breathing helps.

i think i may finally be settling in.
i´ve gotten past being angry at the kids when they´re soooo bad. i´m actually rather calm.
now i´m trying to just go day by day, hour by hour. when i think of the big picture it´s just way too overwhelming.
and actually, considering the lives that these children have come from, they are suprisingly "normal" ... whatever that means.
we played with play dough for the last hour of kinder today. joel, the youngest, took much joy in squashing everthing i made... so i started to squash his stuff too. if you can´t beat em´, join em´.
i had a dream that i was in canada and was able to take santos, my sponsor child, out for a day. in the dream he could tap dance and speak english perfectly. i told him this this morning in class, and he and all the kids started to laugh as if this was extremely funny.

this week i´m going to start working with a second group outside of the orphanage. a campesino (peasant) community a little farther away from where i´m living. i´ll be teaching there after i teach kinder in the mornings at the hogar because all of the volunteers aside from one are leaving that project to go back home. i´m looking forward to filling more of my day.

i´m also starting puppets tomorrow. the kids will make monster puppets and we will hopefully present "where the wild things are" at the end of 5 weeks. or i may just end up with a pile of paper mache and a hernia.
we´ll see!!

a new volunteer moved into the volunteer house a few days ago. he has a connection with a rehab center in la cieba where he volunteered for a couple days. i´m going to go check that out sometime this week as well - who knows, my pilates experience might come in handy!

adios for now.

oh, and ps. i have lice.
gross.