Ranch Fashion

Ranch fashion is an interesting concept and I am constantly surprised at the different types of clothing and accessories that I see wandering around the ranch. The children here are very isolated from the rest of the city and as a result really don’t know what the outside world is wearing. Also, they only have a limited amount of clothing to work with. However, they are very proud of what they have and have developed their very own fashion statements and strut around the ranch like they are the coolest thing around. Here are some of the more amusing trends:

1. The most prevalent and, in my opinion, the most odd trend is the wearing of one glove. Not a leather glove, but those cotton one size fits all gloves that we all wore in high school. Both girls and boys alike don the one glove for every special occasion. During the activity, the glove always travels because there are not enough to go around and sharing is common.
2. Another trend that has made its rounds throughout the world, but seems to be permanently stuck on the ranch is the popped shirt collar. Only the “coolest” boys can pull it off and pop it every chance they get.
3. Usually it is those boys that pop their collars that also have a mountain of hair gel to get that perfectly spiked hair. Sometimes, they even use baby oil because they haven’t been able to secure some real gel.
4. The next fashion is more common with the younger boys on the ranch. As in every country, these young boys follow everything the older boys do, and this fashion statement is based on that concept. The older boys, who have been able to go to the city with the little money they have, typically carry a central american style messenger bag. Because the younger boys don’t have the opportunity to go to the city to purchase these bags, they mimic the style the best they can with bags they find on the ranch. This usually involves a little girl’s purse. It is so amusing to see a 7 year old boy proudly sporting a little pink Barbie purse slung across his body.
5. As everyone knows, a style that has made a recent comeback in the US and Europe is the skinny jean. Many of the kids here have skinny jeans (probably originating from the first time they were popular) but they are not allowed to wear them to school because they have uniforms. In an attempt to make their uniform pants “skinny” the older kids tuck them into their white tube socks.
6. The next fashion isn’t something that the kids do intentionally, but by default because they don’t have many nice clothes. Clothing is a very important part of special occasions in Honduras and the ranch is no different. Whenever there is a celebration on the ranch the kids bring out their best clothing. So, they iron their best shirt, put on their nicest pants and shine their nicest shoes. The catch is that the “best” of everything doesn’t necessarily match, but that isn’t important.

Inmaculada Concepcion

Every night from 6-8 pm and every other weekend, I pass my time in the hogar (home), Immaculada Concepcion. This is the place where all of the 15-16 year old girls live. During the selection process, I narrowed my options down to the hogars San Francisco (7-9 year old boys) and Enmaculada. I chose Enmaculada because I really enjoyed the girls and I thought that they would be better for developing my spanish. Unfortunately, most of these girls moved up to the next (older) hogar the weekend after I was assigned to them. In addition, the girls from the hogar Hermanas de Jesus, moved up to my hogar Enmaculada. During the selection process, the only hogar I was sure I didn’t want was Hermanas. AHHH!

Well, as it turns out, the girls are totally growing on me. Also, this is the best place to develop my spanish because they try to trick me into saying dirty words all of the time, so I am learning a lot. Seriously, most of them help me a lot with the words and phrases that I am unfamiliar. Tonight they told me that they all really like me, which is a big surprise since most of them ignore me a lot of the time and I have only been working with them for 2 weeks. However, one thing I have learned since being here is that these kids warm up to people very fast and feel that they have good relationships with people they have only known a short time. This is nice for those of us here to help them, but concerning for the time when they are out in the “real world”.

This past weekend, I spent Friday night and all day Saturday with the girls. On Friday, we organized the performance they planned to give at the talent show, which was the Saturday night activity. Of course this was a dance to a popular reggaeton song. I left the hogar at 8:30 and the girls were still working on the choreography. As some of you may know, I was a pretty good dancer back in the day (LOL) and participated in many talent shows including an NKOTB contest at the local mall J I would have offered to dance with them, but I don’t think I am ready to show off those skills to the entire ranch yet (however, I had no problem getting’ down at the house party with the volunteers following the talent show; gotta start slow and work my way up). When I returned to the volunteer house, we decided to have a “Fiesta Americana” with the Spanish and German volunteers. This included a watermelon, a bottle of vodka, a bunch of beers, a picnic table, Honduras’ version of solo cups and a ping pong ball that I borrow from one of the girls in my hogar. We spent the night infusing the watermelon with vodka (to be used at the party the following night) and teaching the Europeans how to play beer pong. It was a great time and we set the bar high for the future “Fiesta de Espana” and “Fiesta de Alemania”.

Saturday morning I arrived at the hogar at 9 am, after the girls finished breakfast. There was a group of girls going to work at the “represa” (river/pond swimming area) and I joined them not having any idea what we were doing there. As it turns out, our terrible, horrible job was to gather dirt into large bags and haul them (about 15) back to the hogar garden ( probably about ¼ mile) with the use of only 2 wheelbarrows. The icing on the top of the cake was the constant drizzling rain throughout the day. I couldn’t believe that anyone expected these girls to do this difficult physical labor in the rain and even more surprising was their willingness to participate. We filled each of the bags about half way and loaded up about 4 bags per wheel barrow. This left about 5-6 bags that we had to drag down the rocky path back to the hogar. Because of the unlevel ground, the wheel barrows tipped over about 5 times each. The girls just kept loading them back up and trying again. This chore was made even more effective by the fact that most of the bags had holes in them, which got bigger as we dragged them along, leaving a trail of dirt behind us. I think we probably arrived at the hogar garden with half the amount of dirt that we started with. I was a sweaty, muddy mess by the time the job was done, but I figured that counted as my workout for the day, so I wasn’t too unhappy. Also, the rest of the afternoon involved playing hangman with the girls on my electronic dictionary, which was pretty fun.

The talent show took place on Saturday night and was supposed to start at 7, but like everything else, it began about an hour late. It probably took about 20 minutes just to get all of the kids to quiet down enough to get the show started and that quiet attention lasted only about 2 acts. However, the show was great! The best was 5 year old Moises who dressed in baggy clothes and rapped to a reggaeton song. I couldn’t believe he got up there in front of everyone at the age of 5 and didn’t miss a word. My girls performed their dance half heartedly and it was obvious they were not prepared, but nobody seemed to care. I stayed at the show until my girls performed and then cut out with all of the other volunteers to go to a house party on the ranch. We ate the watermelon we had slaved over the night before, sat around the fire, listened to music and played “games“. The night lasted a pretty long time and ended with a couple rounds of limbo, which made it obvious that it was time to go home.

Sunday was my day off and I took full advantage, by sleeping in until about noon and then dragging myself to the hammock with my book to read and nap the rest of the day. It was wonderful!!