1-1-2011

For New Year´s dinner I was sitting with Julio who has been really attached to me recently.

But most of the youngest kids couldn´t stay for the whole dinner, like Alondra.

And Julio too.

Héctor and Marcos danced freely after midnight.

2011! Wow, it has been a quick year, and now it´s coming to the end of my work here. The funny thing is that it hasn´t been too long ago that I felt I have had a grip of what I can do in here. It took so long to fight for what I can do, to figure out the system, the culture and to get to know all the kids profoundly enough to know what exactly they need. I feel that I have built a strong relationship not only with the younger kids, but the older ones as well through interaction in many events. I have also built a good rapport with my colleagues, and we get along so much better than before.

We celebrated New Year Peruvian way of course. First, we had a relatively nice dinner, with a chunk of meat, salads, rice and soft drinks. We all dressed up relatively nicely. I put some fragrance on the kids in kinder, and they loved it! They kept saying it smelled "Ah, muy rico!" Afterwards, we had a dance party at the dining hall. Some of the kids were dancing but they lined up in two lines and didn´t move very much, while all the adults sat down in woods. So I got up and danced wildly with the kids, and they all were screaming and started to loosen up. Everyone who knows me knows that I am not good at dancing, but I really wanted them to open up and feel secure about themselves and who they are. Soon, they started following the rhythm and moved their bodies as they should. And some of the older kids who were a bit timid in the beginning hit the dance floor as well later. It was fun to see them loosen up and have a good time. At midnight, we stopped dancing and went to burn a few stuffed mannequins, which is a Peruvian tradition that represents getting rid of all the bads in the past year. Then we had some fireworks while we hugged all the kids and tíos and wished each other happy new year. After all that, we went back to the dance floor and danced til 3 a.m.!