Orphanage Emmanuel in Guaimaca, Honduras: Supper with Elizabeth's Parents

Alina and I headed back to the toddler house this morning to cut veggies and serve breakfast. After breakfast, some toddlers go to Kindergarten while the others hang back and play either at their playground/park or in the enclosed play Pavilion. Alina stayed back with the toddlers, but my assistance was needed in measuring some children that were not measured last week while the Maryland team was here. Here at Emmanuel there are actually 2 medium girls houses, but the team had only gotten to 1 house. So I headed to the school (where most of the girls were) and began measuring there. Andi sent 2 of the Alabama team members over to help me out with the measuring and that made the process go even more smoothly. We got all of the girls from Zue's medium house measured by lunch time and then I met up with Alina at the Tienda (Emmanuel's snack shop).

The Tienda was serving tostadas. Elizabeth is a staff member here who is in charge of the Little Girls House. I believe she's been here for about 2 years now. I worked with her last summer for the first time and while I was down here last summer, her parents came down for a visit, so I got to know them a little bit. They were at the Tienda today during lunch, so Alina and I sat with them. We had a great chat and found out that we have quite a bit in common. At the end of lunch, they invited us for supper where they are staying, which is attached to the Dental Clinic.

We headed back to the Toddler House at 2:15 for the normal afternoon routine of waking them up, playing for an hour, feeding them supper, and then showering them and doing the supper dishes. On the way back to our room, we stopped by the Little Girls House to check in with Elizabeth about supper. She let us know that she'd pick us up when she was finished, around 6pm to head up to where her parents were staying.

Supper was wonderful! Elizabeth's younger brother, Joey, made the salad with cucumbers and tomatoes (and I commented on nice it looked because all the pieces were laid out on top of the salad in a symmetrical manner...the math nerd in me!). Her mom, Kim, made spaghetti with alfredo sauce and garlic bread. For dessert they purchased a gallon bucket of ice cream from the Tienda and had toppings to put on it as well. We had a great time chatting with them and Kim reminded me to head to the office this week to reserve a spot for next year as the housing here is getting slim for volunteers since the orphanage is growing. She let me know the dates they'd be back and I wanted to get as close of a time frame to that as possible so that we could catch up again next year. We were at their house eating and chatting for about 2 hours when we realized that it was coming up on curfew time...Emmanuel has a curfew of 8:30 due to town people trying to break in after dark and Emmanuel's night security guards would not be able to tell from a distance if we were volunteers or unauthorized people on the premises. Elizabeth gave us a ride home and we quickly went to bed.