Mexico, Day 5

July 7, 7:35 am
Sitting in the courtyard with Carissa and Michelle.

Lots of the girls were sore this morning after all the carrying and piggybacking we did last night, but I'm not. I tried to wash my blue hoody in the sink but it's still wet and sodden so I don't know if it's going to be dry even by Friday. I'm planning on buying one today when the gift shop is open. [I didn't.]

Anyway. Adult Evangelism was shockingly eye-opening. I sort of wonder if the reason they take us out there is so we can actually see the poverty for ourselves. They have little houses, and playgrounds and a basketball court, but they LOOK poor, and the kids are all tiny and wild. [This, we learned later, was a fairly high-end work camp, as work camps go.] One girl, as tall as me but younger, was only wearing a tank-top-like shirt and asked for my hoody by tugging at it. I said no but I wished I could, that I didn't need it, and that it wasn't unfair to give it to just one when we didn't have hoodies for all of them. I also had a granola bar in the pouch of my hoody, which a couple kids noticed, and then when we got in the van I realized it was gone.

I forgot about praying for the kids for the most part, they were in and out so fast, but I did for a few right at the end.

In the van on the way back I asked Nathan about Ambrose meal plans and he proved quite helpful. He said most girls don't actually use up all of their meal plan. He also told funny stories of dorm pranks. :P

We laughed a lot about random things, most of which I barely remember, and my caesar salad from Sunday, which I forgot in the van, got spilled on the floor. Eww. I may go back to make sure I got all the bits that spilled when I cleaned it up, cause it was dark.

It was weird, I wasn't happy with the ridiculous skirt getup, but once we got there it stopped mattering. The kids don't care. It was nice to change out of it, though. All our hair looked hilarious after we pulled it out of ponytails and whatnot, because of the hairspray we put in to discourage lice.

I journaled as far as I could last night and fell asleep probably seconds after the light went out.

This morning I woke up and dozed off again until 6:30, when I stumbled over to the bathroom for a cold, wimpy-water-pressured shower. My hair is still damp and I need to hunt up some bobby pins before we go out to work assignments.

We got toast and peanut butter and oatmeal for breakfast, and I tried the milk, which Carissa says tastes like melted ice cream. It doesn't, quite, but almost. Also had more awesome coffee, though 15 minutes is not long enough to properly enjoy a cup of coffee.

Destiny just about started breaking in through the wrong window, when we went back to our room and no one had a key. I believe she wanted a calling card to call her mom. She was really homesick initially, but I think she's feeling better. [Yay for Destiny! I hope you were feeling better.]

[A bit later]
Carissa and I sat in the courtyard for a while with our journals, before the nursery was open for us to take babies.

At breakfast Bob came up and picked Loree and Dionne to watch the kids in the nursery during Sala. I wanted to be picked to go in the nursery, no fair :P He didn't even ask for volunteers. Whatever. I'll get over it. Maybe he just noticed they've been playing with the kids a lot. I TRY, but I just feel...awkward. Shy? I feel like I don't know how to be a fun person with kids, or something. Which is stupid, of course I do. I dunno.

I got a little girl out of the nursery, Leah, for Sala, but she started squirming as soon as I sat down and I took her back (thankfully today I sat close to the door). I wish she'd gone to sleep on my shoulder, she looked like she might for a bit and it's so sweet when kids do that.

We're sitting in Sala now and one of the house parents is sharing about the medical problems his 'son' (one of the orphans) Oscar is having, and how Oscar has to leave and live in Tijuana. [Poor Oscar. He has AIDS and they live too far away from Tijuana for him to get blood tests and stuff as often as he needs. He shared, too, and just about started to cry before he even started talking.]

1:35 pm
We're sitting in the sun outside the visitors' centre, enjoying it. Destiny showed us she can fake being pregnant. Now she's lying in the sun. Laurent and Loree are over playing with some of the disabled kids from the day home.

According to Ms. Hildebrand, there's a little autistic girl who lives here with two caretakers. She came right to me to tell me. I'd like to meet her, I think - I feel a little apprehensive at the idea. It's not like I really know much about autism. I do work with Jaden, but autism is so DIFFERENT with every individual. [I never did get to meet her. I kind of wish I had.]

