While our main purpose in Honduras was to build a day care center for the village of Independencia, we also made a couple of other stops to hand out used clothing and used toys to different villages and the Children's Hospital in Comayagua. Here are some pictures of those stops.
First we went to a town in the mountains called Las Uvas which translates as The Grapes. We saw no grapes. The truck ride to Las Uvas was crazy! Rocky, windy roads on the edge of the mountain.
This shows the other two truck loads of our group on our way up the road, if you look on the top right corner of the picture you can see the road continuing up the mountain, it was close to straight up.
This shows the beauty of the mountains but also how high up we were in comparison to the other mountains. My ears popped the whole way up.
We made it to Las Uvas, and it didn't take long for a crowd to form. We didn't tell the people at Las Uvas that we were coming because last time they were told a group was coming, the group's truck got hijacked and they took everything. I thought we had a good turn out and this was about all the people we could handle.
My dad liked this picture, he figured that little girl better hold on to her toy tightly, otherwise the other two would swoop in and grab it! Don't worry though, they all got toys and clothes.
This little girl was adorable, but look how dirty her face and legs and feet are. I don't believe any of the kids had shoes up there. You can see the moms wore flip flops though.
We started our way back down the mountain and stopped at one more place before finishing our decent.
This was the 'water plant' those two concrete domes with the white x on them is the water reserve. I'm not sure how that spot got chosen or why, but that was it...I don't think it was full very often.
Again, it didn't take long for a crowd to form.
On another day before work, we stopped out at the brick factory. I will blog more about the bricks later, it was quite a process. But for now I will just blog about the give away and show the kids.
I know all of the pictures look the same, but I thought it was so fun that the crowds of people just came. It's not like they have phones to just call each other up and let everyone know what was happening. I didn't even see any homes near by the brick place.
Suzanne also brought along her Polaroid camera and took pictures of the kids and family pictures because none of these people have any family pictures because they don't have cameras and wouldn't be able to develop the film. Suzanne took her camera to Las Uvas too. People were thrilled with the pictures, we had fun with that.
We also had a day at the work site where the women who are running the day care center handed out rice mixed with milk, cinnamon, sugar and raisins. We also took Polaroids during this since everyone in the village was out.
We also stopped at the Children's Hospital on our last day before work. Don't worry, I didn't take many pictures here!! I felt kind of bad taking pictures of the sick and injured kids. We just handed out stuffed animals at the hospital. The hospital is a little different than ours. When you bring you child to the hospital, there needs to be a caregiver there at all times to take care of the child. The hospital provides the medicine and the beds, but he caregiver/family must provide the food and blankets and bathe the kids and feed the kids. So the parents were there at all times, leaving the rest of the children at home, usually unsupervised.
I'm not sure what was wrong with the baby in the top pictures, I think he had some sort of problem with his eating. The boy in the bottom picture had some sort of furniture dropped on his foot and I believe he lost a toe.
It was amazing to see how happy just a stuffed animal made these kids. I was worried I was going to be really sad to see how these people had to live but everyone seemed happy and it was a very joyful and rewarding experience.
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