H4H is a small campus, comprising several indoor and outdoor classrooms clustered at the top of a gorgeous hill. It has grown over the past decade to serve grades K-6.
At first, we were a bit concerned about admissions standards mooo-ving lower:
But we quickly made friends. Fernando dubbed me "El hombre in el sombrero," after confusing me with a pirate. This led to lots of spontaneous sparring over the course of the week.
Kelly led an impromptu dollmaking workshop, handing out the dolls to students at the end of the week.
The classrooms had many familiar trials and tribulations. A shame that we always see the same hands...
The school is a main source of safe nutrition for the students. The line for rice and beans, or the occasional arroz con pollo, is a daily ritual.
Our sister-in-law Kat Trauber Macmanus was an absolute rock star. She brought all the tools in her arsenal as an NYC schoolteacher to bear on the high-energy kids at H4H.
Kat is a specialist in identifying special needs children at an early age. Here, she's working one-on-one on some outdoor exercises with our bicycling, pirate-battling pal Fernando to help him channel his (how to put this...) enthusiasm.
Her presentation was a highlight of the daily joint workshops for the teachers from the U.S. and Honduras.
Some of the students' parents were gracious enough to invite us to visit their neighborhoods and homes. Past Liberty Corner missions had built a simple metal roof for this family's home, dramatically reducing exposure to the frequent rains. Eight family members share one room divided by a row of furniture and stacked belongings.
ATV buggies like this are a common and inexpensive way to get around. Some students hail them to get home from school.
We visited a local youth camp, which included this caretaker's home. This was the site of one of the water filter stations Kelly helped install last year. This family no longer drinks out of the river. (We also visited the town's public health clinic, where the only physician on duty confirmed what we already suspected: that the single most preventable cause of death for local infants and children is dehydration due to water-borne illness.)
In some better neighborhoods, $3,000 or so buys cinder-block construction, and some families take great care of their front gardens. This may help with the bodegas some families run out of their homes.
As ever, we took courage in the fact that Tigger and Eeyore preceded us -- in this case, to one HFH family's living room. My real-life Tigger appreciates the H4H diploma on the wall as a proud parent looks on.
Bridges are irregularly placed and not reliable. I asked some students if they put boots on to cross rivers; I learned that they instead take their shoes and socks off. This helps protect their uniforms, which like the rest of the school's costs are all but completely subsidized by U.S. donors connected with HFH.
The cobbled-together, tin-roof hut nestled below washes into the river with every heavy rain; the family always rebuilds it in the same place.
Glenn Taylor, the extraordinary man behind so much of the cooperation between the New Jersey church and the La Entrada community, also arranged visits to a private clinic and the local Y -- which is the only other facility, other than H4H, offering comparable computer skills training in the area. Along the way, he coaxed some equally extraordinary maneuvers out of our Toyota van under weather conditions that were generally NOT so idyllic as you see below.
Understanding what these kids go through to get to the H4H school -- both in a general sense, and in a practical, day-to-day sense -- made the ribbon-cutting ceremony all the more moving. Here are Kat, Jonathan, Kelly and Glenn with some top students and HFH School Director Paty Villanueva (second from left). (Thanks to our translator Pamela for the picture!)
The following plaque marks the entrance to the new room:
To all of you who contributed funds for the construction of this room, I apologize that my pictures do not do it justice. (My real camera wasn't functioning, so I relied on my cellphone camera for the duration.) But I can tell you that it had the highest construction quality and finish of any room we entered during our entire time in Honduras, from the airport to the visit at the Y with the mayor's wife.
The children were visibly excited, and the school expects to generate income by renting the room to local businesses for meetings. With nice windows, recessed lighting, and air conditioning planned, it's also good for teacher team bonding sessions like the one below.
What we DIDN'T know was that the room was also designed with specialized under-floor plumbing and conduits to support dual use as a dental clinic! Not only most of the students but their families would never see a dentist if it were not for the school. (The dentist chairs were acquired to replace the duck-taped lawn chairs that had been in use before; thanks to Honduras Vision Team President Doug Liguori for the picture.)
This ingenious convertible design was the brainchild of Daniel Cruz (at left below), who we met on a tour of a local high-end private high school. In addition to being a talented architect, Daniel has participated in local archeological digs in conjunction with Harvard's Peabody Museum.
After the ceremony, it was off to a lovely lunch, a student concert and an abstract dance recital portraying the constant struggle between good and evil. (My cellphone camera cut off the biker-clad Lesser Angels on the other side of the two-toned central figure -- sorry!)
There are charities nearer to home, where the need may be real but the impact is often incremental. There are disasters from the Caribbean to Central Asia, where the scale of suffering and the necessary chaos of the response effort defy understanding. But at H4H, a patient and sustained commitment by people of different cultures, languages and countries is steadily improving the life of a growing community on a generational timetable.
Kelly and I are incredibly grateful.
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