4:15 pm
To carry on from where I stopped just then, I ran over to take pictures of Laurent and Loree and Nathan with the disabled kids and ended up semi-playing with them until 2 when we received afternoon work assignments. Incidentally, the grassy sward where we played is SO lovely and soft and green in the sun. [I like the phrase 'grassy sward' and since it sounded about right for this particular area I just kept on using it. It makes me feel wordy. It means 'an expanse of short grass'. From Old English.]

Anyway, we congregated right outside the visitors' centre and Bob started out by listing the places that needed help in the afternoon - weeding, raking, lawnmowing, help in the day home. I expected the day home to get snatched up right away because it involves playing with kids, which everyone loves, but it didn't. Two people volunteered for sweeping first.

So I put up my hand and said I'd do the day home, and then sort of discovered/remembered that that means the disabled kids, not the daycare kids. The mission takes on the disabled kids during the day. Also, they only needed ONE helper.

I was okay with being with the disabled kids. Not AS okay as with the daycare kids, but whatever. Even though I work with Jaden, that still intimidates me, and I'm guessing that's why other people didn't volunteer right off the bat. ALONE, though?

Anyway, couldn't back down, so I headed over. (Also, Bob gave vague directions, and though I did actually find the right door, they weren't inside.) Anyway, I found them eventually, having a birthday party picnic. By the grassy sward, incidentally.

The really pretty British girl, Katie, was there briefly. I felt out of place initially, but the kids were really friendly. One of the boys with Down Syndrome wanted a picture with me. We played a game with a parachute and I helped a boy with either spina bifida or muscular dystrophy (don't remember) sit up so he could play.

I couldn't understand them at all, of course, except one girl (12 or 13) who spoke English. It didn't really matter, though.

After the birthday party and the game we went back to their room behind the clinic. I pushed a boy in a wheelchair to get there.

Inside, two of the boys were playing with toy cars, so I sat down at the same table. One of the ladies commented that it would be great if I would play with them, which gave me a bit more confidence.

I pulled out my camera at that point (always a crowd-pleaser) and one of the boys, Martin, wanted to play with it, which consisted of him pointing it nowhere and pressing the button. That was fairly entertaining for a bit, until the boy across the table wanted to use it. And he did, for a long time, taking pictures almost exclusively of the bottoms of his toy cars. Later on he took some dubious shots of kids playing in the toy kitchen. I have ten million pictures of the bottoms of toy cars. I was iffy on entrusting my camera to a motor-skills-challenged kid, but he did really well. Another boy in a wheelchair, who spoke English, used it briefly as well, and very politely gave it back when my two were being restless.

Right at the end I played with two of the last kids to leave, trying to take pictures of them while they hid. They thought this was hilarious.

The lady in charge thanked me at the end and offered that if I wanted to go on the bus that took them all home, I could, but I would have missed dinner, so I said no. It might have been fun, though.

About 3:30, they were all gone. So I was going to head over to where some others were working and see if they needed help, but Bob accosted me on the way with a trolley full of shoeboxes.

Perhaps Bob is a bit dyslexic? Anyway, he doesn't come across real clearly, so initially I thought he wanted me to visit all the Casas (houses) with this trolley of shoeboxes, to see if any of the orphans wanted one for their personal belongings. I was a bit intimidated by this. (See: Not speaking a word of Spanish.) But then he just started following along in his bike. He told me 'free boxes' was 'cahas gratis', so I said that a few times to various kids. We got rid of all the boxes, though mostly to one of the ladies who organizes clothes. Then he told me I could stop for the afternoon!

So I did.

9:55 pm
After I stopped journaling I was feeling wonderful because it was sunny and warm and I was off work early and I was in MEXICO. So I grabbed my journal and was sitting outside and writing , on the low walltop by the road. It felt pretty cool. There was a time when I would have felt self-conscious, sitting on a random wall journaling while people walked by, but not now.

