Truckin´ by the dozen

The rule for trucks in Ecuador is that you can drive as many as you can fit. So today I saw a family of 12 all piled in the back of a pick up. The driving laws here are crazy, it feels as if everytime we bus over to the orphanage we have a near death experience. for example today we crossed over the double yellow heading straight into incoming trafic because the bus in front of us was going to slow for the drivers taste. But we always make it there. At least we have every day so far!

This past week I was made site leader for Casas! I´m super excited! That means I am in charge of telling the  other volunteers about what´s going at the site, make goals for the volunteers and the kids, and make sure everything goes smoothly there. It also means I work at the site at least 5-6 shifts a week (around 20-25 hours) and I go on all the field trips with them. Basically the best job ever. Over the past week 4 new kids have come to Tadeo (the building with both Casas & Cunas), which is very out of the ordinary. A newborn baby was brought into Cunas, and they today named her Maria del Cisne. Three new kids were put into Casas last night! They were apparently taken from their homes by the governmnent, which is usualy for the kids safety. I get to meet them tomorrow in my morning shift. The past couple days I´ve spent my time in in the OSSO houses, where most of the children are handicapped. I learned something important there: 

¨The kids aren´t messy eaters, I´m just a messy feeder.¨

You can quote me on that. I felt like this idea applied to more than just feeding. The more you get to know the  kids the more you learn what they need most and what you can do to make their time here more worth it, to make their life less of a messy bib and more of a nurturing experience. Some people just need to be fed diferently. Christian from OSSO Alegria has autism and doesn´t get along well with the other kids; he doesn´t quite understand why he can´t just take toys from other people and why he can´t hit kids to get what he wants. But the other day when volunteering I noticed he calmed down when he found some puppets and was lining them up into shapes. He was very focused and proud of what he had made. The next time I went over,  I ¨fed¨ him deferently. I brought him some building blocks, gave most of them to him, and the others to the smaller kids so they wouldn´t try and steal the new toys. Christian spent almost the whole time making towers as tall as he could, making sure they were the same deminsions all the way up. He didn´t run around hurting the others anymore. I hope that I, and whomever else that reads this, can, when we meet someone new or diferent we can learn how to treat them in a way that brings out the best in them or in us. Some people need to be treated diferently, and when they are, they become a new person that we can´t even recognize anymore. I´ve had it happen so many times down here and I hope I learn more from these kids throughout my next 6 weeks. Love you guys!