Casa Alianza

Last Thursday presented a window into another non-profit organization that works with children here in Honduras. A few of my fellow volunteers and I had the opportunity to visit Casa Alianza, an institution in downtown Tegucigalpa that works with street children and their families. While they are in no way affiliated with NPH, the two organizations are in the same line of work, and sometimes children are referred to the Ranch from Casa Alianza. In fact, Laura, our volunteer visitor coordinator since January who led the trip, actually recognized there a girl from her Hogar who left NPH in March. The girl left to live with her family, but evidently she has since found her way to this halfway house of sorts. She told Laura she wants to go back to the Ranch. With such ties in mind, I thought it valuable to relay what I learned about this organization to perhaps broaden the picture some and provide a little information of what life is like for some Honduran children outside the Ranch.

Casa Alianza, started in 1987 and largely supported by a New York charity, takes children off the streets of Tegucigalpa and works with them on a near term basis to resolve problems in their lives. These are wide ranging but typically involve physical or mental abuse, drugs, sex trafficking, and gangs. Over 90% of the children suffer from some sort of abuse. The organization is best equipped to serve children ages 12 to 18, any older and they are legal adults and difficult to help, and the younger ones are typically referred to other groups who have more specialized care abilities (e.g. NPH). Even so, they treat approximately 1500-1800 kids each year, and about 160 live at the institution at any given time.

Children are at the institution of there own volition, often just showing up on Casa Alianza’s doorstep because they have heard about the place through other street kids. They also have a street team that looks around the city for new children to help, inviting them to the house after three or four positive encounters. Many of these children are troubled by gangs, and the horror stories about Honduran gangs abound. Gang members are said to drive by in cars and force youths to show them their chests—if they have tattoos from a rival gang they are shot down right on the spot. This is one of the reasons that Honduras has an unusually high homicide rate among minors, a statistic of which the government seems unaware. Children are also referred to the house from other organizations or the legal system.

The house helps children foremost by giving them food, medical care, and a safe place to live. The children can attend school nearby and return to the house afterwards. If the child is in trouble with the courts or the police, the house has lawyers on staff who work with him to resolve those issues. They also have a family services department that works with the kids’ families to help their economic development, because due to extreme need many of the children are forced by their parents to work the streets to help earn income. They also have programs that work with adolescent girls, many of whom have been involved in the sex industry.

After all they do for these troubled kids, Casa Alianza still finds that others are ignorant or unsupportive of their work. Because many of their clients have been involved with gangs, some are untrustworthy of Casa Alianza or assume that it supports gang activities. Due to this youth gang involvement, some even think it is better for these street children to die or disappear (remember governmental apathy towards adolescent homicide rate). In any case, the house continues its unheralded work, and right now they are even in the midst a fundraising campaign to renovate their building. It was an eye-opening experience, helped me put some things on the ranch into perspective, and I wanted to pass it along.

A "Typical" Week

As good a place as any to start blogging about the Ranch would be to recount what is a typical week for me, at least as much as any other. Here are the day-to-day highlights of my last week, September 7th-14th:

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Volunteers have every other weekend off from work, and this weekend I am on vacation in Tela. Visiting this small north coast town with me are my two friends and fellow volunteers, Finn and Marieke. They are both from Germany; since arriving in January, Finn has been the school’s physical education teacher, and Marieke began volunteering with me in July in Padrinos. The Padrinos office coordinates communication between pequenos and their padrinos, or sponsors, the majority of whom reside in the U.S. or Europe. Marieke’s job is to translate letters that the kids write to their padrinos from Spanish into German. In the afternoons, she leads Chicas Podorosas, a program to support and educate the adolescent girls on the Ranch.

Marieke, Finn, and I spent Saturday at a Garifuna village near Tela called Miami. The Garifuna are one of the many ethnic groups in Honduras. They live on the coast, trace their roots back to Caribs and Africa, and maintain much of their own culture. They are expecially known for their Punta style of dance. On Sunday, we took the five-hour bus ride back from Tela to Tegucigalpa.

