The children at El Hogar de Amor y Esperanza in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, have lived through tragedies. Some grew up on crime-ridden streets where drugs and gangs are the norm for abandoned youths. Others spent days locked in their homes while both parents worked. Those who did see their parents regularly often found themselves toiling in fields or begging for change.

El Hogar, an orphanage and school for students in grades 1 through 6, has a special bond with schools in British Columbia. For five years now, B.C. kids have raised money for the project in Honduras. The children are all roughly the same age, but fate has dealt the two groups very different hands.

Working with the Vancouver-based Universal Outreach Foundation, these B.C. kids are making a real difference in Honduras, as the Georgia Straight saw when it visited El Hogar’s facilities in February. El Hogar is using aid to finance comprehensive development projects. It takes kids off the street, gives them an education, and then sends them out into surrounding communities to share what they have learned.

Sitting in a pub in West Vancouver last January, Ian Rose, a project coordinator for UOF, told the Straight about some of the kids that El Hogar is helping.

“I met one kid who was traumatized,” Rose began. “He was asked to baby-sit his little sister and his mother disappeared for four days.…When she got back, the little sister had died because they didn’t have food. And the mother blamed the boy for the death of his sister.”

At the time, the boy was six years old. For years, he lived with the guilt his mother placed on him until a psychologist at El Hogar learned his story and began to help the boy forgive himself.

Another child watched his father kill his mother. A third was left at home by his mother, who was out working as a prostitute when he overturned a stove and burned his face terribly.

“These are the kinds of kids that you are dealing with,” Rose explained. “So apart from just being poor, they have all this trauma or posttraumatic stress to deal with.”

Honduras is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. According to a 2007 World Bank fact sheet, more than 50 percent of the Central American region’s 7.5 million citizens live below the poverty line.

In such a country, Rose noted, poverty means living hand to mouth. For many, an inescapable cycle develops in which the struggle for survival leaves no money or time for an education. There is therefore little hope of escaping a subsistence existence.

That’s where El Hogar steps in. At her office in Tegucigalpa, Claudia Castro, the orphanage’s director, told the Straight that children are found through relatives, neighbours, or organizations like the Episcopal Church.

She explained that El Hogar gives children a safe and healthy place to live and, crucially, an opportunity to attend school. The approximately 100 kids at El Hogar come from homes where books and uniforms are unattainable luxuries.

“Most of the children say that in their community, they didn’t have time to play and were working with their fathers and mothers,” Castro said. “It is difficult in the beginning but now they are learning to live like a child.”

In the middle of the concrete jungle that is Tegucigalpa, El Hogar stands as an oasis of swing sets and bright murals. During class time, children laughed and excitedly called out to answer their teacher’s questions. A visitor’s peek into a classroom invariably triggered a resounding and happy response, “¡Hola, buenos días!”

Back in West Vancouver, Rose emphasized the seriousness of the school’s work, stating flatly: “It’s a refuge for kids who would otherwise die.”

At a time when international aid is discussed with increasing skepticism, UOF is funding development projects that prove such aid works.

Many of El Hogar’s students not only survive, they prosper. After graduating from El Hogar de Amor y Esperanza, the children have options for how to continue with the organization. Kids can go on to attend a technical school located on the outskirts of the capital and train to become a welder or electrician, for example. Or they can move outside the city to El Hogar Escuela Agricola, where impoverished Honduran youths prepare for a rural life of growing crops or raising livestock. Both programs also include classroom lessons like those you would find at any high school in the country.

“There is no point in taking kids, putting them in an orphanage and school, and then at the age of 14 or 15, putting them out on the street again,” Rose emphasized. “You have to complete it. You have to give them some hope of becoming citizens.”

El Hogar Escuela Agricola is located just outside the town of Talanga, about a one-hour drive from Tegucigalpa. The medium-sized farm is equipped with everything from chicken coops and pigpens to a computer lab and soccer field, and it grows a variety of fruit and vegetable crops.

Fifty-nine students were living at the school when the Straight spent the night in February. While leading a tour of the facility, Richard Kunz, project director for El Hogar, described a student’s average day at the agricultural school.

Students wake up at 5 a.m., he said. After a quick breakfast, they get to work on tailored assignments, like working fields or tending animals. After lunch and a short break, academic classes keep the children occupied until 5:30 p.m., when it is time for dinner. Finally, it’s homework in the evening followed by a little bit of free time before bed at 10 p.m.

If all goes well, the kids leave the agricultural school with a diploma that says they have completed grades 7 through 9.

Like Rose, Kunz emphasized the importance of continuing the children’s education past the sixth grade. “If we didn’t offer anything else, they wouldn’t have any career opportunities offered to them, especially in a country where unemployment is over 30 percent,” Kunz said. “We would have lifted them out of poverty for a while but all the investment would not have made a permanent change in their lives.”

Breaking the poverty cycle is a “crucial” goal for El Hogar, Kunz continued. He explained that El Hogar has three reasons for existing. The first is to address poverty in its most fundamental forms and ensure that as many children as possible are fed properly and given a primary education. The second is to break the poverty cycle by keeping the kids through to ninth grade and giving them a vocational skill. The third is to help the kids transform the communities from which they came.

