Students build houses in Honduras over summer

Last summer, junior Katlyn Hirokawa and sophomore Tim Casey-Clyde traveled to Honduras for two weeks with the Sierra Service Project (SSP), a Christian charity organization, to build two houses in the slums of Tegucigalpa, the capital. Today, according to the CIA World Factbook, Honduras is the second poorest country in Central America behind Nicaragua. Nearly 60 percent of the Honduran population lives below the poverty line.

The charity trip, which Hirokawa and Casey-Clyde joined through St. Andrews Episcopal Church, served to both help the struggling communities of the city Fuerzas Unidas and open Hirokawa’s and Casey-Clyde’s eyes to the troubling living conditions citizens of third-world countries experience daily.

“Although I was prepared to see a lot of poverty, since Honduras is a third-world country, nothing prepares you for what you see [in the Honduras] unless you have seen it before,” Hirokawa said.
During the trip, Hirokawa and Casey-Clyde bonded with and learned about the Honduran community and workers.

“While we were building these houses, we got to connect with the community and the workers,” said Hirokawa. “We also got to visit human rights places and a safe home for kids from the streets or who were forced into prostitution.”

The group would wake up at 6:30 every morning and head over to the work site in Fuerzas Unidas after breakfast. They would work until 4 and go back to their hotel. After relaxing and eating dinner, they participated in nightly group discussions run by the directors of the program.

During these discussions, Hirokawa and Casey-Clyde would learn about the challenges faced by the Honduran people, such as government corruption and alarmingly high crime rates.

Although Hirokawa and Casey-Clyde focused themselves on learning about the Honduran people during their trip, these Hondurans also wanted to learn about them. Their group received recognition from television stations and special attention from the inhabitants of Honduras.

“It was also pretty unusual getting called ‘gringos’ everywhere we went, as most Hondurans do not see Americans very often,” Casey-Clyde said. “We even got interviewed by two television stations one day while we were in the capital of Honduras and later saw ourselves on television, simply because Americans are a rare sight.”

In order to communicate with the locals, Hirokawa and Casey-Clyde had to speak Spanish. For Casey-Clyde, the trip provided an opportunity to improve his Spanish skills.

“A tough part for me was the language barrier,” Casey-Clyde said. “I had only taken one year of Spanish before, but I vastly improved my Spanish during the trip.”

Needless to say, the experience presented challenges to Hirokawa and Casey-Clyde.

“The toughest part about the trip was seeing the poverty,” Hirokawa said. “It can be really hard to accept that some people have to live like they do in Fuerzas. It was especially hard to see the little kids living [in poverty].”

The two discovered that constructing houses was substantially more difficult than they had expected.

“The actual building of the houses were pretty tough,” Casey-Clyde said. “Most of us had to do a lot of heavy lifting of sand, cement and cinder blocks. But the hard work was definitely worth it.”
Hirokawa also found it difficult to say goodbye to the Honduran community after spending so much time with the people in Fuerzas Unidas.

“We got close with the children in that community and it was really hard to leave them there and say goodbye,” Hirokawa said. “It was equally hard to say goodbye to the families we built houses for and the workers that we built the houses with.”

Hirokawa and Casey-Clyde stayed in Tegucigalpa, which Hirokawa called “loud, noisy, and smelly.” Despite the unfavorable conditions Hirokawa witnessed and the manual labor she subjected herself to, she found that volunteering in Honduras was an extremely rewarding experience.

“Doing something like this really has changed my life in so many ways, and I’m forever grateful for getting to have that experience,” Hirokawa said.

Casey-Clyde also found the mission trip memorable and quite worthwhile and would like to attend a similar trip in the future.

“We met so many genuine, amazing Hondurans and I will always remember them,” said Casey-Clyde. “It was overall an incredible trip that I am extremely grateful I had the opportunity to go on. I definitely hope I can do more mission trips in the future.”