Food Deliveries

"Downtime" between groups is a pretty misleading term, especially when some of these days involve waking up at 3:20am to leave the house by 3:45am and the day finally ends at 8:30pm. Not every day has been this busy, but it's far from downtime.

We have been working on a big food distribution project to benefit all of the students at so far more than 30 schools in southern Honduras. Kids Against Hunger, an organization in the US, donated a shipping container full of a vitamin fortified rice-soy "casserole," as they call it, for us to distribute to some of the areas poorest and most malnourished schools. We are up early every morning to load the car up with boxes and hit the road to deliver the boxes of food, explain the goal to the teachers, and teach teachers and parents in the community how to prepare the rice for the kids to eat at mealtime during the school day.

So far, the kids have loved it. We've noticed that the further "out into the sticks" we get, the bigger the smiles on the kids faces when they take the first bite of food. It's great to see that they like it and know that its so packed with nutrients, but it's also heartbreaking in that it makes me worry about the effects it has already had on their health when often the kids don't have anything to eat but a tortilla or a mango.

Note: Here, there are good mangos and there are bad mangos. "Bad" mangos are kind of the equivalent of crab apples, from everything I've gathered, only there is a twist...bad mangos, when they are not yet ripe, contain an acid that literally burns human skin. The first time I saw this around a child's mouth, I was afraid of what the mother was really trying to cover up by telling me her son was burned by mango milk (do I LOOK that gullible, lady?), but multiple reliable sources have since confirmed that, yes, that's actually a thing. Bad mangos really are bad mangos...

One of the mayors in a community explained to me that this time of year, the need for food for school kids is the greatest. Because we are in the midst of dry season and most families depend on agriculture-based work, many families are entirely out of work and can't afford to feed their kids. The mayor and several teachers described how the kids are in "good" circumstances if they are able to bring a tortilla to school as their food for the day. Not surprisingly, rates of anemia are high.

In other areas, teachers have commented that some students come to school specifically when there has been a food project in the area (the government has a program in place for school lunches, but it seems to only occur rather sporadically...), otherwise the kids are sent to work. So if nothing else, hopefully we are helping draw some more kids into schools.

We are delivering supplies to last 3 months at a time and plan to continue this at intervals throughout the year, so we can make sure that the food is being used as is intended and we can be in fairly regular communication with the schools and teachers. In some of the totally and completely inaccessible communities (and you'd be surprised at what we deem to be accessible...), a representative has come down with a horse or donkey to load the animal down with boxes and hike back to their school and the students.