Veinte Uno De Octubre

Today my plane landed in Tegucigalpa around 11:30.  I had fun, but I was glad to be home.  A group from East Tennessee is here and Marc picked me up and we hit the ground running.  After the group ate at Carnita's and, by choice, I had a chicken sandwich from Burger King, we went to a state orphanage called Veinte Uno de Octubre.  It is an orphanage for boys.  For those of you who have visited Casitas Kennedy, you have seen nothing yet in deplorable conditions.  Some of the interns that have been to the prison said this orphanage was far more prison-like than the prison.

We are putting bars on some of the windows that face the playground at Casa de Esperanza.  We are doing that to prevent broken windows.  At Veinte Uno de Octubre, there are bars on every window and locks on every single door.  In many cases, multiple locks on doors.  And then there is barbed wire and razor wire.  There is a teeny tiny window on every single bedroom door.  Of course, it has bars on it.  The boys sleep on mattresses on the floor and are locked in at night. They sleep 15-20 to a room and are locked in at 6:00 p.m every night and the doors are unlocked at 6:00 a.m. every morning.  No adult stays in the room, just 15-20 kids. There is no curtains on the shower or the toilet.  There is no privacy.  Any where. Can you imagine little boys living like that?

Many of the boys had no shoes.  And there seemed to be a high percentage of special needs kids.  There are 50 boys there.  They eat rice and a spoonful of beans for every meal.  There is no where near the staff we have at Casa de Esperanza and with three times the number of kids.  The staff was nice to us, but I did not hear them talking kindly to the boys.  Nor did I see the staff giving any hugs.  The group gave lots of hugs, though.

Most of the kids probably don't attend school.  There were several older boys that could not even write their names. I guess this is the future generation for the dump.  How sad is that?

We played soccer.  And took pizza and soda.  Try to imagine how much those boys enjoyed pizza after having rice and beans three times a day.  I think the boys enjoyed themselves.  The group did. 

Tonight at devo, we kept talking about how hard it was to get the image of that place out of our minds.  Perhaps, we don't need to get the image out of minds.  Perhaps, it needs to stay there.  Perhaps, we can do more.

It was a dismal place.  And depressing.  This is why we do what we do.  So that a few children do not have to live like that.

Terri