el 16 de abril
Wow what a day,
Today was a very busy day. We started off with a group of students going to the main safe passage building to work in the kitchen. They were a great help to the project and without them it would be very difficult to ge the meals for four hundred kids. The rest of us went back to La Guarderia.
We spent the morning time with an adorable group of three year olds. We played parachute games with them and they got very into it. We started bouncing animals on the chute and the kids tried very hard to keep the animals afloat. We then tried to bounce beach balls on the chute, but the wind blew them away. Their favorite part was throwing the chute in the air and running around under it changing places. When their attention span started to give we switched to duck, duck goose. All of the kids wanted to be the goose and many of them jumped into the laps of the students. Some of them were a little aprehensive of going around so we helped them. After a few more games I had to leave to go to the main building. The kids had a fantastic time and it was hard to let them go back to class. It is hard to imagine that for alot of the kids this will be the most attention get from anyone.
At the main building myself along with three other students met the morning english club to go out to eat. We took a field trip to TGI Fridays (yes they are everywhere). They had been working for two months on the vocab and phrases to order, request items (salt, ketchup) and ask for their remaining food to be boxed. In the beginning they were not up to talking much but when a little time passed they got going. We ended up talking about everything from favorite sports and school classes to horror films and Steven King. It was weird to have this kind of a role reversal. We had been spending this time in a foreign country without complete knowledge of the language, and then we were suddenly put in the position of knowing the language and having to aid others in trying to use their vocab they had learned.
Once back from the field trip another group went with the afternoon english club and I along with those not taking the afternoon kitchen shift went back to La Guarderia. We repeated the morning activities with a class of five year olds with different results. The parachute entertained them for a little while but they were not nearly amused as the three year olds. They also were entertained only a short while by duck, duck, goose and red light, green light. We decided to change things up and do some races. This was one of the most entertaining activities and led into a kind of healthy splintering of the group. What they wanted to do most was choose their own activities. Some played on the jungle gyms, others kicked the beach balls around and some played with the stuffed animals. Even though it was a little rocky it was still a happy/sad departure.
When we returned to the hotel we had a ”sort of” condensed, interesting and eye opening history of Guatemala.
After the history lesson we had salsa lessons. Everyone (minus Jiyeon and Sr. Morales) had a great time and learned four steps of salsa (pretty good for an hour). We would go through the steps without music and then go with the music. Near the end we were going back and forth between all four moves which sometimes caused a bit of confusion. But all in all our group was great. The reason why Jiyeon and Sr. Morales were left out was the fact that they had to return to the hotel before we found the salsa place. They could not find the lessons and ended up getting their own walking tour of Antigua. They were finally rescued and brought to the studio five minutes before it ended.
At dinner (which was good as always) we had some fun dancing and then returned to the hotel. While writting this blog some of the kids ran down and said that a volcano was erupting (geez, a tremor and an erupting volcano, we’re not in maine anymore). On the roof you could see the the lava spurting out of the top. It was nothing serious but very cool. It was a good end to the day.
Josh
