When Lilian Banegas first came to Britain in 2002 from a village in Honduras, she was struck by the silence on public transport. How different this was to the music and noisy chatter on buses back home. In her new country people were reading books. Culture seemed to be all around her and, as a young girl from a poor village in Central America, she felt very ignorant. Books, she decided, were the gateway to new horizons.
Lilian’s horizons started expanding in 2002, when DHEF sponsored her to come to London. She studied at Lakefield and then did a degree in Culinary Arts Management at the University of West London. Now she heads up the kitchen at Wickenden Manor and takes great pleasure in supervising young girls who come to gain experience in the hospitality world.
“I love helping them to overcome their fears of working in a kitchen and to discover their talents,” she says.
Lilian visits Honduras every three or four years. However, “I always came away from my visits to Honduras feeling saddened not only by the poverty but by the way people think. They feel hopeless in the face of their problems,” she says. But a trip earlier this year to her home village of Zambrano, just outside the capital city Tegucigalpa, was a turning point.
It was after this trip that Lilian felt she wanted to give back some of the knowledge she has built up over the years. Her dream was to bring books and a love of reading to the children and young people of her village. But in a place where people have barely enough money to buy food, buying books is out of the question.
People in Zambrano are very poor. Working on the land to scrape a living has been replaced by factory work. Big companies from China and Japan are using the cheap labour on offer in Honduras. But even this work is precarious and there is a lot of crime.
Undaunted, Lilian decided to turn her dream into a reality and in April 2022 she launched a fundraising campaign, Books for Children in Honduras, to bring books into schools in Zambrano and nearby villages. So far, the project has printed 150 copies of the classic tale “The Little Prince” and donated them to 6th Grade (11-12 years old) teacher Mr Mario for his school.
However, books on their own will not bring about change. Lilian saw that she also needed to inspire mothers to support their children in reading.
Again Lilian stepped out and created a programme for mothers to help them in their personal development and to expand their ideas, hopes and dreams for the future. On 29 July 2022, Lilian delivered an online conference, complete with a workbook, to 35 ladies from Zambrano and neighbouring villages. The title of the conference? “Fulfil your dreams!”
“Books for Children in Honduras” is Lilian’s dream coming true. Books open up new horizons where children can start to look beyond poverty to a wider world of ideas and aspirations. Lilian’s dream will create dreams and ambitions in others.
You can donate to “Books for Children in Honduras” here.