Monday, September 8, 2008


My morning routine is to get up at 6:30, shower, and eat breakfast in the big kitchen. Today was average – rice mixed with beans, mantequia (creamy white, butter-like dairy product), avocado, and milk. The ranch gets milk straight from the udders of the cows on their farm; it is whole, thick, and hot.

After breakfast, I talk with Tonin from maintenance about installing a hands-free sink in the Surgery Center – we agree to do this Wednesday. At 8:00, I go to bug Talleres, the workshops, about doing work. My primary job on the Ranch, loosely described as project manager for the Quirófano (Surgery Center) being constructed here, means that I frequently need Talleres to do things. Talleres, more often than not, feels that they should not do such things, and their blatant unwillingness to work under any reasonable time constraint is largely to blame. For this we are in a perpetual struggle of opposing interests, each side using all their guile, cunning, and available tools to thwart the intentions of the other. It is a never-ending battle that I fully expect to continue my entire time here. Talleres won today’s skirmish, as Renan from Metals successfully defrayed my inquiry about working on a bathroom screen—countering that they were still waiting on parts to be delivered to the bodega—and Marcio from the woodshop avoided a confrontation about constructing doors by escaping to a meeting, promising to call me when he could stop by the Quirófano to appraise the work. Talleres 1, Quirófano nil.

Returning empty-handed, I called Reinhart to discuss some business with a sub-contractor named Fausto. Reinhart is the Director of Family Services for NPH International, almost single-handedly built the entire NPH Honduras branch beginning in the 80’s, and is my boss. He is a large-framed, balding, middle-aged German who inspires a mixture of awe, fear, and respect from his peers and subordinates. Our talk centered on getting this Fausto to begin installing anesthesia and suction gas systems in Quirófano. At 9:00 I went to meet a potential volunteer at St. Christobal, the visiter house, for a tour of the surgery center. Afterwards, it was up to the Home Correspondent’s office to speak with Patricia about Quirófano fundraising business. Mostly, this was about coordinating information about our projects and spending patterns with NPH fundraising offices in the U.S. and Europe that are working to provide funding for those projects.

1:00 is lunchtime on the Ranch, and the lateness of the meal makes for short afternoons. It is always rice, tortillas, and a steady rotation between some kind or soup or chicken. To be fair, occasionally an item such as salad, pork, or a fruit drink is offered. After lunch, I wrote an email to a contact in Tegucigalpa about buying some surgical scrubs, and called Fausto about his work. He is waiting on parts (big surprise) but promises to begin in two weeks. Vamos a ver...I call it a day, go for a run in the mountains west of the ranch, and spend dinner in my Hogar.

Tuesday and Wednesday September 9 – 10, 2008

These two rather uneventful days were distinguished only by a discouraging lack on progress on Quirófano construction and an exchange in Hogar, so for brevity I will combine them. Of note Tuesday was a particularly brutal practice I endured with the Ranch’s soccer team, involving distance running, an obstacle course, and heavy calisthenics. Wednesday, our plans to install the hands-free sink were thrown asunder when, in a commonplace occurance, the power went out. Unable to work, we patiently rescheduled for Thursday and I went up to the internal clinic. I spoke with Alma, the head of NPH’s internal and external clinics, about an ophthalmology project.

