Shouldering Responsibility In Honduras

By Nancy K. Crevier

Kendra Barrow’s experience with Shoulder To Shoulder in Honduras this month was even more life-changing than she expected. The 25-year-old Newtown resident was dropped into a culture where poverty and health issues were more extreme than she had imagined. Then upon her return to the states, she was offered a job at a school in North Carolina and has found herself settling into a new life far south of Connecticut, where she grew up, and to which she had intended to return after her trip this summer.

“I’m living in North Carolina now, and never even got back to Newtown,” said Ms Barrow in a recent phone interview. “My mom is going to drive my car and all of my stuff down. But this position allows me more connection with the Honduras program, and I will be able to play a bigger part in fundraising for Shoulder To Shoulder here. It’s just a great experience for me,” Ms Barrow said.

On Sunday, July 27, she departed from North Carolina with a group of seven young people between the ages of 16 and 18 from the Carolina Day School, and her cousin, Jody Heck, as part of the Shoulder To Shoulder nonprofit organization founded in 1996 by Ms Barrow’s uncle, Dr Jeffrey Heck, a professor at the University of North Carolina Medical School.

Shoulder To Shoulder provides health care and community support in rural communities in Honduras, and is the sister organization to the local Hombro a Hombro programs there. The organization provides not only health care at four sites, but has initiated a meal program for children in rural areas, outfitted homes and communities with water filters, offers dental care, has set up libraries, and provides scholarships so that children can continue their education, which much of the time ends after sixth grade, said Ms Barrow.

“Then the children usually work in fields with their families, or work mending roads, or otherwise contribute to helping their families survive. For most of them, school after sixth grade is not practical. I was at the La Montana School, a school for kindergarten through sixth grade, and the closest middle school was another 1½ hour walk from there. [Shoulder To Shoulder] would like to be able to provide scholarships so that these kids can get an education, do something more than work in the fields,” she said.

Upon arriving in Honduras, Ms Barrow and her group joined up with an additional eight students from La Ceiba and their director, and then headed to Santa Lucia where the visitors were split into four groups. Each group was assigned to a school in the area, anywhere from 40 minutes to 1½ hour walk away, she said. The groups mainly walked to the schools, and in a mountainous region, it was quite a trek. “Sometimes there would be a truck from one of the clinics going that way and you could get a ride in the back of the truck,” she said, “but mostly our groups walked.”

The terrain in the area of Honduras where she visited was so difficult to drive on, though, and the roads so undeveloped for the most part, that most people in the area walk, or if they are fortunate enough to have the money, buy a horse, as a horse is a more reliable mode of transportation. “I did see a few dirt bikes, but not many,” said Ms Barrow.

Crossing The Language Barrier

Ms Barrow and her group were assigned to the La Montana School, where the volunteers mainly focused on helping the instructors teach English to the students. Despite the fact that she speaks no Spanish and the children spoke no English, Ms Barrow found that it was surprisingly easy to get her ideas across to them. “I knew zero Spanish when I got there, so the language barrier was scary for me. But we met local teachers the first night in Honduras and part of an opening night prayer offered by one of the teachers was translated to say that ‘love knows no boundaries. We will not let language be a barrier,’ and that spoke to me. I found that we exchanged smiles, pointed to things, and I had a lot of people to help, so it didn’t seem hard to me,” Ms Barrow said.

At La Montana, Ms Barrow and her group used songs, games, and role-playing to teach conversations, and made posters to help both the children and the teachers master English. As an English major with a minor in psychology from Central Connecticut State University, Ms Barrow felt that she fit right in. The children were eager to learn and the teachers, she said, were appreciative of the assistance. “Usually there are about three teachers for every 100 students, and the grades one to six are in one building of two classrooms, with three grades each. And they don’t have any assistants, usually,” she said.

La Montana School is located halfway up a mountainside, said Ms Barrow, but one morning a week all of the children climb the rest of the way up the mountain to a soccer field at the top. “They play all morning and then go back to the school for lunch and some classes. And the mountain is no joke,” she added. “I was exhausted!”

While so much about the children at La Montana was like children anywhere in the United States — playing soccer and tag, singing and dancing — there were things that shocked Ms Barrow.

“There was no way to prepare me for the poverty. Kids without shoes walking over an hour to get to school on those rocky, hard paths; no school supplies, not enough pencils or paper; and their poor eating habits. Corn is a huge food and is mostly processed or ground into tortillas. The families might have some beans if they have enough money to buy them, or if they had a successful crop, but often they eat just the plain tortillas and that is all. At La Montana, they had a food program through Shoulder To Shoulder, so all of the children had a meal once a day,” she said. That meal did include corn tortillas, but was supplemented with rice and beans, as well.

The other thing that caught her off guard was that with no pencil sharpeners available, children as young as 6 years old were taking pocketknives out to sharpen pencils. “Can you imagine that happening in the United States?” she asked. “It seemed so dangerous. So I right away decided to put pencil sharpeners on our priority list of needs,” she said.

Priorities

Creating a priority list was another mission for her group, she said. Some of needs included easy to remedy items like school supplies, but the La Montana School is in desperate need of a new roof. “The school has an asbestos roof, so there is a great concern for the long-term health for the children and the teachers. Another really frustrating thing was that the government had told the school they would have electricity and then built the wires up to within ten feet of the school, and quit. There were no outlets put into the school and no way to get the electricity into the school. It was crazy. You could see the wires laying there, and no way to use them, so the school has no electricity,” Ms Barrow said.

Fundraising this year will focus on replacing the roof, she said, and maybe finding a way to provide electricity to the school. She will be posting a master list of general needs on the Shoulder To Shoulder website in the near future, she said, and welcomes donations to support the efforts.

“I loved meeting the other teachers and getting to know them,” said Ms Barrow. “The teachers there have a passion for teaching and pass that on to their students. By the time we left, everyone was telling each other we loved them. I saw a lot of love, respect, and maturity in the young people I traveled with the whole time. You know, the kids from La Ceiba, which is a pretty wealthy town in Honduras, and the kids from Carolina Day School could have gone with their families on vacation or stayed at home and been comfortable, but they chose to volunteer at the clinics and in the schools. It was pretty impressive,” she said.

The group spent one day at a Shoulder To Shoulder clinic in Llantos as part of a medical brigade assisting with eye tests, blood testing, weighing and measuring children, and providing multivitamins. “We were told there were about 50 children in the village we would be giving vitamins to, but we had more like 160 show up. So that means that the others walked more than an hour from nearby villages to get this medical assistance. It was amazing,” she said.

The final two days of her trip, before coming back to the United States on August 12, were spent sightseeing and relaxing in La Ceiba, including being invited to a private villa where the hostess was holding a “very extravagant, catered event with live music and dancing. It was a lot of fun, but you realize there are extremes in the wealth and poverty very close to each other in Honduras,” Ms Barrow said.

In addition to working and fundraising for Shoulder To Shoulder, Ms Barrow hopes to work on getting a master’s degree in speech pathology and return to Honduras some day as a volunteer English teacher for an entire year. “And I am already planning a trip back there for next summer with the same group of people from Carolina Day School,” she said. “It truly was an amazing experience.”

To donate or view the needs list, visit shouldertoshoulder.org.