My Daily Life

Apparently, I never published this from September 9th ! whoops
This explains orphanage as a whole, food, my job and such. I´ll seperate them in categories incase you want to skim.

THE HOGAR - ORPHANAGE
-There are 63 girls total, youngest being 4 years old (there are 3, my main job is them)
-There are a few older girls who go to University, but have no place to live, so they are in and out it seems
-The girls come from different cities in Bolivia, some from hours away by bus
-Most girls have family, they are just too poor to take care of them, every once in awhile one will visit maybe 2 but then on school breaks many kids go visit but hardly get enough to eat while they are at home
-hogar has 2 houses, a big yard, and space in the back and side for washing, and a huge kitchen!
-My room (and Angela´s when she comes) is on 2nd story of first house next to the bathroom that we share w- my partner when she comes and one of the nuns, the girls in this house live below. The other 2 nuns live upstairs in the 2nd house where the rest of the girls live (the girls share rooms and are not sep. by age)
-Pets of the hogar = 3 rabbits, 2 dogs, and 2 birds and many kids (just kidding)
-They have had volunteers in the past, but most from Europe, we are the first Salesian volunteers

FOOD
-one word . YUM! It´s not as bland as I thought.
Tea is really big here, which I love.
breakfst = bread with marmalada or Dulce de leche (like caramel nutella)
lunch = rice with a little bit of meat and vegetables (lots of potato and often tomato and onion) or lentils or something
    dessert is orange or banana (we did have ice cream on a stick once..you know those ice cream things...)
dinner = just bread on weekends with cheese or soup on weekdays bc cook comes on weekdays to make lunch and dinner together. Tonight we had arroz con leche. so good! a little cinnamon with it. Reminded me of Eggnog, but a little better.
     They chew coca plant (used to make .. well u know) but it´s used for altitude sickness and hermana assured me you can´t get addicted from chewing a little bit, but I haven´t been sick so haven´t tried it yet
     Yes, I have been eating vegetables bc sister told us they wash them well and I´ve been fine so far. Also, they have this really easy way of boiling water with this machine thing and it works perfectly! You just put water in it and plug it in. No problems yet.

MY JOB
work with the 4 year olds' there are 3 of them and they are a rambuncious, full of energy!
I make sure they are dressed, make sure they eat breafast, work on numbers or letters or homework they have from Kinder, then bathe them and make sure their hair is done and all that, then make sure they eat lunch and walk them to kinder with one or two older girls. It´s just a 10 min. walk or so. They always fight over who gets to sit on my lap almost everytime I sit down and who gets to hold my hand during the walk. So funny...mostly pretty good kids, though they fight a bit.
    While they are at Kinder, I play with the other kids for a little bit and then it´s homework time! The older ones are seperated from the younger ones and I have to help the older ones with English once a week, the rest of the time, I help with homework, mainly math! They do have 2 tutors that come also during the week. Twice a week, I leave to take a group to ballet by taxi with an older girl, there are 6 girls that take ballet but two diff. times. We wait for them during the hour they are there, other days I go with the older girls to pick up the littles from Kinder.

Every weekday at 6pm we do rosary all together in the first house. Sometimes we say a decade or two in Qechua, which totally threw me off the first time (it´s one of 2 indigenous languages here and it´s SO diff. from espanol). Then it´s dinner time and I have to make sure the 4'year olds get ready for bed and all that and then I take turns each night reading stories. They help me with some words haha. it´s very cute. then off to bed I go. I usually am asleep by 9 or 9.30 and rise at like 6 or 7am

Saturdays = help with chores or keep younger ones occupied and every once in awhile may have movie night Fri or Sat night..Play after chores are done and sometimes take some kids to park nearby

Sundays = Mass for everyone, so get little ones ready for Mass and we all walk together to the church. It´s not as lively as other Spanish Masses I´ve been too, but still really nice and relaxed atmosphere. I like it. A small group of girls might go on an outing (but haven´t done that yet) like to the Botanical Gardens or to see Cristo de la Concordia'- this humongo statue of Jesus on the mountaintop, His back is to the hogar, but I know He is watching over us. Apparently it is bigger than the one in Buenos Aires, but less popular...


DOOFUS MOMENTS...
So, I was at Angela´s lang. school hanging out and stuff last week until she was done so we could start visa stuff and this girl knew that Angela is Catholic and that I was working with her, so she asked if I was Catholic too and I said yes. She asked me if there were a lot of virgins at my church in the United States...I was like okay I know I understood her correctly, so I say, no se, Espero que si, like I hope so hahah and then I realized she was talking about the Virgin Mary and we had a good laugh...wow...The other day, I asked the girls where to put the extra stuff from lunch and she said it was for the dogs and pointed, so I went all the way outside and around and a couple girls were looking at me funny and I had to tell girl washing clothes by the dog cage that this was for the dogs and asked where I need to put this,  she walked me all the way back inside and pointed to a bucket which was where Carmen was originally pointing. I felt a little stupid, but that´s ok, more misunderstandings to come!!. Also, last night I was thinking how nice it was to have electricity all the time here, although with the big windows, we don´t need it as much, but I went to shower and when i came back realized my bulb was burnt out. So nothing too bad, but just silly moments.

The girls are so cute!!! I helped a bit with laundry and helped cook lunch today. we had some meat thing that you put with garlic and some spice and then roll into a ball, stick it between wax paper with flour or cornmeal stuff and pound it with a rock to stretch it out instead of a rolling pin while jamming out to popular music from the states. It was kinda fun.