Bolivia pt. IV

From August 14, 2011

 

This first part of the post is unrelated to Bolivia but I wanted to share that my aunt is in town and I’m really excited about it. 🙂 🙂 She’s awesome and we’re taking her to Radiant Life tomorrow so that will be fun.

Also while I normally try to keep stuff as much on the DL as possible, I’ve decided I really just don’t like drama. I’m finally writing about this because I feel like this happens often to me and other people in general and I want to get it out there. You know sometimes when someone says really awful things about you but you know something that’s truly terrible about them? Yeah…my biggest thing right now is not saying stuff. Cos I could say mean things about people to my other friends but at the end of the day I’m not solving anything. And while it would feel momentarily better to be like “Guess what so and so did?!” and make them look bad I feel like it makes me look worse to have resorted to that. So while I know this entry is a little vague, I just have to remind myself that I don’t ever need to add fuel to the fire. I need to trust that things will work out.

Back to Bolivia!

So Monday we began our work projects. Of course we woke up to do devotionals and eat breakfast beforehand. I became really addicted to eating grilled cheese sandwiches that I’d make using the little bread-panini-press thing. So good. And all of the juice in the morning was soooo amazing. And the fruit. Especially the papaya. I LOOOOVE papaya.

Anyways…

I decided to paint the ceiling of the cafeteria that day with some of the group and that taught me that painting is serious business. You never realize how much energy you have to exert into painting a ceiling. Also the fumes were driving me crazy. Mad props to painters. It’s no joke. I am unfortunately not the best painter in the world. There was this one section that no matter how many times I went over it still looked streaky. It was frustrating!! I think I did all right though for my first time painting a ceiling. It just was not my forte. I had a lot of fun doing it though, listening to music and getting to talk as I worked.

Painting of course left me covered in paint on my face, hair, arms, and a little on my legs. Getting that off was definitely an interesting experience because it was oil based paint and Bolivia doesn’t have the same stuff we used in AP photo to get paint off. It’s funny because a couple of days ago I went to get my hair done and my stylist goes “What have you been painting??” Apparently there are still remnants of paint in my hair. It’s a little piece of Bolivia haha. 🙂

Once we washed up and ate lunch we got to head out for our first Sidewalk Sunday School. I was really pumped for this because I love working with kids and I was excited to see some of the little girls and talk to them. The response to us being there was insane!! Kids were running from all directions to come hang out and play games or jump rope before we told the story of Daniel and the Lion’s Den.

I think a lot of the girls got excited to see a new blonde girl speaking Spanish. They were so adorable. I spent a lot of the time turning the jump rope for the kids. Side note…once the kids get up into the 70s and 80s with their jumps it gets really hard to count quickly in Spanish because there’s so many syllables! haha.

Once we went inside to the little church we did our skit. I was the narrator and I think it went pretty well for the first time performing it for the kids. It’s also weird to think of myself as a foreigner with an accent! I was worried I’d sound funky with what I was reading because for some reason I have the hardest time saying “gobernar” and “gobernador.”

The first day of Sidewalk Sunday School was so awesome though. I took a really neat picture with a bunch of kids in the church which is actually posted further down in my blog. 🙂