Update from the Casa (Week 2)

Well our second weekend at the Casa saw us take a break from our weekly Orientador jobs to become Activity leaders. Basically on the weekends, the kids don't have school but have 4 seperate - 3 hour activity sessions spread out over Saturday and Sunday to keep them busy. It's up to the Volunteers to try and organise something slightly interesting to keep them busy for that time.

Each of the 4 groups (the Big boys/girls and the little girls/boys) has 3 hours of cinema (2 years ago, some volunteers paid for and built a great home stereo room)so that leaves 3 sessions to organise for each group. It's a good gig to do because it means you get to sleep in until 9am !! Believe us, it{s a big break from the usual 4.30am weekday start.

Last weekend, there were enough volunteers around so Lyds and I got to work together. We had the Nina Pequenas (little Girls) and the Varone Pequenas (little boys) over the weekend. The Girls were fantastic and very easy to please. We got some Arts and Crafts from the supply room for them and basically spent a full 3 hours making little clothes from paper to hang on a line with lots of sparkly things and strings and beads etc. etc. They loved it and it was great to spend some time hanging with the girls considering we spend all our time with the boys.

The boys on the other hand.....it's almost impossible to get all of them to want to do the same thing together. Half of them love fishing, some want to play Muerteból (Guatemalan version of dodgeball), others want to pick fruits...it's loco. For something different Lyds organised a series of relay races to get them excited and interested. Before we had them, we made team signs, a scoreboard, got some prizes together, got face paints to paint the different teams in unique colors....it sounded so good in theory.

Probably the biggest success was getting all the boys to stay in one place for an hour. Things started to go a bit pear-shaped from the start. Dividing them into teams took a while, the face painting went a bit askew with a few kids basically covering their entire bodies in paint (thankfully it was water based paint so it washed off easily). The first race went pretty well, but the rest just went progressively downhill. The first few kids in each relay would do it properly (for example - jumping in a bag correctly for the old potatoe sack race)...but then the next team member would just grab the bag and run...and so on.

All six of the races just ended up turning into a running race....Oh well. We kept them busy for a while. The best thing about the little boys is that if you have them in the afternoon, they will happily spend almost the entire 3 hour session swimming in the river and jumpiong off the balcony of their house...an easy gig and perfect on a typical stinking hot Guatemalan day.

Here are a few pics from oour latest week...



As always, if you can´t see this slideshow, please check out the link here - Casa Guatemala Week 2