My Sincerest Apologies…

It has been a long 18 days since my last blog, and I really have no excuse.  We’ve been busy, but we were busy before.  I guess I’m just losing grasp on what’s going on here so I don’t always know what to write about or how to write it.

So here’s June so far.

The little girls are gone.  Our week of “vacation” is gone.  We’ve had three days of the new schedule at the Center, and there are some kinks to work out, but overall it’s gone over well.  I miss the little ones terribly.  I’m excited for the big girls, though, and the opportunities they’ll be getting this way.  Next week, half of them will start a sewing internship that we’re really excited about – it’s a great program they’ll be doing, and if they complete it, they’ll each get their own sewing machine (though they don’t know that yet – shhh!)  Jewelry-making has stopped temporarily as we’re waiting on supplies from the States.  A team is coming the last week of this month that will be bringing whatever they can find.  Unfortunately, it’s hard to find the findings and wire and all here and it’s impossible to find good quality ones.  Still, they are doing well selling what they’ve made, and we’ve worked in a “jewelry/craft” time in the new schedule that they will hopefully be able to use to teach the other girls how to make what they’ve made.  I’m excited about this.

It’s raining so much these days.  I love it.  It cools things off so much.  It’s sad, though, because it floods the slums and a lot of our girls’ houses.  Some of them love it, too, though.  We did home visits today and I saw children with pots on their heads catching the rainwater so they wouldn’t have to hike to the nearest well today and others showering themselves using the rain.  These people love their country.  I love it too.

I leave from here in 17 days, and I head home in exactly 3 weeks.  I’m excited to be home, but I’m realizing how much I’m going to miss here.  I only slept about 4 hours last night, so I’ll write a blog about those things later when I’m more coherent.

We only have 2 full weeks left here, and both will be about VBS for us.  This coming week, the Center will switch from normal school to VBS, and the next week we will do the same thing in the afternoon from 2 to 4 for the little girls that used to come to the Center.  I can’t express how excited I am about seeing them again my last week here.  THAT goodbye will be even harder.

We got to visit one of our girls’ villages the other week, and it was a wonderful experience.  City life is so crazy and hectic, so a lot of them take vacations to the villages on holiday to visit family.  Life is so much simpler there.  I envy it sometimes.  I’m attaching pictures.  It was rainy so we hiked a long way in ankle-deep mud to get there (after a couple hours in the van) but it was totally worth it.  What a gorgeous place!

One of our sweet little girls.

The muddy hike.  We had to be careful not to fall in the rice paddies.  This was especially hard carrying the 6-year-old above.

The alleys between houses were super cool.  We enjoyed taking pictures of the whole area, and no one minded.

 

Breathtaking

This was one of the village ladies who helped cook our lunch.  It was delicious!  Check out the stove in the back.

This is why we eat rice constantly…

I’m pretty sure Mogli lives around this area… Haha.

The village children were so sweet and loved modeling for us.

I must say, watching everyone’s flip-flops get stuck in the mud made me thankful for my Chacos more than ever before.

 

I love this place.  I love these people.

More later this week.