girls sports program continued...: it seems like everything i did this week was trying my patience (which seems to be a common theme here), but i think it's good for me. the first thing was the girls sports program. kelly and i took off the month of october because the kids were praying the rosary during our usual sports time, so this week we decided to start it up again. it was quite a challenge. i don't know if it was because we had been off for a while or what but the girls were in quite a mood. they weren't listening, they were yelling at each other, they were being lazy... i seriously felt like i was in one of those movies where the sports team is really really bad and the coach is new and doesn't know what to do... the only thing is that all those movies end with the coach coming in and doing something amazing and all the sudden the team comes together and wins the championship... and at the moment i'm not feeling like that will be happening! i feel like i need to go watch "miracle" or something to get me motivated. we ended the practice with my best attempt at a spanish "i'm disappointed in you, but you can do this" motivational speech, so we'll see if it goes better next week. we have some ideas for some team-building actvities and we have our eyes on a few girls we need to target at the "captains" and use them to motivate the other girls. we are trying to find some sporting event we can take them to, but seriously girls just do not play sports in this country! so, we'll see... i gotta see if i can find a spanish version of "a league of their own"...
bicycle riding: paola was another one of my frustrations this week. she has been behaving really well lately, much better than her punching me in the face days. we have been having classes every afternoon and she has been working in the office in the mornings. overall, she has been doing really great. however, for some reason she has been gaining a lot of weight, which is fine... being "gorda" in this country is considered a compliment... but none of her clothes are fitting her anymore, so we decided that we would start working out in the afternoons. we started by running, but it didn't go too well because she gets tired and complains after like 2 seconds. but, i discovered that the other houses received a few bicycles each a couple weeks ago to share amongst the kids in each house. so we started to borrow one from the oldest girls house because paola told me she'd like to learn how to ride a bike. can't be that hard, right? wrong! oh my gosh, this was one of the most frustrating things of my life. poor paola, she is just so uncoordinated and she is one of the biggest kids here so the bike is way too small for her. but it was just such an interesting experience. she just couldn't grasp the concept of pushing her feet in a circle (i probably wasn't helping with my broken spanish). she just kept pushing forward for like 2 seconds and then she's get nervous or something and push back, hence stopping the bike. oh my gosh, the first day we tried i felt so bad because i was so frustrated and probably not doing the best job of hiding it. it was so hot and she just wasn't understanding and i couldn't think of any other words to say and i didn't know the words i wanted to say, plus the poor thing was sweating and hot and she gets nervous and starts laughing when she feels incapable, so she just kept laughing and not listening to me (lexy... much like trying to teach you how to use the weight machines at the ymca). after the first day, i felt very defeated and very frustrated. we took a day off and then tried again the next. we made a little progress, but not much. i was secretly hoping that she would just be too frustrated and not want to do it any more because i was out of ideas. i kept encouraging her though because you could tell that she felt bad that she wasn't getting it. the third day we tried started much like the others, but suddenly one of the little boys from my house came out and offered to help. it was so amazing because he is one of the toughest kids i have in my house. he's not really the "helping type". but he was so good with her. he was pushing her and balancing her and explaining stuff to her in ways that i didn't know how. even if she didn't learn, i was so proud of this little 11 year old boy coming to help a girl much older than him learn to ride a bike. then finally, the next day some of the older girls came out to help as well. which was great, because even though they are older or the same age, they often make fun of her. but they came out and they were great and she finally got it! she can do it by herself for quite a while... it's really amazing because after the first day i thought it was a lost cause. she still needs a push to get started... but that will be our project for next week...
uno: i also found a deck of uno cards in the volunteer house this week and i thought it would be a fun and easy thing to do with my boys in casa santa rosa. i also thought it would be a good way to reinforce the english numbers and colors they are learning in school. well it was fun... but certainly not easy. kids are kids and so sometimes it's easy to forget that i'm in an orphanage because we just do normal "kid stuff". but every now and then i am reminded that there are certain things that you just don't learn when you grow up without parents or a normal family setting. playing uno was complete chaos! at first i was frustrated... but it ended up just being hilarious! first of all, they think the "wild" or "pick 4" or "reverse" cards are just so much more exciting than the other cards so when they are picking cards, they just keep picking until they get one... even if in the meantime they pick a hundred cards that they could have played. and then they cheat... so they look at each others cards and when they get a "wild" they'll change it not to what they have, but what the other kids don't have... so they might change it to yellow even if they have no yellow because the kid next to them doesn't have yellow so then when it's their turn again they have to pick again! oh my gosh... seriously we played every day this week and never ever finished a game... no one ever ran out of cards. it was actually quite funny after a while and i'll never look at uno the same again!"we are created by love, to live in love, for the sake of love." - gerald may
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