Boss Baby

This morning shortly after I woke up at 3:30am, I could hear the sound of people mowing the lawn in the background.  We found out later that the mowing was taking place at the medium boys house and the power toddler house.  At 6am when I got to the medium boys house, I found them hard at work mowing and raking and cleaning up the grass clippings.  I had headed to the medium boys house alone today because Noah has been sleeping in more and more each morning, and was not yet ready to go today.  Rather than get upset and trying hurry him up, last night I wrote him a list of what he HAD to have done prior to heading to the medium boys house (very similar to what the medium boys have to do prior to 6am) and said that if it wasn't done, he would get locked inside our room until I came back.  Well, it wasn't done, which was probably for the better because Noah likes to wear shorts (complains when I tell him to put his jeans on) and with all of the grass-cutting, I'm sure that the mosquitoes were out in full force.  I already have 42 bites from just 1 day of not wearing DEET and just from my knees down!

The boys worked hard in their yard right up until it was time to leave for breakfast.  Alina took the camera with her today.  After breakfast, I took Noah's cereal bowl up to the kitchen to put in the refrigerator for him to eat later.  Since he was now ready, I let him walk with me to the medium boys house to pick them up and walk them to school.  I dropped them off at school and then headed back to our room, where Noah ate his cereal while I finished preparing today's calculus lesson.  I heard that the high school was spending the first hours of the morning taking their national English test.  At 10:15am we had to head to the school so that I could teach calculus.  Today's lesson was on area under the curve.  I had an hour and a half to teach.  We didn't get quite as far as I wanted because the students struggle with fractions (not much different than high school students in the States), but we did get through 2 lengthy examples.  I headed to lunch with the students and Noah was nowhere to be found, so once again I had to take his bowl of food back to our room.  He had spent the time that I was teaching out on the soccer field at the school, and even when the kids went in for lunch, he played there alone.

At lunch, Milton gave me the movies I had ordered on Friday.  SO exciting!  They were able to get me 9 out of the 10 movies I asked for!  I can't wait to share these with the medium boys and having movie nights with them from now until we leave.

After Noah finished eating, we headed to the yards to be with the special needs children.  I began working on the answer key to this year's calculus test (that the students will be taking on Friday) and have already found 2 errors!  After school, we walked the medium boys home to the chosa (big gazebo out front of their house).  We waited for supper to come while some of the team members stopped by to give gifts to some of the boys.  Some other boys were being disciplined for bad behavior in school...but most of us just sat and waited.

All day the children had been asking me about having chicken for supper.  When we walked to the dining hall, we found that they were serving FRIED chicken!  This is a real special treat for the kids as they only receive this when a team comes and pays for the children to eat like this!  Typical supper is just rice and beans.  Tonight they had tortillas and fried chicken in addition to the rice and beans.  I began eating, and Luis David came over by me and said, "I need to talk to you."  I told him to start chatting, and he stood there for a few seconds, as if he preferred to talk in private.  I moved over a bit, creating a space on the bench and patted my hands on the bench and said, "Sit down here and talk to me."  So he did, and he began to cry as he told me what was going on in his life at that moment.  I gave my plate of fried chicken to Moncho (who's in charge of the medium boys) to give away to some boys that wanted seconds, and put my full focus on Luis David.  Although I don't want to share details, he is going through a pretty rough patch right now.  I have only seen this boy cry once before in the 10 years I've been down here, and that was many years ago when he was very young.  Please pray for him to be able to overcome the difficulties he's going through.

After supper was over, we made a quick stop back at our room (long enough for the medium boys to shower) and then we took the movies to their house to watch a movie for the night.  They chose Boss Baby and we thoroughly enjoyed it before heading home.  Alina was waiting for us back at our room.  She had been locked out all day, but spent just about ALL of the day with the babies (which has been usual for her).  We rarely see her except for early morning, perhaps sometimes at lunch, and then in the evening.