Carol in Honduras

For the second year we were able to be on hand to present certificates and offer our congratulations to the students attending the El Chilar school where they are now able to access Grade 7, 8, and 9 education in their rural area school. This year the focus was on Computer Based Self learning. We have supplied computers where the entire program has been downloaded for their use.

Bryan Butler and I with one of the students

In the Morazanica school in El Chilar 11 students benefited from the Jr Hi program and 40 students in grades 4, 5, and 6 have limited use of the computers to practice keyboarding, reading and math.

Books in Honduras are a rare commodity. With donations to A Better World (Carol in Honduras projects) being targeted towards books… and help from Hernan Nieto who shipped many of them, we had a good supply of free reading books to share.

Some of those were donated to the new Dayhome (Casita Copan) where we spent time looking at the books and reading some of the stories. Two large buckets of books remain and we have decided to wait to distribute them. We are collaborating with Plan International who work with a number of communities in the far out rural areas. Saul Carrera will work with schools to submit a proposal for access to a supply of the books. I hope we can assess the needs and enthusiasm of those proposals before my next trip and award two of the communities with a large bucket of free reading materials.

The original seed money for the microloan project came from two of our donors and was initially directed to a microloan small business for Raimunda. With her payments and adding a little, we funded Cristinos microloan.

CRISTINO has purchased a fridge and an increasing amount of stock with his microloan. He involves his family… his wife and eldest child mind the shop when he is away and his son takes the responsibility of replenishing stock with trips to Copan.

Cristino asked me to thank A Better World for this opportunity to help him support his family.

Visiting World Vision staff to discuss our joint projects and discuss how they are collaborating with the other main organizations in the area. Here you see the map with the main organizations represented pictorially documenting where each NGO is working. I think it is a brilliant idea by the director (Exely) and should be presented at the next Project Honduras project. By the way, A Better World is one of the organizations represented.

We were following up the eye clinic from last March, exploring providing surgeries for cataract patients. In this meeting we tentatively developed a process to bring an eye surgeon to Copan as well as parameters to choose those eligible for surgery. This would be a collaborative effort between A Better World, Red Cross and Dr Franco.

I have had the pleasure of working with Carlos over the last few years.

He comes from a very poor family… his dad is an amputee and unable to work, his mom was the sole supporter of the family (when there was work available). Carlos borrowed money from me over the last two years to help support his last two years of school… and he paid it all back as soon as he was finished and could work picking coffee. He now has a job at a local restaurant …and approached me about a micro loan to start a small local store selling some basic things in order to provide his family with an income. That was 3 months ago. To date he has been exactly on time with his first two payments. He has dreams of continuing his schooling, and putting his 12 year old brother through school.