Give Hope 2 Kids Blog

Honduras' Orphans: Part 1

People often ask us why there are so many orphaned and abandoned kids in Honduras, so I'm writing a series of articles to answer that question.  I write this from our 8 years of experience in working with students, abandoned kids, the Honduran social services, and many other non-profit organizations in Honduras.  While we will keep our kid's histories private, these are the types of stories they could tell.    -- Sarah Furrow

Teengage Moms

Young teenage moms are commonplace in Honduras.  Statistics from a major hospital here record that the average first pregnancy is at 15-years-old. 

I could probably write all day on our observations of and experiences with teenage moms here, but I’ll try to simplify it into a few main points:

• It’s common and even fairly acceptable for a girl of 13 or 14 to run away with an older guy.  Teenage girls often see this as an escape, often from boredom or an abusive parent or stepparent.  People here call this “getting married,” but there’s usually not a wedding and the relationships generally don’t last long.

• Young girls here often feel trapped by poverty and a lack of options for their lives.  In Honduras, most kids don’t study beyond the 6^th grade or the 9^th grade, especially in rural areas.  It’s common to be 14, be out of school, and have no job prospects or anything else different over the horizon.  For a young girl, finding a guy and having a baby might seem like a "start" to their lives.

• People here, especially in rural areas, assume that you have to have your babies very early in life.  You’re supposed be finished having kids by your mid-20s.  People don’t criticize teenage moms; it’s normal and expected.

It’s a common scenario for a girl of 20 to have two babies from two different men and be currently alone.  What options does she have?  She’ll either have to move home and hope her parents can support her family, or leave her kids behind and look for work in the city, or find a new man.  If she does find a new man, he very well may say he doesn’t want her other kids.  

Teenage moms often can’t support a baby, financially or emotionally.  Moms sometimes abandon their kids in an effort to "start over" in life when they feel they've run out of options.

In our years in Honduras we've seen this story repeated over and over.    So many girls we know have gotten pregnant young and stopped short their dreams of an education and career.  Unfortunately, they don't believe that they have any other options in life.  

Part of our job here is to encourage girls and help them set goals for their futures.  We tell them to wait for marriage until they're older and educated, and tell them that they're worth waiting for.  We are teaching young people how to have healthy marriages and good parenting skills.  Hopefully we can encourage positive change, for a better future for Honduras and it's young people.

Introducing Our 2013 Gift Catalog

Welcome to the season of giving!  This is such a great time of year to stop and remember everything for which we’re grateful and then to turn and bless others.

At Give Hope 2 Kids, we try to turn outward in generosity and bless the people of our community.  We don’t want to hoard our resources when they can make such a difference in the lives of those around us. 

We like to help our local school by donating school supplies and making our copy machine and internet available to the teachers.  We happily use our vehicles to transport people for community events.  When there’s a big event going on within the village, we often host it at our place, or send up our sound equipment and instruments to help.  And then of course there are always individual needs where we can do our part, like giving a jogging stroller to transport a boy who can’t walk, or offering work to a parent trying to help their family survive. 

It’s important to us that we’re a viable part of our community and not just an orphanage closed off from the village.  We want to teach our kids generosity.  God wants us all to have generous hearts, whether or not we have abundance from which to give.

We are excited to show you all the projects in the 2013 Gift Catalog!  This year we have some wonderful new projects, like purchasing solar panels so we can generate our own electricity, (electricity is SO expensive down here!) and sand filters to purify all our water.  We’re also including the perennial favorite: helping us purchase cows!

We hope you'll find a project that you can adopt and get excited about making it become a reality.  These projects have helped us to make huge progress in our ministry like purchasing enough animals to produce all of our own milk and eggs and a huge percentage of our meat.  It really does help us to care for our kids, and we appreciate your interest.

Please click the link below to see our other great giving options and get involved in the work of Give Hope 2 Kids.

