A Sunday with the Big Girls

As I was doing my devotions this morning, I saw another cockroach (ugh) run from underneath the bunk bed that Alina is sleeping in to the rug on the other side of the door.  I tried to sweep it outside, but it was too close to the big chair & ran underneath.  Just when I thought we wouldn't have a problem for a while...another shows up.  There is no food in our room, so eventually it will have to choose to leave or die of hunger (if we can't shuffle it outside), right?

Church began at 8:15am this morning.  We got there around 8:00 so that we could green the kids as they came in.  A girl from the Ohio/California team led the service today, but I liked that David (Papi) began the service and Lydia (Mami) closed the service.

David beginning the service in prayer

Lydia ending the service with a summary of the message and in prayer

After church, Alina and I headed to the 'tienda' since we had not yet had breakfast.  They were serving hamburgers, which ended up filling me up for the rest of the day!  As I was walking back to our room, I saw Papi's crew of boys painting the fountain in front of the church.  I chatted with them and gave them each a 'paleta' (Mexican spice-coated mango-flavored sucker) for their hard work.

Papi's crew hard at work painting

After chatting with these boys for a bit, I headed to the Big Girls yard where Alina was playing a game of Skipbo with Yensi and a few other girls (Grandma Wendt would be so proud!).  I also dropped of an envelope that my former student, Kelsey Phillips, had sent along with me to give to a girl named Isabel Rosario.  Kelsey had come down last year with a few Wisconsin people to work with the Maryland team.  While she was here, she connected with 2 girls and sent 2 envelopes filled with a letter, pictures and some gifts for them.  I work with Isabel in the school on reading, so it was easy for me to find her.  She said she remembered Kelsey and was very excited to receive the envelope!

Alina and Yensi

I left Alina to play Skipbo with the girls, but I had to run to teach some more math to Zelenes and Deisy at the Toddler House while the toddlers were napping.  I spent around 2 hours there with them going through material that would be on Tuesday's test, and then when Alina came we headed down to the 'cancha' where the team was putting on an Olympics-type of competition for the big girls.  We watched the tail end of the competition and then walked with the big girls back to their yard and chatted until they had to go to supper.

Around 5pm, I went back to the Toddler House to tutor Karla in math.  She had been working all day (I believe watching Katja's children), so this was the first chance she had to get together with me.  We spent about an hour and a half going over graphing rational functions, step functions and absolute value functions, and then listing the domain and range of these functions (I know, the math nerd in me is coming out again).  When we finished for the evening, we started heading back to our room but as we passed the Team House, Juliet and Veronica Diaz were there opening the gift shop...so we stopped by, chatted and purchased a few items for our kids back home.