Newsletter December 2022

DECEMBER

Current events	Holiday for Veterans Our partner Operation Enduring Welcome has the holidays in full swing downtown and at Dalainis. Dalainis House is an emergency shelter and transitional housing program for homeless veterans, operated by Harbor Care Inc.Their mission is to build stronger communities between veterans and civilians. Collection boxes for Christmas decorations are located in several downtown locations, additionally they are collecting sponsors for holiday dinner and gift cards for veterans. Honduras Outreach Team Traveling team members are fundraising for the 2023 trip and February is fast approaching! Please consider supporting this effort, as this year’s focus is on piloting Nashua H.O.Y. an effort to engage youth and their parents as travelers on future trips. From Juicalpa to Catacamas, we’ve done amazing projects over the years to inspire positive leadership, but it’s time to start planting the seeds of the future. Outreach Unsheltered Neighbors Recently overnight temperatures have dropped as low as 21 degrees, December 21st, Nashua will observe the longest nigh of the year with a vigil recognizing all those we have lost to the struggle with homelessness. O.U.R. Neighbors collects hand warmers and ready to eat meals to share with local outreach programs and unsheltered people
Involve	There is still time to sign up for the 2023 Honduras Outreach Team January 21 1-4 Open Mic sign up, raffles donations and sponsors needed. Organizers needed for our first annual Gala, email us at involvedtoimpact@gmail.com for more information
Impact	Nashua H.O.Y. launched the first Nashua River Fest with support from local neighbors, alderwoman Trish Klee and a great team of organizers and sponsors. Originally.envisioned as a pop up event at Atherton, construction prompted dialogue, and the idea was transformed into an iconic recognition of Nashua’s unique history! We had a great time at the JajaWeen Halloween event, with live painting from Honduras by Luis Romero, and live musical performances by Ivan! Special thanks to Jajabelle’s owner Jess Depontbriand and her staff for going above and beyond to support outlr event and our mission! Not to be left out, H.O.Y. organized a youth Halloween party in partnership with Lounge 38 and Soel Sistas. A great kid friendly event featuring DJ Johnny Macho, kids had a safe place to celebrate Halloween with a costume contest, mummy wrap, Smash Bros open competition and special appearance by DRok Expressions. A great opportunity for H.O.Y. leaders to organize for their community! Special thanks to Lounge 38, Soel Sistas and DJ Johnny Macho. Operation Enduring Welcome partnered with Joanne’s Kitchen for Buy Dinner For A Vet. They were able to raise money to provide a dinner for Veterans Day! Enduring Welcome partnered with Honey baked Ham to provide a Thanksgiving Dinner, as well and Coffee and donuts for the kickoff of their Holiday decorations contest!
Synnergy	Operation Enduring Welcome meant for its quarterly board meeting in November. OEW elected its 2022-2024 slate of directors. Having weathered the impact of the COVID 19 Pandemic on a mission focused on activities., we are supporting their efforts to build a sustainable organization, separating their accounting, applying for 501c3 status and donor cultivation. Nashua H.O.Y. is planning it’s January/ February lead up to the inaugural trip! Tickets are purchased but fundraising needs include room and board and a budget for projects. Anyone interested in sponsoring the team, supporting team members or applying for a future trip email nashuahot@gmail.com!
Leaders	We wished a happy birthday on October to our Director Shay Bagnera and our H.O.Y. volunteer coordinator Shewanda Daniels! We are a small but mighty team of organizers, and we are always looking for new volunteer leaders to support programs, join our Advisory Board or serve on our board of Directors, if you are interested in getting more involved, email us at involvedtoimpact@gmail.com

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2020 HOT

Today is our team’s first full day in Honduras. Juana was fully rested from travel, as evidence by energetic knocking on Tom’s door, looking for coffee. Luis met Marvin and Cristhian and went to Luis’ studio to work on sketches for this year’s first mural, at a nearby soccer stadium. We also took a look at some of our older murals at the Hogar which will need replacing.

This is Lent, so we attended church with the community as well, before lunch.

After Church we took a tour around the city, and we went over our supplies. One of our bottles of paint opened on the way down, but we had packaged everything so that all we had to do was let the paint dry and then reclaim everything inside. After that we went to play Soccer!

