Scavenger Hunt

Ugh, I've been so bad about writing. I get super lazy after working in the clinic all day and when I get home all I want to do is lay in my bed and play games on my phone. I've been sewing a little more which is good, I need something to reassure myself that I am in fact productive. Right now I'm working on a gift for my sister which is absolutely delightful, I wish I could post pictures but since it's a surprise you'll have to suffer with curiosity for a while.

So aside from our normal 8-5 jobs, the volunteers have different projects that we're responsible for every month. One of them is called Projecto Familiar and I'm really in love with it. The way things work here at the orphanage, the organization wants to try to preserve the family as much as possible for the kids. They have a rule that when a caregiver wants to send a child here, ALL of the children under 16 have to come, not just one (this also helps to dissuade families from having lots of babies they can't afford and just sending the new ones to us). This means we have a lot of sibling groups here. They see each other in passing and during recess, but they don't get to spend a lot of alone time together (with 400 kids here, alone time is hard for anyone to come by.) They started Projecto Familiar to give the kids a chance to hang out alone with their brothers and sisters; we bring them to the park in town or out for ice cream for two hours. I had my first one the other day with a special needs kid and his sister. Since it was my first time I got to buddy up with another volunteer, Bianca. The kids were really cute, they've only been here for a few months so this is all new to them. He ran right up to her and grabbed her hand and wouldn't let go for the entire time. They walked ahead of us and just whispered a lot to each other. Of course it made me think about how it would be for me and my brother and sisters here which made me get all choked up. I'm definitely missing my family a lot :( My first solo-Projecto is this week so we'll see how that goes!

The other thing we're required to do is called Kermes. It's basically one day every two months where the volunteers need to plan a big activity to keep all the kids busy for two hours. They've done all sorts of projects in the past with limited success. Kermes was yesterday and our theme was a scavenger hunt! Now I happen to love scavenger hunts anyway, but to add a little twist to this one, once the kids were separated into groups we tied them up! It was hilarious. Each group had about twenty kids in it of varying ages. We took rope and fed it through their belt loops, basically connecting them into a chain. They had to coordinate their walking to keep from falling, so they ended up moving really slowly. I got off a little easy on this Kermes. Instead of having to lead a group of kids through different stations, I was responsible for making a campfire! The last station of the scavenger hunt was a box of marshmallows for the campfire. Some of the other volunteers made a ton of dough and the kids were able to make bread over the fire too (which absolutely fascinated me. Why have I never heard of that before?!) The kids LOVED it. We blasted music and had a dance party while we ate our food, it was really fun. Here are a bunch of pictures!

The girls waiting for the start of Kermes

And the boys. They're separated by gender a lot.

Here are the kids walking while tied together



Here's me and my buddy Dacia. We do a lot of medical appointments together.

Charlotte and one of the boys from her section (Pablo? Pedro?) showing off his well-done bread

Gustavo and another boy who I don't know. Gustavo is a cute kid. He's close to being non-verbal but has been becoming very friendly and affectionate as he's been getting settled in to NPH

This kid wanted his picture taken, too. I'm not really sure how he got a face full of flour since the dough was all pre-made...

This is Carlito. He was into cooking way more than eating, he kept asking for more dough.

In fact all of them loved cooking the bread. Here's a mob of ravenous children attacking Kristina and Janelle trying to get more dough

This kid is adorable too, though its a crappy picture of him.

This girl's my buddy too.

This kid had such a ridiculously large stick, it was hilarious

Me, Charlotte and Hanna

It was a really awesome time! Once again I was a little surprised by the difference in supervision here. The basic attitude is "if they do something stupid they probably won't do it again." When everyone was done making their bread a bunch of kids dumped the rest of the firewood in, making an enormous bonfire. The staff were just like, ok, our job here is done, the fire will burn out. We just left a horde of crazy children running around a bonfire. Guess everything was fine though, there were no crispy kids waiting in the clinic this morning ;)