The Athens-Clarke County Employee & Retiree Newsletter
August 2008, Volume XI, Issue 8

Few people get to use their career skills in an international setting, but Cooperative Extension Service County Extension Coordinator Judy Hibbs has been able to bring her knowledge of diets and food preparation to help the boys of an orphanage in El Progresso, Honduras during the past two years. Last year, a team of Extension Agents traveled to Honduras for a cultural study and to offer their expertise in the country. A non-profit organization in Atlanta that supported an orphanage named ProNino asked the team to offer training to the orphanage for establishing a garden and improving the boys' diets.

	Judy Hibbs with two of the boys from the ProNino orphanage

Approximately 100 boys live in one of the three orphanage sites. In addition to having lost their families, many of the boys suffer from withdrawal symptoms associated with sniffing glue in order to suppress their appetite. The children come to the orphanage and go through a detoxification program for 3 to 6 months, and live at the orphanage until they are 18. The boys' prior diet consisted mainly of beans, rice, and tortillas, with one fruit and one milk every day and a vegetable twice a week. The diet was very high in fat and sodium, and very low in essential nutrients. Lack of adequate calcium was a major concern.

After Hibbs returned from the first visit in 2007, she provided feedback to the organization about the need for ProNino to learn food preservation techniques to extend the use of their garden vegetables and enable them to purchase food in bulk for cheaper prices.

The non-profit later asked Hibbs to return in 2008 for a week to offer food preservation training and raised funds to purchase freezers, canning equipment, food processors, food dehydrators, and other food preservation equipment. Their team even went down a week prior to Hibbs' visit in June and built a block building to serve as a food preservation center (alacena in Spanish). "It was actually very impressive," says Hibbs, "much like a commercial kitchen we have here in the states."

While there, Hibbs taught the kitchen staff and some ProNino boys how to use the equipment to freeze foods such as beans and peas and dehydrate others such as bananas and papayas. She also developed specific recipes to improve their diets such as a spaghetti sauce with "hidden vegetables," a mango sorbet for calcium, and a salsa recipe that can also be canned and sold in the village.

READ MORE
	• Cross-Cultural Studies: Honduras 2007