

As I continue my journey in this land, working and learning and spending time with the children here, I am blessed to be a part of an awesome organization, Helping Honduras Kids that takes such good care of so many children. Not just at the Hogar de Amor, but also at the Jungle School, the Grandma kids up in the mountains and other poor local families, and the Campesino Peasant Villages. There is a lot of need and never enough time to do everything, but one thing I have learned is that with God, there is always enough, and He is big enough to handle the toughest of situations as He gives us the grace to meet the needs of so many.

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Thanks for visiting our blog and remember to visit again! We will be posting weekly updates keeping you up to date on our new adventures with the kids! Thank you for all of your support!
---HHK Volunteers

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