On Our Little Roses
Crystal Clusiau: Tell me about the social change and activist work that you’ve done.
Sarah DeCamps: Well, Our Little Roses is a home for girls who don’t have anywhere else to go – their parents can’t take care of them or they’ve been abused or abandoned or neglected or whatever. We also run a medical clinic and bilingual school that they can go to, but also that people in the community can use. We run a transitional housing program, where the girls can live in one of the two transitional houses when they graduate from high school. We run a housing project for single mothers. The original mission was to bring together all the girls, and give them every opportunity in the world to expand the middle class in Honduras, which is very small.
Then as that came to be, we started having all the girls involved in different things. The idea was to raise these children relative to their own culture, do what we would do with our own children - teach them about human sexuality, teach them about balancing a checkbook, every little piece to help make them independent, middle class women. Then we realized that there are a lot of other things we could be doing in the community and at the same time it could bring in an income to sustain the home, so that’s where the school and medical clinic came in, because people pay a minimal amount and a great education. So, it’s all these different pieces of social work - it’s health care, education, community development, it’s all of these different things together.
CC: How long has Our Little Roses been an established organization?
SD: The organization was founded in 1989, by the wife of the bishop of Honduras at the time. They got it off the ground in the city of San Pedro Sula, which is where it’s located. Then they established a 501c3 in the United States, called the Our Little Roses Foreign Mission Society.
CC: Could you tell me about the whole educational and developmental process that Our Little Roses implements for the girls that are involved in it?
SD: They bring in kid from all walks of life, and now that the organization has evolved into a successful sort of place, they try to bring in kids younger, because coming in with so many emotional problems, the younger they can get them they can start them in a bilingual school. It’s harder to take kids that are older because you’ve got to get them through 3,4,5 years of school and they haven’t ever been in school. When it first began, they were taking kids from all ages. What they do is the assess the child for the basic levels of the Honduran public school system, and then they’ll put the child in a public school starting out; then if she can prove herself, she can switch over to a bilingual school or to one of the private schools – it totally depends on her educational needs. Once they get to graduation level, they have to choose a track. It’s not like the American high school system, you have to choose a track, so a lot of kids will choose either social sciences or biological sciences, or technology, and then they have to have an internship their senior year, and they go away for six months to do that – to another city. Then once they come back they go through graduation, and then to go into university. Our Little Roses will offer anyone who wants to go the opportunity to go into university, but it’s not for everyone. It’s not the same idea that we have here, that you have to go to college, because it’s just… they’re just kind of getting that stage where they’re starting to realize that higher education is really the only way, or one of the only paths for real success in the job market. And so, they’ll allow all of them to enroll in the big public university; there are four or five universities in San Pedro Sula, and they’ll enroll in the big public university and prove themselves. If they can get good enough grades that first semester, they can choose a major or career path and switch over to a more technical university, or whatever it might be.
CC: Does Our Little Roses seek the girls out, or do they find you?
SD: Our Little Roses is among a group of organizations in Honduras where people are placed, by their equivalent of social services. There’s a long list, a waiting list, in terms of kids that need to be placed, and I don’t think there are many organizations that are as comprehensive in what they offer - a lot of them are orphanages.
CC: How many girls stay in the program?
SD: There are about 25 toddlers, and I say toddler loosely, I’m talking about anywhere from infant almost up to age almost eight or nine, and they all live in one building together, they live in two different rooms with a teacher that lives in between them. They go to bed at the same time, they get up at the same time, they shower at the same time, everything is communal for them. And then there is another building that houses about forty kids that are 8, 9, 10 and above. And they are all over the place, they’re anywhere from first, second or third grade, all the way up to the last year of high school. Then there are ten or so that are in the university program. And there are lots of graduates that have moved on but they still come back a lot and they help in different ways.
CC: Do you think that Our Little Roses gives the girls an advantage in the long run, even though they started out with the program as victims of poverty and abuse and abandonment?
SD: Oh definitely. I definitely think so; the kids that we’ve seen that have graduated, and there are two that we have that have graduated from university, and both of them have wonderful jobs, they’ve gotten married, they have kids, you know, they basically were able to bring children into the world in a totally different environment than that in which they were born. I think that’s a good measurement for success, at least for them.
CC: Is all work done for Our Little Roses volunteer work?
SD: No, there’s a staff of about 20 or so people. They have the executive director and founder, whose name is Diana Frade, and she is kind of the president, the executive decision maker. Under her there are several senior directors. There’s the director of the bilingual school, there’s the director of the home where all of the girls live, there’s the director of all of sort of all the other extraneous ministries, the medical clinic, the housing project, and all that. There is also one more woman that is the coordinator for all the groups; she deals with volunteers and so forth. Then there’s a young man from the Netherlands, who established his own foundation called Our Little Roses Netherlands and has been living there for three years; the foundation pays for him to be there, so he gets paid, but not necessarily by all the funding that comes in for the actual home itself. Then, he works with the volunteer program, so he’s almost like, creating a small peace-core experience for a lot of, college graduates that go down there for the year. They built a building that houses these volunteers. Each person that comes down gets an apartment with a bathroom, and then they share a kitchen and living space with the other volunteers – it’s kind of like the real world Honduras, if you ask me. They have an accounting department, two or three women that run all the finances and all the checks and all the money that comes in. Then they have all the teachers on staff that work at the school. And then they there are what they call maestras, which means teacher in Spanish. They are pretty much the house-mothers that care for all the girls that live there. Then we have doctors on staff, and I would say that the volunteers kind of fall under that, and then there are all these groups that come in that are short-term volunteers.