The Community and the Kids: Preston Palm

This is a photo of the “Calle Principal” or main street. It was one of the points of pride among the community since it was paved only two weeks before we arrived. Not many small communities in Honduras have a paved road like this and many considered it a luxury. On beautiful days like this one you could see the mountains that created a backdrop to our community. Many of the citizens had coffee farms up there that they would work to generate an income. Our community’s main export was coffee. One of the farmers had submitted his coffee to an international taste testing competition in Texas where it had won the number one slot in the flavor category. Needless to say the community held him in high regard. One more note about coffee in Honduras, everyone drinks it with sugar. There is no such thing as strictly black in Honduras.

The view out over the community from the “cerro” or hill was spectacular. You could see every single house, business, and school. In the background you might be able to make out some cell-phone towers. Yeah, EVERYONE in Honduras has a cell. It doesn’t matter how rural you are. People there certainly value being connected.

On top of the cerro there was a large field where the kids would go run, play, ride dirt bikes, and even fly kites. I was honestly rather excited to fly kites with them. It may seem silly, but I had been craving to fly a kite for a long time. Every time we went to the beach I would ask my dad to buy me a kite but that never happened. I guess it took going all the way to Honduras to fulfill this dream.

This photograph held several layers of irony for my partners and me. The object that the donkey is eating out of is actually an improvised trashcan made from half an oil barrel. These trashcans were the project that the AMIGOS group from the year before had implemented. As you can probably infer, their project was rather unsuccessful. Honduran culture is to throw trash wherever they are standing, littering. As a result, the trashcans became feeding troughs and the trash is lined up along the side of the road. We vowed to make our project more relevant.

The two photographs above show my partners and me hanging out with the local youth. The boy in the first photo is the 2-year-old host brother of my partners’. In the second photo we are hanging out with my host brother Dani (far right) and several other kids after one of the lessons that we taught. We taught lessons to the elementary school aged kids 2 hours a day, five days a week for the first four weeks of our trip. We discussed the topics of health, the food pyramid, the water cycle, conservation, and many others.