Bracelets and Bonding
I have a confession. I didn’t do very much painting! Mostly, I “talked” to the kids. That’s a stretch, because my Spanish consisted of some basic words and phrases I’d picked up from the first few lessons on Duolingo!...so the “talking” was actually a combination of charades and random words (badly pronounced) on my part followed by a lot of giggling on theirs.
But somehow it worked. We hugged and laughed and took tons of pictures.
One group of girls invited me into their room where I was pampered with a manicure (along with more laughter) and given a necklace....half of a heart to take with me while the necklace with the matching half stayed there.
We were treated to a tour of the kitchen and even a lesson in tortilla making. Hats off to these cooks who make tortillas and other food every day to feed 500 teenagers. They graciously added us to the meal plan a couple of days while we were there and this was especially exciting to the kids because, cooking for North American guests meant meat was on the menu. It was very touching to me that people who don't have much (materially speaking) would go out of their way to share and give their best to people who have everything.
One afternoon, we offered a bracelet making activity for anyone who wanted to attend. I'm not crafty (at ALL!) so I circled the table with shoulder rubs and, afterwards, some of the girls gave me the bracelets they had made.
I was amazed at how warm and friendly these kids were... and at how happy. There wasn't a lot of money, but there was a wealth of joy, warmth and laughter. And acceptance.
Also, there was singing in the form of an impromptu performance of the elephant counting song!
Saying goodbye after those few days was hard. I came home and made a Facebook group to share photos and started chatting with a few of the kids via Messenger…. an interesting undertaking given my lack of Spanish and theirs of English. In order to build any kind of sustainable relationships, I was going to need some Spanish skills, so I became a bit more diligent about learning the language and longed for the day when I could communicate without Google Translate
