Day Four – Monday March 5, 2011
June 28, 2011 by meredithwilliams
Monday morning we woke up to another beautiful sunny day and a hot pot of coffee. We started to organize ourselves into groups to get the supplies to start painting the first school we were going to and to start collecting backpacks for our second school.
We traditionally try to raise money and gather some school supplies before we go down there so that we can leave a school that has a lot of children in need with some school stuff. This year, we also held a backpack drive as a fundraiser at school. We asked our fellow students, professors and school staff to donate $10 to “sponsor” a child in Honduras. We took this money as well as some of our personal money down to the markets to see what we could purchase.
Backpacks – Nicole
As the most fluent Spanish-speaker of the group, buying backpacks and school supplies became my project. Right away I ran into a few problems. First, the school we were working with apparently had many more children than the schools for which we had bought backpacks in previous years. In addition, Honduras, also negatively affected by the struggling economy as well as political instability, has recently experienced price increases, so all of the materials and supplies we needed for the work we would do, including donating the backpacks, ended up costing more than what our budget anticipated.
The budget for backpacks was 25 Lempira a piece, and we needed backpacks for 63 girls and 42 boys. Some members of the group and I went, accompanied by the daughter of our host family, to look for backpacks at local shops in Lepaera. After visiting two or three shops, it became clear that even small pre-school sized backpacks could not be obtained for 25 Lempira each. The average price for a standard-sized backpack was a little over 100 Lempira. The salesperson at one store informed me that the owner of her store was in San Pedro Sula, the nearest big city (about four or five hours away), and we could order the backpacks to be brought from there at a lower, wholesale price.
As a group, we discussed this possibility, and though we had hoped to support the local economy by buying the backpacks from local vendors, we chose to order the backpacks from San Pedro Sula because of the constraints of the budget. I returned to the shop and spoke with the employee, informing her of our new budget, 50 to 60 Lempira per backpack. She asked me to call that afternoon after she had a chance to speak with the store owner. When I called, she informed me that the lowest possible price would be 70 to 80 Lempira. As a group, we chose to accept this price.
By the time we picked up the backpacks, a few days later, the price had become a solid 80 Lempira per backpack.
Though we ended up spending much more than we had budgeted for, the smiles on the kids’ faces as we passed out the backpacks and school supplies was more than enough to justify the extra expense and the stress of negotiating for and ordering 105 backpacks.
Chicken Lunch and Painting Begins!
It has become something of a group tradition to have lunch at a local restaurant. I actually have no idea what the name of the restaurant is; we just always refer to it as the “Chicken Place.”
We decided that in between the backpack adventure and some of the boys going to buy paint, we would stop and grab lunch at the Chicken Place. They have this great rooftop patio with tables and chairs to enjoy your food at. We filled the patio up and the waiters brought us out plates and plates of chicken, French fries, tortillas, beans, salad and rice.
After lunch, it was time to finally start working! We all loaded up into the van and the SUV to head to our first school. The entire school consisted of about seven buildings and was painted a pinkish color. There was one building, however, that was painted a bright turquoise. It hadn’t been painted in a while and was in need of a bit of a facelift.
We matched the paint colors with the rest of the buildings and all 15 of us grabbed paintbrushes and paint rollers and got to work. It is amazing how fast 15 people can work to get a whole building painted, inside and out. After one very long afternoon, we were pretty close to be done!
