Anniversario!

Since I arrived here, everyone's been telling me about NPH's huge anniversary celebration. It's without a doubt the biggest event of the year; they have dances, put on shows, eat great food and play games for four days straight. It's so important to the kids here that volunteers are actually required in their contracts to stay and participate for the whole thing. Usually the celebration is in mid-November, but like I mentioned before we've been having some major financial problems here. All the kids are being sent to their relatives houses for November and December so the house can save a little money on food/employee salaries. To accommodate this, the anniversary celebration was moved to October and shortened to one day.

All volunteers and children are required to participate in Anniverario. We were broken into teams of 15-20 people and assigned a type of dance. Once I heard that we would have to present our dance in front of the whole school I instantly lost all interest in participating. I HATE to dance in front of people, especially when I don't know what I'm doing. We were assigned the Merengue which I know absolutely nothing about. We had one week to meet with our groups and prepare the costumes, make a flag, write and memorize cheers, decide on our dance moves and music, and then memorize everything. Considering I needed to miss more than half of our practices because of med runs, I was in bad shape. Luckily Tia Rosa came to my rescue and asked me to cover for the nurse the day of Anniversario. I would have to pass meds and treat the children, so I wouldn't be able to do the dance (hooray!). Right after I told my group that I wouldn't be dancing, they asked me if I'd still be able to help them with the games (during the day we compete against the other teams in a series of games, then at night we have the dance competition). I told them I'd do the best that I could to help them out.

During the week while they were practicing their dance moves, I helped with making costumes. Here was a cool unexpected lesson; I learned how to make grass skirts! Actually, I learned how to make pine needle skirts, but it's pretty much the same thing. There was no budget for costumes or decorations, so we had to be creative. People are very quick to use nature in their arts and crafts here, we're always pilfering braches and leaves for projects, so the first thing our group did was to go out and rip down some low-lying branches from the pine trees. Then, we pulled the pine needles off in clumps.

Next we took two long strings, tied them together at one end, and tied in a small clump of needles.

Keep that up until you have a long string of pine needles, then just tie it around your waist.

Voila! The finished product! (And the only reason there's a space in this one is that it was made for a little kid!)

As we were practicing, we had to show the committee the progress we had made. Here we are showing off our flag and shouting our cheers

Holger and Bryan look on

After all the practicing, it was finally time for the big day. We started with a mass at 5:30 (yikes), then started playing games at 8a. I had to run to the clinic and load up on first aid supplies before meeting up with my group, so I missed the event that I was most interested/frightened of: The Pole. Basically, the point of the game is to climb a telephone pole that's been greased up. Every person who gets to the top of the pole wins a point for their team. I have issues with upper body strength. I've never climbed a rope in my life and I had absolutely no hopes of getting up a pole unassisted. Once I saw it though, I realized it was different than I had pictured. The pole was actually on a diagonal; you didn't need upper body strength, you just needed to be able to shimmy up the pole without falling off (something that proved really, really hard to do). I watched another team do it, and the strongest boys of the group had a really hard time with it. The people running the station said that the little ones could try it as long as older kids stood on the sides to catch them if they fell off (it's about 12 feet off the ground at the top). This was instantly listed as one of the most dangerous games of the day and I spent a good amount of time cleaning scrapes and cuts (though thankfully no broken bones).

I quickly ran to find my group. It was actually really cool how unified the groups became. They ran back in forth under their banners, shouting out their cheers. It was really fun and the sense of competition was pretty serious.

The other games that they had were pretty fun. For this one you had to form a line and pass a wet sponge from the front to the back, then wring out the water into a garbage pail.

This game was very clever on the part of the employees. The kids had to run around and fill up garbage bags with litter. The group with the most bags won.

Finally it was time for the best game ever: the tug-of-war. Let me tell you, they don't kid around with their tug-of-wars. They dug a four foot deep pit in the center and filled it with water, thus making this a huge mud trap.

From a nursing perspective, it was a nightmare. Kids would get pulled into the pit and fall four feet down onto their faces, underwater, then a bunch of kids would fall on top of them. As soon as a team went into the pit I'd run to the side and go through CPR steps in my head. Luckily everyone survived, though we did have one concussion and at least ten sprained knees/ankles.

SO MUCH MUD

I've never felt more valuable at NPH than in this game. When I walked over to the rope, the kids instantly parted to make room. They made sure I had the most secure footing, that I had rags under my hands to have a better grip. I felt like a star, it was awesome. Naturally, my awesome body makes me a prime person for tug-of-war: I'm heavy so I'm an anchor for the team, plus I'm pretty strong, so I can do some real damage. I'm proud to report that we kicked ass and came in first place.

Post-mud clean up

Then it was time for the dancing. I have to say, I was really impressed by all the groups, especially Merengue. They really were great and everyone remembered their moves

This was some kind of western dance. They made little boot tips for the kids in the metal shop. So cute!

I have no idea what half of these dances were. Here's Holger's group. I'm kind of glad I didn't get roped into being topless

And Jose Louis pretended to not like his dance, but I know he secretly did.

Here's the winning group for the dances: Rock and Roll. Check out this video. It's a bit long and it starts slow, but I think it's pretty impressive, especially the end. They made their skirts from black and white garbage bags and all their props were made from things they found in the garbage. It's Grease Lightening!



I have to say, even with a shortened celebration and virtually no budget for a party, anniversario was a huge success. I had an awesome time :)