This morning Jaden and I woke up to our typical morning view here at Emmanuel. Then we headed to the Comedor for him to get his last breakfast for this trip, which was oatmeal. Jaden headed out with Alexander after breakfast to do weed whacking, whereas I headed back to our room to pick up Kaylyn to head to the Chosa. Usually on Monday mornings, I would hang back and wrap up lesson plans or homework since class is at 8:20am...but since it would just be Kaylyn and Eva in the Chosa today with the toddlers, I decided to go with her right up until class started and then return pretty much immediately after class.
In today's 10th grade class, I had prepared a Jeopardy game to play with the students which reviewed each of the 6 functions they had learned about (quadratics, rational expressions, absolute value, greatest integer, exponential, logarithmic). The 16 students were divided into 4 teams of 4 and absolutely loved the game and really got into it! I am hoping that they learned something along the way, but it really seems to me that their math skills are extremely weak. Each student got a paleta for participating and for the winning team, each member received a pack of gum.
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| Drawing maps in school (trace, color and label) |
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| 9th Grade class, unfortunately I forgot to get a pic of 10th Grade |
When I got back to the Chosa, Kaylyn told me that she took Mateo to the clinic while Eva hung back and watched the rest of the toddlers. Also, before and after class in the Chosa, Brithany was fairly clingy. I don't believe she knew that this was my last day, perhaps she "felt" it somehow? But either way, she would not leave my side (or my lap which she definitely hung out on most of the time). For almost the entirety of this trip, she has called me mama, and all of the toddlers when I would come to the door would call Brithany's name and tell her that her "mama" was here. Kaylyn has been pushing for us to adopt her for the past 5 weeks, even saying that she would share her bedroom...but as I wrote a week-ish ago, I don't feel called to do that. Although, if I were to adopt a child, she would be up there on the list!!!
Kaylyn worked through Brithany's hair and found a louse (singular of lice?) as well as pulled out a fair amount of nits. Lice is pretty common here among the younger girls, both toddlers and small girls. It is an orphanage. And unlike many Americans who get freaked out about them, that is not the case here. You just tackle it on a day-by-day basis until it's gone. Since we are on that topic, Kaylyn and I headed to the Medium Boys house after lunch so that the tia Berta (who was with the toddlers last year) could go through our hair thoroughly and check for lice. Kaylyn, who had some dried up nits last week, was clear. I had 3 dried up nits in my hair. After checking us and pulling the nits out, Berta put both of our hair up in a french braid. On our way to get our hair checked, I stopped at the Tienda to buy both Invisible and tia Berta a bag of chips and a soda, and then there was around $100L left of our in the Tienda, which I just told Brenda (who works the tienda most days) that she could put the rest in her name.
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| Kaylyn checking Brithany for lice and nits |
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| Marbella |
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| Mateo |
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| Brithany pointing to her teeth when I was asking her if she knew each body part...she did! |
I took Invisible all of the lotion, shampoo, soap, conditioner, detangling spray, and toothpaste that we had left over. And we also gave her Kaylyn's pair of sandals and my tennis shoes, as well as one of our flashlights. I typically leave my tennis shoes with her as her feet are larger than most females at Emmanuel. She has been nothing but kind to me ever since I first met her back in 2008...and this is only a snippet of how I try to repay that kindness.
This afternoon while we were with Invisible and tia Berta, Jaden was working with the pigs (feeding them and cleaning their pens) and also fed the cows with Herlan. We all walked to the Comedor together for supper, where they had beans, rice, and crema; as well as a really sweet bread that was made in the Panaderia (bread shop) at Emmanuel.
After supper, we put the last load of laundry in and then packed our suitcases. We COULD fit everything in just 2 suitcases (we came down with 4), but if Noah is truly coming down here as a volunteer, we need all of our suitcases at home. So we put the smallest suitcase inside of the largest suitcase, and then loaded them. There was definitely extra room in each one. We decided to hit the hay early and not watch a movie since we were planning on getting up around 3:30am to make sure the rooms were all clean and everything was ready to go before breakfast.
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