Projects

Status: Completed

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The University of Mary Washington chapter of SHH collected $25,000 for the construction of a new library in the Villa Soleada community. With the help of the organization Global Playground, the project was expanded to include a technology center and a study area for students.

Status: Completed

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Beginnings

Tucked snugly at the bottom of rolling green mountains, just outside of the city of El Progreso, Honduras, lies a small village called Siete de Abril. The setting is picturesque, but a closer look reveals another story. The people of Siete de Abril live in extreme poverty. Homes are roughly constructed using scraps of corrugated tin and cardboard. There is no clean water, and illness is widespread. More than half of the over four hundred residents are children. It is no surprise then, that when ten year old Carmen Flores talked to Shin Fujiyama, she expressed only one wish – she wanted all of the families in her village to have a home.

The Movement

Status: Completed

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SHH constructed a water tower at Villa Soleada that distributes clean drinking water to a community of 400 people. The Standard Fruit Company of El Progreso donated a water tank for the project, which was cleaned, repainted, and mounted on top of a structure built by SHH with the assistance of the Building Goodness Foundation. In addition, a small structure was built to securely house the well, pump mechanisms, and timing unit for transit of the water to the tower. Members of the project now have access to clean water twenty-four hours a day.

Status: Completed

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In tandem with the water tower project for Villa Soleada, SHH has constructed an eco-friendly waste management system at Villa Soleada composed of waste stabilization ponds, composting beds, and an intricate system of indoor plumbing connecting each house to the sewage system's grid. This project ensures that the fresh water from Villa Soleada's well won't become contaminated by waste.

Status: Completed

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SHH installed 48 power poles and 33 street lamps in Villa Soleada to light the entire village at night for security as well as productivity. Electricity allows children to study at night, families to have evening events, and reduces crime in the neighborhood.

Status: Ongoing

SHH is providing girls from underprivileged communities and orphanages the opportunity to study at the best universities in Honduras. The program offers group housing and full scholarships to qualified candidates.

Currently, four girls are enrolled.

Status: Ongoing

A lack of a sustainable income prevents many from overcoming poverty. Since Students Helping Honduras seeks to not only ameliorate current problems through intervention, but also to empower community members, partnering with La Ceiba provides an opportunity to reach to the root of poverty. La Ceiba, a microfinance institution created by University of Mary Washington students in the summer of 2008, combats this by allowing entrepreneurs to receive small loans to create or expand businesses.

La Ceiba seeks to empower women in the community, as they develop business plans, undergo training and create their own businesses. Already, thirteen women in Siete de Abril have established businesses with the help of loans from La Ceiba in the first round of loans. La Ceiba hopes to expand to provide increased training and loan availability to residents of Siete de Abril and Villa Soleada.

Status: Completed

In conjunction with Dr. Shawn Humphrey, the founder of La Ceiba and students from his economics class, SHH helped install fuel-efficient cooking stoves at Siete de Abril. The stoves significantly reduce the amount of indoor pollution in households utilizing traditional fuel stoves. This includes as smoke and carbon monoxide, the fourth leading cause of death for children under the age of five in developing countries. Through its efficient design, these stoves require only half of the amount of firewood compared to an ordinary stove and have significantly contributed to the health of villagers in Siete de Abril.

Status: Completed

In 2008, SHH built a three room elementary school at the village of Por Venir that is currently enrolling nearly 150 children.

As a condition of SHH financing construction of a new building, we asked that the school pay off its remaining land debt. On December 19th, 2007, Por Venir announced they had finally met this goal. In addition, the community is matching our donation by providing for all the labor costs: they fundraised to pay for all skilled labor and arranged local community members to volunteer.

Status: Completed

For many years, the children of Siete de Abril did not have a school to attend. They could not afford to travel to schools far away, and could not pay the bus fees or buy the uniforms. Desperate to educate their youth, several parents tried to teach math and reading to the children on a patch of dirt. The kids sat in plastic chairs and shared a handful of tattered books and dull pencils. They could not have classes in the rain and had no bathroom facilities.

In 2006, SHH built a one classroom elementary school at Siete de Abril that is currently enrolling nearly 100 children.

Status: Under Construction

This municipality in the department of Intibucá, Honduras, currently has a 90% illiteracy rate among children and adults. This can be attributed to the fact that the underdeveloped town has a limited number of schools, with none going higher than the ninth grade, and has never had a library.

The San Francisco de Opalaca Library will be the first public library in the entire northeastern region of Honduras. Having this library built would be the first step to help provide the villagers with the means to further develop their literacy skills. The ability to read and write are essential skills needed to get ahead in life. Improving the literacy rate of the town would cause a ripple effect to improve the impoverished state of Opalaca.

Status: Ongoing

The women's eco-bag program is an empowerment program for women from Villa Soleada, Siete de Abril and other impoverished communities in the El Progreso area. It was started in 2008 as part of the SHH summer fellowship by two fellows, Rachel Mason and Megan Coolidge. They taught women how to find chip bags and drink wrappers, clean them, cut them to size, and then stitch them into magnificent purses and hand bags. Each month SHH purchases bags from the women, which are then sold to student volunteers in Honduras and online to people in the United States. Since the beginning of the program, many of the women participating have become the main wage earner in the family based just on their bag sales.

Click here to purchase SHH Women's Eco-Bags online now!

Status: Completed

The house, located in a small community called Las Brisas, only a couple of minutes from Copprome, was built in the names of the five children of widower Don Chepe. Gerson, Juan, Alejandro, Luis, and Wendy have lived at Copprome since their mother's death from illness.

The 17’ x 25’ home consists of 3 rooms: a living room, one room for the boys to share, and, at Don Chepe's insistence, one room just for Wendy. SHH members, alongside Don Chepe himself, a small team of masons, and with much help from neighbors, dug trenches, cut rebar, mixed cement and mortar, and laid cinder blocks.

The home, finally completed twelve days after the group returned home, will serve as a prototype for the new Villa Soleada community. Because of the hard work done by SHH, the total time it took to complete the house was cut in half. This project, in addition to providing a deserving family a home, gave SHH members much needed experience for their future projects in Honduras.