We are the New Owners of the Spanish Institute of Honduras

Just over a year ago, I was asked if I would be interested in managing the Honduras Spanish Institute, by founders and Camino Global missionaries, Mark and Michelle Fittz. It's hard for me to believe that it has already been a year, but if memory and my blog post are correct, then it is true. As the saying goes, "time flies when you're having fun".

When I was asked to do this, Barbe and I were already deeply involved in the school. The teachers were like family to us and so many of the students had become friends and were part of our weekly home fellowship group. For us, it was an easy decision to take responsibility for the day to day operation of the school and student care.

The Institute was growing and was beginning to acquire a name for itself within the missionary community as a quality "Spanish as a second language" school and as an alternative to some of the larger and more expensive schools in Costa Rica and Guatemala. For those missionaries who would be serving in Honduras after language training, it made sense to learn the dialects and customs in the country they would be living and working in. (here is a link to what MTW's Mike Pettengill had to say about this)

As the school grew, it was also experiencing growing pains. With our love for the school, my passion for bringing jobs to Honduras and 30 years experience operating my own business, I felt that I would bring to the table what the school needed in order to move forward. I saw several issues we needed to face immediately. One of those was moving the school to it's own facility and out of the space it had shared with a local seminary for the past several years. Within a few months, I had located a large, beautiful mansion in Barrio El Carmen and made the decision to relocate the Institute. I also made the even larger decision to move our family there as well and to be an integral part of the school on a daily basis.

Our new facility located in Barrio El Carmen, Siguatepeque, HN

We officially opened for business in our new location on January 1, 2014 and it has already proven itself to be a wise decision. The grounds are beautiful, the house spacious, the atmosphere tranquil and because we live here, we are able to give the Institute the family atmosphere that makes our school unique while still retaining the quality one on one classes we have always had.

Classrooms are indoor and outdoor, depending on your study preference.

As the school continued to grow, employing ten teachers, a bookkeeper and a part time grounds keeper, I helped the school transition from an idea that had matured and grown out of a need Mark had seen four years previous into a legitimate, job and revenue producing, tax paying Honduran enterprise.

On June 6th of this year, Mark and Michelle officially turned ownership of the Institute over to Barbe and me. Although they too love the school, Mark made the tough decision to let go of it and concentrate his energy on the rapidly growing Hope Coffee. Mark had begun buying and exporting coffee with the intention that profits from sales would come back to Honduras as funds to help local churches provide shelter and aid to those in need, especially to widows, and the business was growing in leaps and bounds as churches all over the US caught the vision and began serving "Hope Coffee". Not only do sales support missions, but it is an excellent, quality coffee and we proudly serve Hope Coffee here at the Spanish Institute of Honduras...all day, every day.

Mark and Michelle Fittz with our teachers on June 6th, 2014 as they officially pass ownership to us.

One of the things we needed to do as part of the transition to us as the new owners, was to legally close the school and reopen it as a merger with our existing Honduran business, Inversiones Wolfe Honduras, SA de CV. That transition was successfully made accompanied by a slight name change. The Institute's new name is, Spanish Institute of Honduras, operating under the umbrella of Inversiones Wolfe Honduras.  Our website is still under construction, but check it out when you can.

Other than the location, the name change and the new ownership, the core values the Institute started with remain the same; commitment to quality language acquisition, learning in a relaxed and personal manner and staff that truly care about our students and their success.

Yessica and Roxanne enjoying a beautiful afternoon in class.

Mercedes and Eric...hard at work.

We even have classes for kids. Yarely and Ella under the gazebo.

The living room where students and teachers study, use the internet and hangout.

And of course there are our school mascots, Alfredo and Tiger. 

Barbe and I bring to the school our own passion to care for each student individually. We understand firsthand the difficulties students face learning a new language in a new country and we do all we can to provide encouragement, emotional and spiritual support as well as a home that is always open to any of our students, anytime day or night. Combined with the love and care our teachers show each student, I have no problem saying...as I often do, that we have the best language school in the whole world.

Our slogan is; come as friends, leave as family...and we mean it!

Some of our students and teachers on a recent field trip to a Lenca potter's shop. 

Barbe and I are grateful to the Fittz's generosity to us, to our very special teachers with out whom we would have no school, to our students who willingly come to class each day to learn the language in order to better serve the people of Honduras...and to God, who faithfully provides all our needs.

A Day of Donuts

Last Thursday Kevin, Chris, Thomas, Luis and I went to Comeseb, better known in Sigua as "the Mennonite store", for donuts. This place is a must visit when in Sigua. Homemade ice cream, homemade breads, cinnamon rolls, cheeses, yogurt, granola, apple pie...so, okay, you get the picture, it's my kind of place. Anyway, I know it was Thursday, or maybe Friday, because they only have fresh made donuts on these two days. Unfortunately, there were only three left. So after buying them out, we went in search of a donut bakery I had only recently heard of. (and I thought I knew all of them here)

We finally found it in Barrio San Antonio in an old billiard hall. We bought a bag of 12, warm and fresh for 20 lempiras, less than a dollar and sat on the tailgate of the pick up and ate every one of them...and went back for another bag.

Nice selfie.