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After we finished Soccer, we has dinner at a nearby spot. The food was great, and the company was better!

We returned to the Hogar to plan for the next day. Tom went with Cristhian and Marvin to work on some mural prep with Luis. Using a projector we were able to presketch tomorrow’s plan on the wall.

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2020 Day 1

It’s all about the travel the first day. This year we are a new group, travelling together for the first time. We caught the first plane out of Boston for Atlanta Georgia.

We landed early in Atlanta, but Juana used the time well, helping a guy we met disembarking, find his way to his plane heading to El Salvador. We boarded the plane for our seats in the far back. Apparently sitting in the back gives you free leftovers, either that or the Steward really liked Tom who had several juices, two free coffees and an extra granola bar. Landing in Honduras we were reminded that world is watchful for the Corona virus, especially a country with a limited health care structure. Also They Are Concerned In Honduras Too.

We have arrived!

Well alright, we had five more hours of driving.

OEW Floor Wars!

Floor Wars Episode IV!

Dalanis is decorated for the holidays! On November 30th, the Tree Amigos team decorated Dalainis’ Common Area to kick off the holiday festivities.

Then for the next three weeks Veterans used decorations donated by the community, including four artificial trees by Ward 3 Alderman and State Representative, Patricia Klee. On December 19, Judges, including Alderman Klee, NH State Senator Cindy Rosenwald, OEW President Amber Logue, and Jo Anne St. John found the Fourth Floor winners of Floor Wars, Episode IV!

Special thanks to our donors:

Senator Cindy Rosenwald

JoAnn StJohn

Susan Turmel

Richard daSilva

Tom Lopez

Cole Morgan

Amber Logue

Pine St Eatery
Bagel Alley
CourtHouse Pizza
Calif Burritos
Fratellos
Norton’s
Chick n Chips
JaJa Belles
Sopranos
Martha’s

Next up is our Superbowl Chili Cookoff in 2020, if you are interested in donating or participating to support this event, email us atoperationenduringwelcome@gmail.com

We will return!

Our final day was basically lots of driving and lots of airport

We talked about the trip on our way to Tegucigalpa and plans for next year. We also shared some interesting sights.

Then it was all just airports and boarding passes. We bid farewell to Mario and entered customs.

We had a last team dinner at the blue moon brewery at the Atlanta Airport. Tom finally broke a several year streak of getting hung up in immigration. It was past midnight when we landed.

Next year’s projects include a Spanish books drive, a lap top drive, we are hoping to send a pallet of donations around November with extra paint for Luis. We will be doing presentations on our trip over the next few months and recruiting new team members. Keep an eye on our Facebook page and the events page here, thank you for your support!

2019 trip Day 7 Involved to Impact

It is our final work day, so we are concentrating on the final mural at the library. We had pancakes for breakfast with the staff of Hogar Los Ninos. When we arrived on site, it was straight to work. Luis worked on a mural depicting Robin Hood, Jyl a mural with many creative stories coming from a book, Drok painted the door and Sam painted a cloudy background with Tom, and then the alphabet.

Isella joined us just before lunch and started working on another piece while Tom and Drok painted the back wall and Sam finished her letters.Reporters came to interview again, to spread the word of the projects we have been doing. Profelita came with a class full of students to thank is and to present us with a snack.Lunch was great, Listenia cooked something special for each of us, Jyl and Mario brought it back for us to eat on site. Sam initiated an impromptu dance party with Luis and Isella, then with the arrival of Erika Karolina, Arte Positivo member since the beginning, we were back to work

Alfredo came as well, he admired the work of artists. Luis affirmed there as a musician, Alfredo is an artist as well. It brought to mind the elements of hip hop that Universal Zulu Nation conceptualizes. Bboys (Dancers) Graffiti, DJ, and MC. A holistic view of what we see in Honduras is singing, dancing, instruments, and painting, though there are many more elements, craftsmanship, sculpture, and more. Luis invited us to his tv show after painting, which he runs every Tuesday night. We were able to talk about art and the kind of work our team has helped accomplish over the years.

When we returned we had dinner and made plans for where to send any leftover supplies we brought. We also talked about plans to keep in touch throughout the year with Microchip, with Luis, and to maintain the connections we had built upon.

