Seño Karla y Seño Alana

Alana with Maria Antonia, Sandra, Lisa and Elicka...
a delightful morning welcome of hugs and excitement!

It makes 5 year olds really happy to have
butterfly (mariposa) stickers stuck to their foreheads!

Alana and me with our rowdy mañana class

Alana and I are on our own now at school with the 5 to 10 year olds. This means that we make and carry out all of the lesson plans and we conduct the classes...it´s extremely tiring, mostly because not only are we in charge of all these little kids, but we have a very limited vocabulary! It´s amazing though how patient they are with us.

I´m feeling pretty run down right now after this long week...and was truly tested on Monday and Tuesday when I had to teach all of the classes all alone since Alana was very sick after our strenuous weekend at Lake Atitlan.

We are loving it though. And especially the adoring hugs and kisses, cuddles and smiles that we receive from the children every moment they can. We arrive each morning to kids running up the alley to squeeze our waists and bury their heads in our stomachs...each fruit break they are either sitting on our laps, playing with our hair, holding our hands to walk in circles and sing songs in Spanish, or shouting ¨arriba, arriba!¨so we´ll pick them up and swing them around... We can tell that school for them is a refuge from their deprived childhoods.

Both my heart and my first tears broke last Friday when after Sports Day we learned that one of the little 7 year olds, Nayeli, had eaten nothing in the past 24 hours except for the orange that we gave her during fruit break...she was eating it like it was the last piece of food on Earth...so Doreen asked her if she had eaten breakfast or lunch...no, she hadn´t eaten any meals that day or dinner the night before. So, we gave her the remainder of the bread from the morning classes to eat and to bring home to her brothers. It´s really difficult to comprehend how poor these children are and how ridiculously much we take for granted...