8am: We arrive at the school this morning in the bus. We are carrying the same supplies with us as yesterday because we are continuing our work all week. Today the older kids are at the school in the morning so we will get a chance to meet them. They way the school system works here is that they students range from kindergarten to 6th grade and they are broken up into two age groups; one group comes in the morning and the other group comes in the afternoon, and then the groups switch the next day. So yesterday we met the 1st to 3rd graders and today we will meet the 4th to 6th graders here at the school. We began our day touring the school again and going into the classrooms to be introduced to the students of the new group. Shortly after we finished our tour, the bell rang for recess. The kids came outside and had a snack then it was soccer mania! The boys are a lot older so they are a lot more skilled at soccer and they loved to play. It got pretty intense so the girls didn’t play, but all of the girl volunteers played with the boys; again it was boys versus girls. I played soccer for a little while then I went back up the hill to the school to talk with some of the girls that went to the school. It is a lot harder to connect with the girls at this age because I feel that as they grow older they may want to feel more introverted to meeting new people. I talked to the girls with some of the other volunteers and we asked them if they wanted to play soccer with all of us and they said yes! So before we know it there were about 15 girls versus 8 boys and we were all playing on the same field. It got pretty crowded at times but everyone was having a great time laughing and playing. The boys at that age were all very interested in girls so they kept trying to flirt with some of the volunteers but we just kept saying no, no. When the bell rang for recess to end, we wrapped up the soccer game and walked with the kids back to their classroom. We then began the volunteer work for the day, which consisted of painting the rocks that we had washed yesterday at the school. We got paint all over our clothes but at that point nobody really minded too much. It was a fun time painting; we began to sing songs as we painted and we were really enjoying ourselves. We painted all the rocks that were clean then we went back to washing and scrubbing more rocks. We took a short break and ate a banana that someone brought to the school straight off the banana tree. It was a great banana! The kids came out again for lunch and we played a lot more soccer with them. After lunch, we got a chance to volunteer with the children. We first went to the computer lab and talked with the children about their computer games. They were really nice and we helped them with their health fun quizzes in Spanish. They had a program where they could copy and paste and change pictures and it was pretty cool! Then we switched to the kindergarten room to play with the kids, they were all absolutely adorable!! I first played puzzle games with a group of little girls, then I played with the plastic action figures with the boys at a low table. I was making the sounds for dogs and tigers and the other animals that I was pretending to be in the game that we were playing. When it was time to clean up all the toys, we sang the “limpia” song and then we said goodbye. The women up at the kitchen were getting ready for a teacher breakfast that they would be holding in a few days and they were making tamales. I helped make tamales and I learned the right way to wrap a tamale. The kids were all finishing with their classes by the time we were finished making tamales and we joined them in their soccer game. They day was getting hotter as the sun came out and humidity began to really show, it was around 75-80 degrees as we played soccer. It was cool being able to get the boys to talk about their lives with us and form a connection with these kids. 12pm: We load back into the bus as the older kids start to walk home and the little kids are showing up to begin their day of school.
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