Schools and Scholarships

Schools

It is common in Honduras to walk into a classroom and find 30 students sharing 2 textbooks, and homework being filled out with crayons because there are no pens/pencils left. In addition to scholarships, Friends of Honduran Children (with the help of donations) provides schools with full sets of supplies to help them get through the year. On previous trips, I have been part of school upgrade projects to help build new classrooms, bathrooms, and sidewalks to allow a mud-free walk between classes. Objects like calculators, dry-erase boards, and student workbooks which are commonplace (and sometimes even obsolete) here in North America, can be rare luxuries for a remote Honduran mountain school.

There is one such school located in a small coffee-growing village in the mountains of central Honduras. In 2017, a group I was a part of was the first non-Hondurans ever to visit the village. We were greeted by most of the village, including a group of around 35 young, cheering kids in school uniforms that were in various states of poor repair. The students invited us into a small, wooden building with a metal roof where the only light came from cracks in the wall boards and the open door. This was the school. We shared an afternoon filled with games, songs, and piñatas, before unloading the pick-up trucks full of school supplies, clothing, backpacks, and bags of food for the kids to bring back to their families.

We visit this village every year, and since 2017, the school has been upgraded to a much larger, brighter concrete building with windows, lights, whiteboards, bathrooms, and a playground. We continue to bring trucks of supplies and contact the teacher to find out what she needs to improve her classroom. We’ve provided a full set of Honduras curriculum books, a scanner/printer combo, and a helmet for her to wear on her ATV that she uses to commute to work. They’ve come to count on us as their “Amigos de Canada” (Friends from Canada).

During a visit in 2022, we were given a worn-out “Team Canada” backpack filled with fresh oranges. We had given the backpack to a young 1st-grade boy in 2017 filled with school supplies. He had just graduated from 6th grade and wanted to return the backpack with a gift from his family as a way of saying thank you to us for the support over the years.

Scholarships

The importance of school for children can not be undervalued. It serves as a source of education, community, and child development. These programs are particularly necessary in areas where an education can pull children out of devastating poverty and give them purpose and possibility. In Honduras, school is free until 6th grade, after which students must pay $250 per year (an unobtainable cost for most families, especially in rural communities). Friends of Honduran Children currently provides scholarships to allow students to attend their local high schools.

I visit these schools every year to check in with the scholarship students, and each year I’m overwhelmed by the gratitude they have for the opportunity to continue their education and the pride they take in their accomplishments. In 2022, I had the privilege of speaking with Juana, one of the scholarship students. She had just returned from a national science competition where she placed first in physics for the entire country. As the daughter of a sugar cane farmer, she told us that she would never have had the opportunity to attend high school without our scholarship and would have instead sold tortillas at the market with her mother.

60% of Hondurans cannot afford to attend school past 6th grade, leading most children to enter the workforce at 12 years old, or move to the city where they often find gangs or abusive partners as the only offers for support. Our work continues to provide as many scholarships as possible, allowing for more success stories like Juana’s.