Volunteering:

By participating on our programs you will be involved in a variety tasks that our foundation carries out. For example, you will visit schools and families to take photos, videos and do interviews with them. You will also fill out their profiles und get to know them well. You will help in the nutrition centers and deliver food to them and families who live far away.

In general, you will spend a lot of time visiting villages with our team. You will help in our office doing administrative work and maybe even help with our English web pages and promotions for an US audience, if you like to do that. You will visit/help at our sustainability project, the farm. You will help children do their homework at our office and you will be involved in our regular fundraisers where we sell food or clothes in town. We are very open to new ideas as well.

Overall, we can say that you will make many new valuable connections in Honduras and you will get to know the incredible stories of the children we work with.

 

Sponsorship:

Helping Hands works with children living in extreme poverty. While school is free in Honduras, many families cannot pay for school materials or uniforms and might even require their children to work to survive. Other children are known to faint in class because they get so little to eat at home because of their poverty.

Our organization rescued various children from such hazardous living conditions, e.g. we got to know various children as young as 5 years old who collected rubbish in the streets with their parents and who were thanks to our support able to stop working and go to school.

We firmly believe that the only way to help our country and lift ourselves out of poverty and a third world status, is the education of our children. Only like this can we lower analphabetism rates and get more people enrolled in universities who will later be able to alter the economic course of Honduras. We want to achieve sustainable change, not just a temporary fix.

In order to support these children, Helping Hands has a sponsorship program in which people from other countries can sponsor a child in Honduras with 20 Euros or 25 USD a month. This money covers for school materials, uniforms and food at school. The importance of nutrition cannot be underestimated as part of our mission: we early realized that school books alone cannot help children get an education if they are starving. Since then we include food in our program.

Every dollar and euro is seen as a future investment in the education and well-being of the children, so they own families later will not find themselves in the same situation. We do not want people to stay poor, but to become active creators of their own future and well-being.

In exchange we send our sponsors monthly updates and photos of the children. We also organize additional small activities in which sponsors can take part in, e.g. special celebration such as El Día del Niño; or birthdays; or we cook low-cost food (around 1 euro/1.25 USD) for extra fundraising which sponsors can purchase and which we deliver to their children (it serves a double function as extra nutrition for the children and it helps us raise money).

All parents that enroll their children in our program are required to volunteer 2-3 hours a week in the school of their children. With this we want families to develop a sense of responsibility for the donations they receive and to increase their feeling of connection to their local community.

 

Nutrition Centers:

We currently run two nutrition centers in two villages (Los Pozos and La Majada Verde) for children that go to school in the area regardless of sponsorship. Daily, around 20 children receive a meals there if they attend class. What the two locations share in common is their lack of road access: Neither one has asphalted roads and both are mostly accessible by 4x4. This means that the people living there often lack access to food and clean water.

As mentioned above, we believe that lack of nutrition is one of the key obstacles between the children of Honduras and their education. Thanks to the nutrition centers we were able to raise the enrollment rates of primary schools in those villages to almost 100%. Receiving breakfast or lunch during school hours is a big motivator for children and also families to send their offspring to class.

 

Farm Stays:

We are currently developing a sustainability farm project to produce some of our own food which we can either sell for funds or distribute at the nutrition centers. We grow a few crops and have pigs, chickens, bunnies and dogs. In the future we hope to develop this in a home stay as well.

 

Safety:

Honduras is famous for its high crime rate. However, Talanga is more rural than places like Tegucigalpa and San Pedro and quite different. It is a lot safer with far less robberies and there are no gangs. Generally, you can walk around during the day without problems, even as a solo travelling woman.

During the night, it is safe to move in groups or in car, but we make sure of this, i.e. our members will drive you home and pick you up if we do something in the evening (which we do often). Our team is very conscious of safety, because the last thing we want is that our volunteers have a bad experience. In the past, we have walked with new volunteer everywhere until they felt secure enough.

We also advise you what to do / not to do in Honduras and how to watch out for overcharging. If you have any questions please contact us.