First Impressions of the Orphanage

I'm here! It's feeling a bit surreal at the moment, it slowly starting to dawn on me that this is going to be my new home for the next year. It kind of hits me in waves, one moment I'll be really excited and thinking of this as a summer-camp type thing for a week or two, and then the enormity will rush over me and I'll be like, Oh man, a year is SO long. The thing I hadn't really counted on to help in this process was the fact that a lot of other people would be starting their volunteer positions at the same time as me. Right now there are only three of us, Stephanie (the girl I took language classes with) and I arrived Friday afternoon, and the other volunteer Charlotte came later on that day. It's just been the three of us this weekend, we're expecting eight more volunteers to come in tomorrow (Sunday). It's pretty cool, a lot of the volunteers are going to be from Germany, Italy and Australia, so we'll be able to learn a lot about their cultures too. There's only one more dude coming, a guy from Germany, so we're going to be roommates. It's so weird to be talking about someone I haven't met yet, but who's going to be such a huge part of my life for the next thirteen months. I was talking about that with the girls earlier today, it's weird to be meeting everyone knowing that we're going to be such a huge part of each others' lives for the next year.
Before I jump ahead of myself, let me tell you what the orphanage is like. I think I mentioned in previous posts that it's in a pretty rural area. When you first approach it, you're greeted by a sign welcoming you.

There's a wall surrounding the whole campus with a large gate in front. The gate has a guard posted 24-hours a day (so you can all sleep soundly knowing I'm safe at night.)

There are several buildings and I still haven't figured out exactly what is what (I think our official tour isn't until the other volunteers arrive), but here's what we discovered so far:

The school buildings

The cafeteria (on the left) with some very colorful storage buildings

And finally the medical clinic (my new job!)

The orphanage also grows/raises its own food. We couldn't find the fields but we did find the animals! They have pigs, goats, cows and chickens (from what we could see). I had homemade goat cheese for breakfast today! I had to take a video of the pigs because I felt like a picture just wasnt capturing the sheer number of pigs. There were probably 60 or 80 of them! I guess that's what you need when you have 500 mouths to feed, though.

The houses where the volunteers live are WAY nicer than I expected. I felt like they were cottages in a retirement village or something, the lawns were so well manicured!

Here are some inside shots. This isn't the actual house I'm going to live in, just a temporary home until the volunteers who are returning home leave. We have a three week overlap so they can train us, so once that's done we'll move into their old houses. (The house we're staying in has a lot of beds in each room, usually there are only two)

We didn't see many kids on our little walk around, I'm wondering where they're all hiding. They seem to keep pretty busy during the day, so that's good. Hopefully they have someone planning a lot of activities for them.

Since we didnt really have anything to do today, we headed into the local town of Parramos. It's only a 15 minute walk from our new house and a lot of the other volunteers go here for their grocery/beer/hang out needs. This is the same place that I went to that street fair a few weeks ago and I showed Stephanie and the other new volunteer Charlotte around a little. Here's the fountain in the park

We also grabbed some liquados (smoothies) from a little shop. It wasn't the cleanest of places and we were a bit worried that we'd get sick from it, but it seems like we survived unscathed.

After we got back we hung out at the house for a bit and I taught them how to play 500. Hopefully we'll be playing a lot over the next few weeks. I miss playing it at home.

Tomorrow's a big day. After all the new volunteers get here we're going to go out for a meet-and-greet dinner. I'm looking forward to getting a feel for all the people I'll be living with. Hopefully the ones I've met already are an indication of what's to come