The 2013 Gift Catalog

School is Ending and Rainy Days are Coming

As we head towards the winter months and the holiday season, it means certain things to us in Honduras and at Give Hope 2 Kids.  Since they don’t celebrate Halloween or Thanksgiving here, things move from celebrating Honduras’ independence in September, straight to Christmas decorations in October.  (Thankfully, I don’t think I’ve heard Christmas music in the stores yet, but now that October is over, I’m sure “Frosty the Snowman” will make the airwaves.  Let’s not let Frosty get us too off-track  though.)

The end of October means that school is wrapping up for the year.  We never quite know when the public school will end, until about a week out.  This year there are two different heads over the public education system giving two different end dates for classes! 

 

For our Afterschool Program, we’re ending along with the private schools.  All the kids just finished their final tests for the quarter and now we’re hosting a carnival day to celebrate how well they’ve all done.

 

Our Afterschool Program went so well this fall.  We’ve taught classes full of enthusiastic learners and seen so much progress in them.  Having a more focused program, with kids that are attending because they want to be here, makes a great learning environment.  The English students have made faster headway than in their previous classes, the drum class can keep time with a simple drumbeat, and the youngest class experienced learning as an adventure through oceans and cities and a pirate treasure hunt, among other things.

Here the winter months include long rainy days, where it gets cool enough to enjoy sweatshirts and warm drinks.  It’s a time where things move a little slower, so we can take a few deep breaths and regroup from the busier months.  During our months of school vacation, we’ll pare back our educational activities to a simple Library Program, more like what we did in the past.  We’ll offer reading time and activities in an informal setting. 

So here’s to more time for family and friends in this next season of the year!

September Highlights

September is a busy month in Honduras, mostly because two of the big holidays fall in this month.   First we celebrated Dia del Niño, Kid's Day.  This year the kids had a party with a piñata in either school or preschool, depending on their age, and then we hosted a carnival during Library time.  Click here to see more photos of our Dia del Niño partying.

Right after Dia del Niño comes Honduras' Independence Day.  The biggest tradition here is that all the kids march in parades with their school.  This year we had kids in every section of our village parade, from the military corp, to the pom-pom squad.  The kids really enjoy participating in this show of national pride.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This September though, we were even busier than normal, because of our new classes, called Tutoria Estudantíl La Esperanza.  Below you can see all the kids lined up on the first day by class level.  We have 60 kids coming, from 4 villages!  

 

 

 

 

 

The older kids are studying English and computers, taking a music class, and participating in Bible, library time, and sports.  These classes are much more formal than anything we've done on-site before and the kids are really responding and rising to the occasion.  More parents are asking when their kids can start.

Somehow we always think we're building as much building as we'll need, and then we start a new program like this.  We've already outgrown all our Library and office areas!  The above English class is in the "garage."  Plans are already in the works to add on more classroom space to this area.

 

 

 

 

 

We're tutoring the younger kids in the basics: reading, writing, and 'rithmetic, and incorporating other fun learning activities into their class time, like pirate treasure hunts!

So far our new class system has been a success!  We're so excited that we can offer great learning opportunities to our local kids.

An Incredibly Sad Day

We just had a heartbreaking thing happen around 11:30 this morning. For reasons that are still unknown to us, the six new children that have lived here for less than a month were taken away by social services. We all gathered around them, gave them hugs and kisses, and prayed together with them. I don't know why things happen the way they do sometimes, but I do know that God has a plan for every one of those precious kids. Please help us pray for Carlos, Ingris, Agustín, Jorgito, Yensi, and Dennis. Even though we are all upset, I feel that in the time we had to watch over them, that we did the best that we could of showing them that we love them and that God loves them. We'll send out more updates as soon as we know more. We would appreciate your prayers for our ministry and our work here. This is our post about the kids

Making Strides towards Self-Sustainability

In the past year, we’ve made incredible strides in producing our own food and working towards self-sustainability.  This is an important value of Give Hope 2 Kids, for we try to stretch every donated dollar as far as possible. 