El Hogar students bring their skills into the community, where they’ve helped farmer Milton Mairena install a drop irrigation system. Travis Lupick photo

Travelling in a pickup truck down narrow dirt roads in a nearby rural area called La Sabaneta, Johnny Aguilera, a teacher at El Hogar Escuela Agricola, explained the school’s outreach program. He said that small groups of students are sent out from the school with an instructor to assist farmers in the area and share what they have learned. Together, students and teachers deliver instructional sessions on topics like drip irrigation. The outreach program aims to empower students by placing them in leadership roles and assist communities by increasing agricultural productivity.

Leaving the pickup truck at a washed-out section of road, Aguilera led two students up a steep path to a field of tomatoes and peppers. There, two farmers, Milton Mairena and Victor Illias, reported on an improved irrigation system that El Hogar students helped them install earlier in the year.

“The school has helped with technical assistance and production,” Mairena told the Straight through Aguilera, who worked as a translator. “I am very thankful for the students’ help.”

Aguilera noted that Mairena’s small farm was one of five such projects in La Sabaneta that El Hogar students were assisting with.

Back at the agricultural school, Kunz said that the goal is sustainability. He noted that the average annual income for families in these communities is between $300 and $500 and that most homes are off the electrical grid and without running water. “Basically, it is rural poverty,” he said. “So our kids take what they have learned and apply it to these projects.”

As an example of the outreach program’s potential, Kunz claimed that one project saw students’ efforts help a family to double its annual income to $600. With the ability to save a little money and invest it in next year’s harvest, Kunz said, the family was given a chance to break out of the poverty cycle.

A lot of this would not be possible were it not for the fundraising efforts of students in B.C. Reached by phone on the first day of spring break, Sentinel secondary student Nick Pizzacalla said that UOF connects Sentinel’s Make Poverty History club with staff at El Hogar and keeps students updated on where donations go.

For example, Pizzacalla said, in December, Sentinel raised $5,200 for El Hogar. Instead of simply mailing a cheque, Rose contacted the orphanage and asked them what they needed. A request for 10 bunk beds came back and that’s where the money ended up going. When the Straight visited El Hogar in February, the beds were already in use.

“We’re breaking the poverty cycle,” Pizzacalla said with confidence.

Sentinel is far from the only B.C. school producing tangible results. Last Christmas, West Bay elementary school raised enough money to supply El Hogar’s 100 boarders with milk for an entire year. And in February, Chartwell elementary raised $1,000 for El Hogar that bought the school more bunk beds and food.

Rose claimed that UOF’s administration costs are an impressive zero percent. Volunteers like him work full-time for free. When Rose visits Honduras, he pays for the airline ticket. In Honduras, at El Hogar, nobody is making worldly salaries. Employees at the agricultural school largely live off of what the farm produces.

By the time street kids in Tegucigalpa enter El Hogar’s technical or agricultural school, many are old enough to be gang members. Some would have had to commit murder to pass street gangs’ harsh initiation tests. But as night fell on El Hogar Escuela Agricola, the teenage students played chess with one another and shared tiny amounts of candy with friends.

Sitting on the school’s steps, Kunz admitted that aid is not always effective, particularly in large development projects. But El Hogar is a grassroots organization, he noted. “We are dealing directly with the kids and with the communities.”

Kunz explained that with El Hogar, the focus is at the level of the community. “It’s about getting people on Sachs’s first rung of the ladder,” he said.

Jeffrey Sachs’s 2005 book The End of Poverty received widespread acclaim for its pragmatic arguments in favour of development aid. In the book, Sachs presented extreme poverty as a problem that could be solved by assisting the world’s poorest nations onto the “bottom rung” of the economic-development ladder. At that point, Sachs maintained, a country could enter the global economy and begin to independently take itself the rest of the way up the ladder.

Kunz described El Hogar’s efforts as applying Sachs’s thesis at a micro level. “Our project will not change the overall economic climate in Honduras,” he said, “but it has the potential to change the lives of the families involved forever.”

At the orphanage, Castro told the Straight the story of an 11-year-old girl named Elis. When she arrived at El Hogar, she was only six. Castro said that Elis wouldn’t play with the other children, so she gave the girl a doll. The gift was met with confusion.

“She told me that in her home, she was like a mom,” Castro explained. “Washing floors and cooking for her younger brothers and sisters.” Elis didn’t understand why anybody would want to pretend to raise a child. “She was a little one but she has been old,” Castro said.

At El Hogar, you see kids turn around, Castro continued. “It’s amazing when they go back to their community,” she said. “They look like different children.”

Rose and other UOF volunteers are bringing stories like Elis’s back from Honduras and sharing them with students at Sentinel and throughout B.C. Rose described the resulting enthusiasm as a favourite part of his work for UOF.

“We’re not talking about trivial amounts,” he said. “There’s nothing like watching what these kids can do.”

For more information about the Universal Outreach Foundation, check out UniversalOutreachFoundation.org. If you would like to help the kids at El Hogar, send a note to Ian Rose.

Travis Lupick was in Honduras as a recipient of the Seeing the World Through New Eyes fellowship, funded by the Jack Webster Foundation and CIDA.

Read more stories from his trip:
Doctored crops stir Latin American debate (April 16, 2009)
Exploring Peru in the shadow of the financial crisis (February 17, 2009)
Discovering "mass food production" in Honduras (February 13, 2009)
A walk through the poverty of Honduras (February 12, 2009)

You can follow Travis Lupick on Twitter at twitter.com/tlupick.