In the evening, Hogar was difficult for one of my boys. First, briefly, every volunteer is assigned to a Hogar, or “home” of about twenty-some similarly aged boys or girls, where she will eat meals and interact with the children during evenings and on weekends help with chores. My Hogar is Discipulos de Jesus, a hogar of 22 boys aged 14-16. This particular night, a skinny boy with an easy, toothy grin named Gerson was uncharacteristically down. Whether or not his disposition provoked two of his fellow roommates is impossible to say, but they began to tease him. Not in a mood for kidding, Gerson lashed back, but as the boys were stronger he could not defend himself. Deflated, his pride temporarily hurt, he put his head down on the table and covered his face and any tears with his arms. I thought about how I had likely just witnessed one occurance of many, and how quickly some have to grow up, and not believing I could say anything to make it better, I patted him on the back and gave him my apple.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Today was a terrific Quirófano day. Ranch workers began preparation work on a new storage shed, or bodega, that at we are constructing to house Quirófano supplies. Leo from maintenance began installation of the hands-free sink. This sink is for surgeons to scrub in before beginning surgery: the water can be turned on by moving a semicircular device with the knee. Josué from maintenance and I put together some bathroom shelving for five of the six Quirófano bathrooms. An aside: Josué is an año familiar, a pequeño that is doing one of his required years of service to NPH before he can attend either high school or university. One year of service is required before NPH will support a pequeño to attend high school, and two years before university.

Later in the morning I spoke with Tom, an IT specialist who is here to volunteer along with his wife Casey, a doctor, about equipping Quirófano with internet. And I scored an important victory with Talleres when Marcio actually came down to Quirófano to take measurements for the wood doors we need built. To top it off, Juan, the ranch’s engineer who is very involved with Quirófano, told me that today he would order the epoxy I’ve been asking for for weeks in order to finish sealing the floors near the sterilizer. So all in all it was a very successful day.

Friday, September 12, 2008

Today marked the Ranch’s celebration of the Honduran National Day of Independence, a holiday every 15th of September. During the morning the entire ranch participated in a big parade that went from the army base in the nearby village of La Venta all the way back to the Ranch. Many of the children, especially the younger ones, dressed up in costumes and outfits, and there was a percussion band and baton twirlers. A few people watched from the sparsely populated town, but mostly it was employees and volunteers from the Ranch who cheered on the kids. Soldiers directed traffic as the children proceeded down one-half of the highway on which the Ranch and La Venta are situated. A squad of troops from the army base brought up the rear of the parade, and later they performed in a presentation at the school.

During the afternoon, Christiana and I met at the external clinic to help a few new pequeños choose eyeglasses. Christiana is an ophthalmologist from Germany who spent about six months giving eye exams to all the children on the ranch, fitting frames for those who needed them, and taking the frames and prescriptions to an optometrist in Tegucigalpa to make glasses. After vacationing for about six weeks she was back on the ranch for only a few days before she went home to Germany, and we wanted to use this opportunity to use her skills for a few new girls. Unfortunately, we could not find the key to open the room where her stuff was stored. In a confoundingly unsensible move, the clinic gave their only copy to the workers who are finishing construction of the consult rooms that contin the opthalmology supplies. It is not a huge deal, but it means we will have to pay for these services in Tegucigalpa for these children at a later date.

Saturday, September 13, 2008

This weekend was my turn to work, so I was at my hogar before 9:00 to eat breakfast and help with chores before going to the school for the day’s activities. Today was different because the children were to going to play in the morning and do their chores on Sunday instead. There were a few boys’ soccer teams from nearby villages that came to compete on the field at the school, and all the other children hung out and played games into the afternoon. At 1:30 lunch came in uniform red coolers, whose insides are permanently tinged by the contents they hold three times a day. Coolers are the method of choice for transporting the food from the kitchen to the kids, whether that be at hogar, talleres, or the school. Today's lunch was rico: spicy chicken, rice, and cabbage-tomato salad, topped off with pinapple refresco. There were a few free hours afterwards before mass began at the church at 5pm. During mass, there was a very relevant skit about stealing that incorporated a gospel message about the golden rule. Girls sit on the left and boys on the right to minimize mischief. After mass it was dinner in Hogar (eggs, tortillas, avocado, cheese, tea) before the boys fastidiously brushed their teeth, gelled and spiked their hair, put on nice clothes, and went to meet the girls at the Talleres auditorium for a concert. After I said my goodnights and snuck out the back, the week’s work over, I could still hear the echoes of a very average garage band as I made my way through the ranch and back to the volunteer house. Sunday I am off work and rest.