Sam successfully completed her second trip, and her project as lead. She joins the ranks of Nashua HOT alumni who realize in a deep way, that the world we visited marches on as we return to our own. The need remains, the passion is real and the courage to push fear aside, and lead, is something we all have waiting to be rekindled. We are connected, even as elements of art make up hip hop, leadership is made up of many expressions of service, meeting need.

We all made a choice to get involved in the lives of others. We brought what we had, we prepared as best we could, and we made a positive impact in the lives of many.

2019 trip Day 6 Renewal

This morning we tackled Sam’s return project. Last year she took note of this playground at a Kindergarten.So this year we planned to restore it to a place children could play. The Hondurans started by painting the wall and equipment. We spent the morning removing construction debris, including a couple hundred pounds of moldy asbestos roofing.Sam interviewed as spokesperson, for two local news stations to raise awareness of what we are doing and the projects underway here in the community.We picked up three truckloads of debris and brought them to a nearby landfill.While a better location than a kindergarten playground, this field is a dump site which is eventually burned via controlled fire. Nothing as organized or environmentally friendly as we are used to in Nashua, where trash is sorted, incinderated, recycled, compacted landfilled and monitored.Tomorrow we will be laying down fresh turf and soil to make the ground a little safer for young children.We returned to the Hogar Los Ninos for lunch and a siesta, the temperature was mid nineties today so working with the sun at it’s peak was not a good idea.Drogon didn’t mind the heat at all.Our afternoon project is at a school library. We met the principal and many students, whom Sam entertained and quizzed.Then we got to work prepping the site, moving booksheves and furniture, cleaning and priming the wall.Drok taught a pop up dance class when kids started to get really curious as school let out.We also bumped into 2.0, a boy interested in break dancing on Drok’s first trip. As always, Drok brought him shoes.Then we had dinner at Karina’s coffee shop down the street from the Hogar.Los MicroChip was waiting for us at the Hogar when we returned. Their dance practice was cut short by news of a personal tragedy.

As a team, we do extend our best wishes to them. We are guests in their community, they have made us welcome, we share their pain.

2019 trip Day 5 The Summit

We have passed the halfway point of the trip, today is a day of rest and celebration. Drok was not quite ready to emerge renewed but was on he mend. It is Easter Sunday, so of course we went to celebrate Easter mass with the community.

We encountered a surprise in the form of Father Dan St. Laurence, founder of project Eden, former pastor of St. Louie’s church in Nashua.

We picked up Drok and went to have lunch. In observance of Easter, many shops and restaurants were closed, but we found one.

We spent the afternoon at the Hogar planning our last two days. We hard-boiled and colored Easter eggs to surprise Listenia, our cook. We reunited with Oscar as well who watches the Hogar at night.

The summit is always better sweet, it is the height of the mountain, with the best view of what came before and what comes ahead, we are nearing the final stretch of our work week. The team is recharged and refocused, tomorrow we will work on the playground and more murals

2019 Trip Day 4 She The Change!

Drok had a rough night, he couldn’t keep food down. We travel with anti biotics in the event that we accidently eat or drink something that makes us sick. The local water has bacteria we aren’t used to. Travelling through airports and sharing space on airplanes with people from around the world can cause any number of issues. Drok wasn’t running a temperature so we gave him ibuprofren, Pepto bismol, Gatorade and extra rest in the morning.

We worked on the elemtary school murals, using Jyl’s design, to compliment last year’s mural, while Luis and Arte Positivo did panels wrapping around the building.Sam started a city wide search for coffee, and several Hondurans obliged, we we’re visited by a tourist from Miami, and John, a regular volunteer living in San Francisco.At one it was time for lunch. We were painting next to the park where the Festival was planned, and teams from the other cities, Juticalpa and Catacamas were already arriving. Drok was back on his feet so we cleaned up the murals and started getting ready.

Jyl’s mural from last year in back, with this year on the closer wall in front.
Involved To Impact

A few days ago, we talked about a cultural issue we had noticed for years. Last year we only saw two girls on the dance teams that came, it’s a tricky balance encouraging movements with self determination. We don’t want to impose our own ideas and disempower them.Samantha had a very frank conversation with Microchip on Thursday night about girls and dance. Microchip agreed, they were aware their group had gotten very macho, but they didn’t know any girls that wanted to learn to dance.Tom pointed out he had tackled this in past years. Girls will play soccer in Honduras and are very athletic up until their teens, and then they segregate and don’t engage. Microchip added that when some girls were interested, they had ultimately been pushed out of it by jealous boyfriends or husbandsA past effort was to try to introduce cheerleading at games as a bridge to dance, but the project was never really continued.