Nathan and Loree and Everett dropped by after a bit. I commented that I might actually be getting a tan. Nathan put on his sunglasses because it was 'a bit bright over there'. Ha ha. Loree told us the woes of the tiny lawnmower. Everett gave me a tiny orange that ended up being super sour, and a practical joke that they were handing out to the girls in general. [I did not eat it after the first taste, despite their earnest assertions that "you're supposed to eat it whole".] I believe the boys went to the orchard in the afternoon.

Then I sat and half-journaled and half-chatted until dinner. I don't remember what we ate for dinner (oh yeah, it was rice and beans) but someone commented that a lot of the food LOOKS disgusting but after you've been working you really don't care.

Wednesday nights are church at the mission, so we walked there, and Loree and I read the copper plates in the sidewalk. They're names of events in the Bible, chronologically as you get closer to the church, in Spanish. Pretty cool.

I wasn't expecting such a big church or such a wealthy one. They gave us headsets, for English speakers, for translation. We ended up not using them.

There were also a lot of white people. Near the end numbers from the nursery flashed on the screen a few times. Kids getting fussy and their parents being paged.

The worship team was GREAT. They had a really energetic sound and sang a few songs in Spanish that I know in English, so I sang the English. That felt cool.

Dionne sang and Joel drummed in a really neat song that they put together with some people from the other groups. Awesome harmony, and they built to a great crescendo. Impressive, for the very little practice they seemed to do.

At one point I looked up at the one uncovered window on the west side of the church and there was BLINDING sunlight streaming through. How's THAT for an image of God? Sunlight in a huge white airy church. THAT was cool.

The service, despite being long and ponderous due to translation, was strangely refreshing. I just enjoyed the feeling of being in CHURCH, and the peaceful walk back. I chatted with Bryan and Loree.

I did a quick sweep of the van to make sure the lettuce spilled from the unfortunate caesar salad was all cleaned up and not bug-infested, and pilfered a granola bar, and went up to the visitors' lounge for a team meeting.

We got really off-track, but it was a good off-track, funny stories and commiseration about shared issues. A lot of people don't like Bob :P

What touched me the most was when Bryan shared his high point of the day. He said that someone at church asked who was the Southgate leader, anyway, and it made him think of what a good team we all are and how proud he is of us. Bryan very seldom says stuff like that so it means a lot when he does.

After a bit more sharing, some from the Washington group came in for a 'peanut butter run', we prayed to end the meeting, and then things got a little crazy, fun at first. We ate peanut butter toast and straight peanut butter off spoons and Michelle and I made tea (Earl Grey!).

Then the Americans introduced us to a slightly violent game [I hadn't heard of it. "I sit. In the grass. With my friend..." and it's somewhat full-contact. Maybe you have], so Bryan and the adults on our team decided that wasn't really their thing (I think) and went off to bed. I didn't really feel inclined to hang around except that someone still needed to clean up, and Joel was kind enough to help me. He's been great on this trip. Mature, great with kids, GREAT attitude about everything.

I grabbed my hoody, which is just about dry (W00T!) off the clothesline, where I hung it this morning. Carissa borrowed my new bracelet from San Diego, so I put that and my new ring from the gift shop in the jewelry bag I brought. It's getting full. [This is a cool little leather bag that they shipped my sterling silver replica of the One Ring in.]

I also bought nuts today. Mac Roca and Vanilla Brittle and some normal roasted. I may go back for more.

I don't think I wrote about orchard-weeding this morning. Carissa and Debra played Guess the Movie Line, and we got a lot done. The guy in charge spoke no English, but we actually communicated really well through gestures and Debra's 'un poquito' Spanish.

It was a better experience weeding in the morning. Cooler.

Also, I am sunburnt. And not happy. I thought I might tan while sitting outside journaling, but not BURN. My face and neck and arms. It is not terribly attractive. Loree did give me some face cream, which I think helped. Meh.

The girls want to turn off the lights, so really fast, I went out to see the stars with Carissa and they weren't as impressive as I thought they might be. We came back in and discussed middle names and I got some echinacea from Debra because...echinacea is always good.

Tomorrow, I think I will buy more nuts, perhaps a pair of earrings, and whatever snack is at break. Was burritos again today!

Okay really now. Good night.


[Okay, I know, a bit PG-13. In reference to Destiny's skirt getup.]
"Well, we know who's NOT getting raped tonight." - Debra