Hogar, Sweet Hogar

As I mentioned before, I've begun guiding with a local NGO called Quetzaltrekkers. It is absolutely awesome. I love the work and I love my coworkers, but the best part are the organizations we support. This is the sort of thing I could see myself doing for the rest of my life. I am happy and I am at home.

All of the profits from our treks support three organizations. Escuela de la Calle, Primeros Pasos and an orphanage. Escuela de la Calle serves who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend school, with a full range of services, like hot lunches, health care and after school activities. Primeros Pasos is clinic on the outskirts of Xela that sees kids and adults and does home and school visits.

My favorite is our orphanage. We have anywhere from eight to eighteen kids, from four to eighteen years old. Right now we have twelve, ranging from six to fourteen, ten boys and two girls. There's only one adult in the house, so the older kids, especially the girls, end up taking care of the younger ones a lot. The Quetzaltrekkers staff tries to go over to the house a couple of nights a week, to have dinner, play futbol, help with homework and just hang out.

The kids seem so happy and full of life, especially considering what a hard time most of them have had. Very few of them are actually orphans. Most of them were abandoned by a single parent or another family member when times got really tough. Some ran away when their parent's alcoholism became incapacitating, or abuse unbearable. Some of the kids do have caring parents who are concerned with their welfare, and have sent to live at the orphanage in town so they can attend school, or so that the parents can seek work in the United States and send money home for a better future.

These two little monkeys are Julian and Eduardo. And while letting them sit on my lap while I read them stories may have given me lice, they are what makes my life meaningful.

On a totally tangential note, I find organizational naming practices here hilarious. Organizations, especially governmental organizations, are given long descriptive names so that there is no doubt about their purpose. Then, because the names are so long and hard to say, they're generally converted back to acronyms. The acronyms usually bear no resemblance to the original name, or clue to the organization's function, i.e. Escuela de la Calle, the Street School, becomes EdelaC.