Producing our own food also gives meaningful work to our Honduran staff and is something for them to teach our kids.  We want to raise up good workers and not people who have their hand out, expecting life to given to them.

We have a new agricultural expert on our Honduran team, so we’re planting more of our own food.  We recently moved the cows and sheep across the river, away since they kept eating everything we were trying to grow. 

The animals are doing really well though, even though we relocated some.  We’re able to raise a good percentage of our meat now.  We have great laying hens that produce three dozen eggs every day.  Our cows produce all our milk and most of our cheese and yogurt.  We’ll be putting in more pasture for cows though, so we can keep up with our dairy demand. 

Our best product to grow and sell for self-sufficiency is coffee.  So, we’re planting more acres in coffee and learning better growing techniques.  We’ve recently perfected our roast and we’re getting rave reviews on it. 

In the upcoming months, we hope to raise the funds to add some solar panels to our buildings.  We have a solar plan that should easily cover half of our electricity usage.  Since we pay more per watt than anywhere in the US, this will be a big savings for us.  

If you’d like to help us on our path to self-sustainability, you can click here to donate.

Great Volunteers Make Our Day -- Everyday

The ministry of Give Hope 2 Kids couldn't function without great volunteers.  We've been blessed through the years with awesome volunteers, people who have come and helped us love kids and do excellent ministry work.  This season, we have our largest volunteer force to date.  We're doing more than ever before with education for our community and it's all thanks to these great people.  

Kelvin & Monica Johnson, with their daughter Kelly, have served with us for over a year and a half now and have made a big difference in our ministry.  They have tackled a wide range of projects while they've been here, from hosting groups, to working on construction projects, to throwing parties for our kids.  They currently lead in the planning of the Friday Night Youth Group and the community classes we teach.  The Johnsons plan to stick around GH2K for at least another year or two and we're certainly grateful for the role they've played in our lives and ministry.

Recently, another family moved down to work with us: Jacob & Cynthia Baker, and their girls, Maddie & Myra.  All four of them have jumped in here with hearts to serve.  They expect to be with us for a couple of years and we're looking forward to spending that time with them.  Their family is involved in a wide variety of activities, from collecting eggs (the girls big job), to co-leading the preschool class, to administrative work, to leading the volunteer "church."  

Leah is an awesome gal who is part-way through her year volunteering for GH2K.  She is our resident librarian, who organizes the Library and much of the Library Program and classes.  The spark she's added to the Library is huge!  Leah also co-teaches the preschool class.  We really appreciate her great attitude and willing heart.

In July, Kaitlen came and started her year of volunteering here.  Kaitlen is assisting with teaching English, preschool classes, and is using her passion for soccer to spend time with kids here.  She has a great heart for the kids and we really enjoy that about her.

For part of last year and earlier this year, we had an excellent volunteer here named Daniel.  Unfortunately he had to leave us for a season, but the good news is that now he's back!  We're excited to have Daniel here again.  He excels at building relationships with our Honduran team, while helping them build more of our facilities, and he's excellent with the kids.  We've always appreciated Daniel's heart to serve and be wherever he's needed.

Our newest volunteer Corey came and jumped right into everything: construction, teaching classes, and spending time with the kids.  He's already added a lot to our team.  He has a great heart and a lot to offer when working with kids.  

So, as you can see from their long and varied job descriptions, we depend a lot on our volunteers.  They make our ministry a success.  Give Hope 2 Kids certainly wouldn't be where it is today without the history of excellent people coming to give of their time and passion.  Thank you volunteers! 

And here's an updated photo of the our family.  We're Jason & Sarah Furrow, the directors of GH2K, and our kids are Josiah & Eliana.

Our Little Ones Love Preschool

We are now offering our 2 to 5-year-olds an awesome preschool program and they are loving it.  The newest excitement for the kids is that they each have their own chair with their photo on it.  The excitement for the adults, is that after only a couple months of this program we are already seeing improvement in the kid's development.  

