Bringing love to the Home of Love and Hope

For the last two years, The Church of Our Redeemer Episcopal church in Lexington has sent 15 volunteers to Honduras to work at a school named El Hogar de Amor y Esperanza, or the Home of Love and Hope.

The school takes in destitute or orphaned boys and girls in the capital city of Tegucigalpa and provides them with shoes, clothes, three meals a day, and an education. Once the boys get older, they go to a technical school or an agricultural school to learn a trade. Other boys can go to the three-year trade schools as well, but there is a long waiting list, and they must first pass some requirements.

“You have to display poverty and a willingness to work in order to get in,” said Jessica Maeck, a Lexington resident that has volunteered two years in a row. “You don’t have to be an Episcopalian.”

It is at the farming school in Talanga, an hour from the capital, where Lexingtonians lend a hand. Boys learn tractor maintenance, crop rotation, drip irrigation and organic farming, as well as attend academic classes in the afternoon. The volunteers mend fences, build bunk beds, and scrub and repaint mold-infested walls.

Most volunteers from Church of Our Redeemer go to Honduras for a week. But this year Maeck, an English teacher at Lawrence High School, went for a month to start up the school’s English program, arriving in Talanga in early July.

By July 20, when the rest of the volunteers arrived, they had more to do than dig holes for fence posts. They were teaching aides.

“They have no computers there, so we were like the language lab,” said Maeck. “They had one-on-one drills with native speakers like us.”
The Lexingtonians were also administrators of the final exams.

“We had each of the boys sit down with an English-speaking volunteer and discuss their families in English,” said Maeck. “They all passed.”

Stephanie Kukolich, a sophomore at Lexington High School that has also volunteered for two years, managed to learn some Spanish during her second stay in Talanga.

“The first time, I was too nervous to talk, but the second time I learned a lot of Spanish because my friend Sarah Vogele (an LHS graduate attending Wooster College in Ohio) came and she got me to talk more,” said Kukolich.

Kukolich intends to come back for a third time. The work is fun, she said, and she knows how grateful the Hondurans are.

“I like talking to the people there, and I felt a lot of accomplishment out of the work we did there,” she said. “They really appreciate the maintenance that we do on their farm, but they also really appreciate the company. Otherwise [for them] it’s just going to school, and we’re something new and attractive.”