20-7-2012

Hector with his acne cream.

My precious Francesco when I said goodnight to him.

Antoni and Anghello with their bottles ... and they are holding hands!

Gilmar making a car with mud!

In the past few days, it has been crazy with work, lots of preparations, meetings, and cleaning of the therapy room which hadn't been used for over 6 months due to lack of therapist.  Plus, discussion with other volunteers about how crazy it is here with work ethics, human resources and among other things.  But after spending a second with the kids, everything becomes beautiful again.

As I stay in the house with the boys, I got to spend more time with them as family, and help them with little things like carrying lunch and their school bags and stuff.  It feels very satisfying to spend quality time with them.  Francesco always asks me to spend the evening time with him, and even though I can't do it every night, I would at least make an appearance to say goodnight to him.  The little ones always go crazy when I enter their house, and at one second I would have ten little kids with twenty arms all around me.  You can say that I am here to share my love with them, but in fact I receive loads of love too.

I also got to spend some quality time with the boys as well.  A lot of them are in their adolescence, so it is inevitable to have pimples on their face.  They ask me how to treat them, and so I ask them to wash their face, and then I put some acne cream on them and make them some chrysanthemum tea for them.  Even though it was a bit bitter for them to drink, they finish and keep asking for more next time.  And also I got to help them with their English homework as well as play with them.  Rafael, for instance, has learnt some card tricks over internet, and he has mastered them and showed to us.  It was fantastic!  

Virginia and I had been cleaning the therapy room for 2 days straight as well as doing the inventory.  It was such hard work as the floor is not tiled so it is very hard to clean.  And the office is provisional and made of wood, so it is super hot in there.  But we have got a lot more facilities here thanks to the donation made by some canadians.  We now have a computer (which looks like those in the 1990s), 2 work tables for the both of us, a storage cabinet and loads of materials.  It is so much better already than the year before.  And Virginia is such a good collaborator in cleaning and organizing, so it was a joy to do that.  And David, the handyman, has been super helpful in many things, and he's so efficient!  He helped us fix the tab which was leaking, fixing some of the materials, hanging stuff on the wall, mending some places with cement, etc.  And he did all that in half a day!  It is always great to have such collaborators and it just makes life so much easier.