otro día en el orfanato...

and what fun it was!

i did things that are completely un-anni-like ... for instance, i taught kids math and played soccer with them for a really long time. you know how they say that studying abroad will take you out of your comfort zone? i´m pretty sure that i reached the height of that today when these 10 year old boys who have played soccer for 9 years longer than me (i kid you not) made me be goalie. very surprisingly, i held my own.

since the chiquitos are still infected with hepatitis, i ended up working with a group of ten to fifteen boys, probably between the ages of 10 and 13. i wasn´t really looking forward to it (because i don´t like kids when they have a mind of their own and don´t like authority figures), but it was actually really fun! i had to stretch my spanish limits to explain multiplication (¨no, you need to carry the one, you can´t just pretend it doesn´t exist!¨) and i even beat 3 boys at a jump roping contest. (yessssssssss!) i´ve been pretty impressed with my comprehension skills of late... case in point being when one boy was drawing a picture of some trucks and drew speed bumps on the road, and i knew exactly what he was talking about when he used that word. later, when miguel didn´t want to play soccer anymore (and i decided that i´d played for long enough), we talked about what happens when the balls go over the walls (¨over that way, it´s where the police are, so they give them back to us. but behind that fence, that´s where the people who smoke, steal, and drink live. they they don´t give back our balls.¨) and about how he wants to go to university to become a police officer. then alejandro bit my shirt when i was leaving. apparently that means he wanted me to stay longer?

oh! and i was wearing my red sox shirt today and i had to explain to them that the red sox are a baseball team in the united states (¡el mejor equipo, por supuesto!) and that nomar garciaparra was their shortstop. so maybe they´ll all grow up now to be sox fans...

i took a different way back today, since it´s kind of a waste to take 3 busses to get to the cholula house instead of just 1 (i had been taking bus #1 to get to my bus station, then taking an udla bus to campus, then taking a local bus to get to the house). i got to walk back the way i came, so i stopped at a restaurant called habibi´s (where i´d been wanting to go since the day i first saw it) and got falafel. then i stopped at a flower booth on the corner and bought myself a big orange and yellow daisy. pretty sure i´m going to make the falafel and flower stops a weekly tradition.

mel´s boyfriend alan came to visit from the states last night and he brought me a package that my parents had sent to him. this marvelous present included the book divine secrets of the yaya sisterhood and my hip hop cd. so now my life is complete! (and i definitely enjoyed the pictures of the metz family mardi gras celebration as well, along with the not-so-subtle hints that i should be a reds fan... thanks joe!)

annnnnd that´s about all for my day. it was grand. :)