Off to Pizza Hut
It’s traditional in the hogars that when a volunteer is leaving, they throw a “despedida” which is some sort of activity or party with the hogar. We really wanted to take our boys to a cloud forest overnight, but it would have been just too expensive, so we opted for a traditional “American” outing. I had to drive a truck and Carl drove the microbus. The transportation coordinator was unsure about letting me (a woman) drive, even though I have been driving since before he was born! Then all the boys in the hogar and the tias couldn’t believe I could drive either (to the women of Honduras-Its time for a revolution!). Anyway, we safely arrived first at Pizza Hut in Tegucigalpa. Many of the boys have never been to a restaurant before, so it was actually quite exciting for them. They couldn’t believe you could drink as much soda as you wanted. The special deal we ordered came with a dessert too. They were in heaven! We fed 24 people garlic bread, lots of pizza, a bottomless soda, and dessert for 100 bucks I’m going to miss these cheap prices.
Next we went to a brand new Mall. Riding the escalator was another new and exciting adventure. One of the boys was afraid to get on, but his companion just shoved him right on. Our destination in the mall was an arcade, and we gave each boy 10 tokens. They weren’t sure what to do with them, and we had to teach them how to put them in the machine. They had a blast but weren’t very skilled at the games, having never played them before.
Our final stop was a grocery store. We gave each boy 20 lempiras (about a dollar) to go in a buy some snack they could bring back to the hogar with them. An American kid would probably buy a candy bar or two. Not these kids, they wanted to get the most bang for the buck, so several of them bought bags of sugar. Others bought loaves of Wonder bread and some tang mix (they like to eat it right out of the envelope). We specifically told them not to shop lift anything, but a few seemed to end up with more than a dollars worth of goods….hmmmm.
It was disappointing that we couldn’t afford the overnight trip to the cloud forest, BUT as Carl said, some of the boys wouldn’t have appreciated it nearly as much.
Gabriel, Kevin and Isaac at Pizza Hut
