Mission Lazarus

We stopped outside San Marco de Colon in Honduras to volunteer at Mission Lazarus. We heard about this place through a friend at home who said they can always use help.

maneuvering a culvert downhill

Mission Lazarus headquarters is a beautiful ranch where they have a children's home, a large farm, a coffee plantation, and hotel and restaurant. The proceeds from the hotel and restaurant go to support the mission work. 

They are a christian organization practicing "no strings attached" assistance to the rural communities around them through the building and staffing of schools and medical clinics. 

winching a culvert into the hole

We arrived in time to help a college group from Tennessee install latrines for rural families that have never had any sort of outhouse or bathroom. 20% of people in Central America have no sanitation facilities (not even simple outhouses) at their homes. This obviously leads to any number of parasites and diseases. Honduras has a rainy season to be reckoned with, and just digging a hole will not an outhouse make. As soon as the rains come, the holes collapse. So, Mission Lazarus has collected funds for and using truck winches to install large cement culverts in holes that people have dug at their homesites. Each culvert weighs 1500 pounds. Each latrine requires 3 culvert pieces. 

assembling an outhouse

There was a slight break in communications in briefing the families on where it might be appropriate to dig the holes. Even with excessive man power of a bunch of American college kids, it is not easy to maneuver a 1500 pound culvert down a loose gravel hill and around trees and walls. The ropes holding the culvert snapped a couple times, but luckily no one was hurt. It takes a full day of labor for about 10 people to install one latrine in these tricky spots though.

We also got to help with roofing a school building in the remote village of Las Pitas. I'm not sure how efficient it is to use unskilled labor at these projects, though extra helping hands are useful almost anytime. I do see the benefit of getting over-privileged Americans on site to see the plight of those they will hopefully donate time and money to help.
Being with locals in the mountains also afforded us the opportunity to see how they make a living. We got to stop at a sugar plant to watch them use oxen to press sugar cane into juice and boil it down to blocks of brown sugar. It is not uncommon for men to lose their arms in the grinder as once they are moving, the oxen are difficult to stop.

grinding sugar cane

Mission Lazarus was a great stop for us to get involved and meet people in rural communities. Sometimes volunteering can be a great way just to get off the travelers' circuit and see what life is like for people who actually reside in the country you're visiting.