El Bichito: Meet the Hicken Family!

We are excited to introduce the Hickens! This awesome family is volunteering for a semester at El Bichito. They are our first full family to intern for such a long period of time. We are excited to have them! Look for updates from them as we move through fall! Following is a bit of their story:

 This is us, Brent, Sunny, Kai, Renen, Sierra, & Lily.  We are the new “interns” at El Bichito. We are also, apparently, the first volunteer family.  Many have asked us what our story is, so here goes.

Years ago before my husband and I knew each other, we both spent an extended time in Spanish speaking countries working with people who had significantly less monetarily than we were accustomed to.  We both found this time so educational and beneficial to our personal development that we wanted our children to have such an experience (and we wanted more for ourselves, too!)  For years as we raised our family, we planned and looked for an opportunity to go to a Spanish speaking country, not as tourists or to live in an elite ex-pat neighborhood, but to really be part of the native community.  We wanted an experience for our family that could open their eyes to other ways of life, help them learn Spanish (since that is the second language my husband and I knew), and give them an opportunity to serve just for the sake of their fellow man.  Our children were getting older, and we finally decided we didn’t have any more time to wait for an opportunity to arise.  I searched the internet again looking for opportunities and came across Eagle-Condor Humanitarian.  Even though young interns were the normal source of volunteers, I contacted them to see if our family could possibly be part of their program for the time we could carve out—one semester.  They were flexible and had opportunities that would help us reach this goal for our family.  We spent about a year ironing out details (like arranging to do school and work online, since we couldn’t take off either one, finding someone to take care of our home in the U.S., learning about the different programs with Eagle Condor, getting passports, etc.).  Amazingly, it all came together, and here we are!

            As you might imagine, taking a family on such an adventure has been a bit more of a challenge than going just as a single young person.  We have only been here a couple of weeks, and we are just starting to settle in.  We still haven’t figured out a lot of how to do things.  Cooking, cleaning, school, work, errands, laundry—it’s still all part of our days just as before we came and it takes a lot longer now, too.  But I know this time of our lives will be life shaping.  In a way, this seems like a crazy time to leave home.  Our youngest started Kindergarten and we have a high school freshman and senior, both missing school activities that were a big part of their teenage lives.  The language has been a big barrier for them, though they do notice an improvement already.  Since our kids can’t talk much with the kids who come yet, one thing they do is to set an example by doing their own homework after lunch (something we keep trying to encourage all the kids to do).  Lily, our youngest, loves playing active games like ball or tag with the kids in front of the center.  Sierra, who is the age of a lot of the kids here, has both made friends and gotten teased by the boys.  (“Sierra…costa, selva!” they say to her, naming the three geographical areas of Peru—the mountains, the coast, and the jungle).  Kai, our high school senior, is teaching a small English class and just today he started tutoring a student in math for a college entrance exam.  He is currently taking AP Calculus online and felt confident about his math skills, but he said that teaching math in Spanish is a lot harder than he expected.  He also told us tonight that he realized that the hard things are often the best things to do.  I’m glad to hear him say that, because coming here has definitely not been an easy thing for our family, but it may well be one of the best.