I stood at the doorway and chatted with the elderly lady and her daughter through the bars. I shared with them my lifetime love affair with donuts. She must have found in me a kindred spirit, because before I knew it, this 82 year old baker of donuts had unlocked the side door and ushered me into the inner sanctum, the place where it all happens.

I felt honored...and privileged...and awed.

She told me of a lifetime of baking bread, going back to her childhood. Her mother, she tells me, was an incredible baker. She shares with me her desire to get "the machine that flips the donuts on it's own" as she reaches in to the hot oil with a skimmer and expertly flips three or four at a time. It would cut down on labor cost she says. For 20 years now she has made donuts. She stopped baking bread a number of years ago and only makes donuts now.

3500 donuts a day, over 300 lbs.

Racks of fresh donuts line the walls

I watch, fascinated with the speed her daughter exhibits as she grabs three donuts in each hand, rubbing them in the sugar and placing them in a bag.

The "sugaring" process.

I have made new friends.

I leave them, with the promise that I will be back...soon!

Kevin, one of our new language school students and me.    Muy contentos!

Carlos; the baby in the bag.

Imagine yourself walking along the sidewalks of Comayagua. You see a plastic trash bag on the sidewalk ahead of you. It sits on the walk in front of a church. You are curious. What's in it? Maybe something of value that you could reuse or sell. You stop, lift it. It doesn't weigh much. Less than five pounds. You open it. Inside is a newborn baby, it's cut umbilical cord still attached lying in it's own afterbirth. The baby is barely breathing...if at all. He has been in the closed bag long enough to have used up most of the air his little lungs need to sustain life. He is catatonic. What should I do, you ask. Will he even live? Maybe you should just reclose the bag and walk on. No, your heart has been touched by the terribleness of what has happened. You lift the little bundle in your arms and seek help.

This is Carlos Benjamin. And that is his story.

As soon as the person who found him took him to the IHNFA center, they hurried him to the hospital. He was having trouble breathing. The next day he was transferred to Hopital Escuela in Tegucigalpa where he spent the next nineteen days of his life.

On the nineteenth day, I received a call from the IHNFA office begging us to take Carlos for "just" a few days while they tried to find an NGO or home who would take him. Barbe and I agreed, of course. I mean really, what else as Christians could we do, and so we waited in Comayagua all afternoon for Carlos to arrive from Teguc.

He was so thin. And tiny. And his little ribs stood out. And he was very quiet.  

Carlos' story is not really all that unique here. I hear of the same thing happening all too often in Teguc or San Pedro. I wonder who Carlos' mother is. Is she a prostitute and Carlos was just part of the cost of doing business? Another casualty on an already long list of the same. Maybe she is a young teenager, too afraid of the consequences and realities of keeping a baby. Or a mother with already to many mouths she can't feed.

I am learning not to judge other's actions too harshly. I have never been in the shoes of a young, pregnant, teenage girl or a mother of ten who cannot feed those she has. BUT, I find it almost impossible to believe that anyone, no matter what the circumstances, could throw a baby out as trash. 

Unfathomable and unimaginable is such an action to me.

More than two weeks later, Carlos is putting on weight. His cheeks have filled out and his little, stick like legs are getting meat on them. He very clearly let's us know when he is hungry...which is most of the time. He is getting lots of love. He is very popular with the ladies. Last weekend we attended a missions conference and we rarely saw him, unless it was seeing him being cuddled and loved on by one of the women.

Our boys are going to be great dad's. That is obvious. They do their part, holding him, feeding and changing him. Both Thomas and Ben have taken care of him at night, feeding him every couple of hours, letting Barbe and me catch up on sleep.  I am proud of them.

Thomas and Carlos

I do not know how much longer we will have him, but I suspect it is going to be awhile. IHNFA is being dissolved and a new department, DINAF, is being formed. Everything is on hold. The paid foster family program is being discontinued and only the unpaid, like us, will remain. The news coming from the new agency is that they want NGOs and churches to take on the huge burden of orphan and foster care in Honduras. I see disaster looming in the not too distant future. 

The need for foster families is huge. 

Children should be in families. How I want to see more families, Honduran and otherwise, step up and fill this need. I understand the cost involved to feed a child, to buy pampers and formula. I understand the risk of losing one's heart to this child, only to have him one day taken from you. But really, what else can we as Christians do? Can we leave a baby, abandoned by his mother, to just...just what?

It is more than likely that we will receive another call from IHNFA soon. 

They told me yesterday that there is another baby, a little girl, who will be leaving the hospital soon...with no place to go. Barbe and I are trying as best we can to do our part, to live out our faith. But, I know this; we cannot personally take care of every abandoned baby we are asked to give a home to. 

Sometimes I wish we were part of an organization with access to donors and funding. If I had the funds, I would go through the legal requirements to start a transition home. It would be a home to receive babies until foster families could be located. It would not be a long-term care facility. I would find a Honduran lady, maybe with a couple of children of her own who needs the work, rent a house for them to live in, furnish it with what they need and set up a nursery with several cribs. Here would be a safe place to receive abandoned babies, a safe place until a family willing to foster them could be found or until they can be adopted. It would not cost very much to do such a thing.

This is what is in my heart to do...if I had your help.