Corazon de Angel

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Well.....the past 3 days have certainly been a shock to the system after the ´luxury´of mexico city, tula and Guadalajara....... The orphanage itselff is a really nice building. It has its own park in the front with a basketball course and to my delight a football pitch (thats proper english football!!). It consists of 3 buildings the main builing which hosts the kitchen, dining room, boys dorm and most importantly my bedroom along with the Madres office. The second is the girls dorm and the last is a kind of school for their morning activities. There are around double the amount of girls as there are boys and as i dont have a partner i handle both which is nice. In the morning I get the boys up and dressed, wash their faces and do their hair, and take them to breakfast. My main charge is ´Tonio who is 5 but seems alot younger than that...he often wets the bed which is a pain....gotta love a bit of cleaning up wee at 7am in the morning. My duties after breakfast vary, on the first day i had the baby, Diana, who is 9months old all morning but today i took a few of the children into the centre as they had a school service in the main square. Tonio came too so i looked after him whilst the other children took part in the service. When i returned i had to take care of Diana, feeding her and changing her. In the afternoon i look after the litteliest children who return from kinder. in the evening i help with dinner and then play with the children before we all head to bed. I dont have to put the children to bed so have free time from about 9 by which time i am usually so tired i read a couple of chapters of my book and go to sleep!!!

Its the weekend now and most of the childrengo else where for the weekend....either to their homes (if they are there as their parents cannot afford to keep them during the week or if the only have one parent who has to work and cannot afford child care) and a few children have kind of like foster parents who take them for the weekend. It was difficult watching some of them go so i have no idea how hard im going to find it in 5months time. Th most heartbreaking thing was when i went with the Madre to take some of the children home...2 brothers ran to their front door only o find thta there was noone home....the look on their face as they came back t the mini bus was heartbreaking. On the was back one of the boys, CHema, fell asleep in my lep and i was trying so hard not to cry.

I am settling in well and get on well with most of the children...some i find a bit difficult as they are very touchy feely which i am suprisingly finding ok from the little children but i find it slightly odd when the eldest boy (who is around 10 and 11) still comes up and gives me long hugs resting his head inbetween by boobs....and its the same with the older girls who can be 13/14....finding that slightly odd!!

2 new children have arrived since i´ve been here....2 sisters, Juanita who is 6 and Idis who is only 2 months and they were both in a bad state with terrible skin and eye infections (hte skin infecting on the elder girls face is quite possibly herpes!!!) its really upsetting. Juanita opened upto me after a couple of hours of sitting in silence but now she doesnt like it when i play with the other children and constantly cries to get my attention. That´s one thing im finding challenging is time management between all of the children as there are some children who are obviously more rewarding to work with than others but I still have to measure my time out equally!

Thats about all I have to say at the moment...I´m just chugging on getting settled into a routine so i can arrange with the Tec convenient times for me to go and work there. I really want to go and work in the Tec as it will give me an oppertunity to make some friends my own age and actually make use of my teacher training!

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