Diego’s Story, Part 1 of 3

May 12, 2025

On the first Monday of February, the chilly Tegucigalpa breeze and the morning sun snuck through the cracks of mismatched slats of recycled wood that made up the walls of Diego’s home.  He slowly woke up to the familiar smell of beans cooking on the fogón, a rustic wood-burning stove, just a few feet away from his bed in the one-room home he shared with his mother and grandmother.  Before he opened his eyes, he listened for the familiar sounds of his neighbourhood – the rush of the menacing river outside his window, the traffic on the bridge that passed above, the annoying rooster and chickens that pecked away at the wild grass that grew at the back of his house.

Diego’s mother had left before the sun came up to deliver fresh tortillas to her clients, so his grandmother was preparing breakfast at the fogón, stirring the beans and heating up the leftover tortillas from his mom’s early morning batch.  Pulling himself up from his thin mattress on the floor, Diego stepped outside into the latrine and splashed cold water over his face hoping it would wake him up and quell his nerves. 

Today was Diego’s first day of fifth grade at El Hogar.  He was feeling a little uneasy.  Diego could walk to his old public school, which was convenient because it meant that on the days that nobody showed up, he could just walk back home.  Learning was a challenge in that school.  Sometimes there were more than 45 students in his class, and one year his teacher was responsible for three grades at once.   Diego wanted to understand, but there was no time for questions.  When he struggled, instead of support he got discouragement.  “You should know this by now,” his teacher would say.  Diego started to feel like maybe school wasn’t for him.

After breakfast and getting dressed in his new uniform, Diego’s grandmother took him up to the main street where, for the first time, he would take a bus to school.  Diego timidly greeted a few of the kids he recognized from his neighbourhood who were also going to El Hogar and waited nervously for the bus – the white bus with the sun logo on it that he had caught glimpses of before and now it was his turn to get on it.

Part 2 Coming Soon…