Tom pointed out that engaging girls that were younger, in a school setting might work culturally. Parents weren’t likely to let their daughters hang out with a group of older teenage boys unsupervised, or even after dark, which is when Microchip practices.Sam can’t change the world alone, but she IS involved to impact, so she lead by example. Sam had been training with Drok for a few weeks, with her own background in dance and Drok’s ability to coach, she used the opportunity to make a point. Sam free styled as the solo female participant in the festival.Sam, and Drok judged. Despite his unsettled stomach Drok was determined to support the dance movement. Now on his fourth trip he is greatly respected by all three teams, as a coach, and certainly as a dancer having battled them all to victory the past two years. Sam, as a bilingual liason is appreciated by all, and Tom, in addition to being handy, is recognized by many on sight after many years of service trips.Los MicroChip took victory in the two on two battle. The full contest will be uploaded to this site’s gallery.Juticalpa won overall, but there was extraordinary talent and the product of incredible dedication to training on display. There were a few incidents where competition between Catacamas and Juticalpa nearly got personal, and physical, but to their credit, Los MicroChip intervened as hosts, and the judges set clear expectations that dancers would respect each other’s space on the floor, and each other as competitors.While the battle was under way Luis and Jyl were organizing art on display and activities for younger children.During a break in the dancing, Tom, Jyl and Alfredo, a musician and artist Luis invited to participate, gave a brief concert. Following the battle, some games for kids included an easter egg carry and a sack race, posted live on our Be the Change Facebook page.The second urban arts festival was a success. Dancers went home happy, and determined to train more. Artists showed their work and gained some well deserved recognition, and children had fun! In a few years, if word starts to get out, about a new b-girl movement coming out of Honduras, remember the spark. A few years ago Drok had the inspiration to come to Hondutas, and then the courage to share himself with them. Sam’s dance did not go unnoticed, in addition to earning a new respect in the eyes of the dancers present, both as a dancer and a judge, Sam’s comments made them think. In addition, there was a little girl in purple watching by the steps during the video that stayed for all the rest. Everything starts with an idea, and an example.

2019 trip Day 3 No Longer Foreigners and Strangers

We started our morning with grilled cheese Quesadillas! Today we went to see the Stations of the Cross. Last night being Holy Thursday, the celebration of the last supper, and today being Good Friday, where the Passion of Christ is observed. We left at 8 am, the 14 stations concluded around noon.

This is a very important cultural moment in San Francisco La Paz, it was very hot but the town turned out, many with parasols, people of all ages and walks of life.

The Stations concluded at the Church and were followed by mass.

We saw many familiar faces along the way, this is the community we serve so we saw some of the young students who helped us yesterday as well as many from past years.

We stopped back at the Hogar Los Ninos for some lunch and to refill our water, then after one we loaded art supplies to finish the welcome to San Francisco Mural.

Moises is a graffiti artist who joined us in Tegucigalpa, he brought a lot of skills to the mural and is a hard worker.

Luis’s students returned to help us finish, even though Good Friday is a major holiday, and businesses and schools were closed.

Luis apparently signaling angels in the outfield

Drok adding some lines

Finito mural 1! We also stopped to wish Manuel Ramirez a Happy Birthday. Manny finished his second year trip last year and led a project to introduce Arte Positivo to aerosols, which worked, given Moises and Marvin both using spray in their pieces.

We were pulling into the Hogar La Nino to get ready for dinner when Mario asked us to stop just outside. We collaborated with Luis, Marvin and Moises. This piece is inspired by today’s stations of the Cross and the river of parisols we followed around the city. There is a deep sense of community here, which called to mind for us Ephesians 2 :19 “ you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his family”And speaking of family, Mario’s wife stopped by with his daughter!

Jyl and Tom will be practicing with Alfredo tonight to play guitar at the Festival, Drok is watching the clock for when Los MicroChip arrives to practice.