Most of our kids have neglect and malnutrition in their life history, so several are behind in their language development or have sensory sensitivities.  Thanks to some great volunteers though, who have expertise in early education and special needs, we are giving these kids a great place to work through these challenges.  

In preschool our little ones sing and dance, practice following directions, plays games to sort colors, do painting projects, and more.  They're excited about learning and we're encouraged that they're getting the specialized attention that they need to thrive.

The New and Improved Library Program

We're relaunching our new and improved Library Program here at Give Hope 2 Kids.  It's exciting to see a fresh influx of kids enjoying new books and more creative activities.

Earlier in the year we suspended our Library Program to focus on helping our village school.  We wrote previously about the dramatic changes enacted in the school system.  Due to fewer teachers and more school days, we've sent volunteers to our local elementary school nearly everyday so far in 2013.  Now however, we'll be swinging our focus back from the school to our Library Program once again.  

We're ready now to offer English, computer, music, and Bible classes here on-site at Give Hope 2 Kids!  Thanks to a great volunteer force and larger facilities, we can offer these classes and have the Library open three afternoons a week.  We are excited for an ever greater way to reach out to the kids in our community.  

Recently our team was discussing what influence our educational programs have.  Sometimes it's easy to get caught up in the daily grind and forget about the big picture, or miss what the home life is for many of our kids.  Jorge is a student that reminds us of why our classes for the community are so important.  Jorge is a boy that started school really late.  He's the first kid in his family to go to school, even though he has lots of school-aged brothers.  He and his brothers are all little cowboys that are taught how to work hard, but not how to read.  Now, thanks to our classes and tutoring, Jorge will have a chance to go on to junior high and high school.  Can you imagine being the first one ever in your family to finish elementary school?

We value being a Children's Home with an outward focus, a community perspective.  We want to share our resources and knowledge with any willing kids from our area.  For young people here, getting an education is the difference between growing beans and corn as a subsistence farmer and having an open world of opportunities.  We hope to prepare many local kids to thrive in high school so they can go on to succeed in university and then do well the years beyond that.  

Introducing Our New Kids

For over a year now we’ve had 10 kids in the Give Hope 2 Kids Home.  Yesterday we added 6 more kids to the mix!  It is an honor to be charged with caring for these kids.

So, there are now 16 kids living in our Children’s Home.  While that’s the official number for the Children’s Home though, it’s not how many kids live here.  If you include the 14 kids from our staff and volunteers, we actually have 30 kids living on this property – and 21 adults!

You may be asking why there’s such a crowd living here, so we’ll explain.  When a child comes from a background of neglect and abuse, we feel the best way to get them healthy is to surround them with healthy families that reflect God’s love.  We’ve found three great families – mom, dad, and their kids – to take in and raise our “orphans.”  Then we try to surround these families with great support, in the form of our volunteers and staff. 

By God’s grace we are creating a community where kids can grow up feeling secure and loved.  

We had to wait a few months for this newest batch of kids.  In June the new house-parents,  Jesús and Rina, moved here with their family.  They're from our village and we've known their family for several years.  We've seen how well they've raised their own kids, so we are excited to watch them incorporate these six new children into their family.  We've already seen Jesús out playing soccer barefoot with the kids,  in a culture where dads don't play much, so we're encouraged about the future of this newly blended family.

There are two families represented within the group of 6 kids.  The first family includes Carlos: 9, Ingris: 8, Agustín: 4, and Jorgito: 1.

The second family includes Yensi: 9 and Dennis: 6.

We have seen so much improvement and growth in the lives of the kids here.  It is a privilege to offer them a home and hope for a better life.  We anticipate watching this new batch of children adapt and thrive.  

 

 

(Sadly, since the above was posted, these kids had to leave our Children's Home at Give Hope 2 Kids.  They are missed.)