We had a good breakfast
I think Doña Celia either cooks better for more people or she is pulling
out all the stops for Amy and the Board.
We went to La Villa and straight to the church at the large orphanage
next door, Cuidad de Niños. The Catholic
service was hard to follow and long, but at least interesting for Domingo de
Ramos (Palm Sunday).
We went back to La Villa and played with the kids for a while. Since none of them were in school on Sunday,
it is livelier than I've grown accustomed.
We then went to the kitchen to prepare the pizzas. The mamás (the women in charge of the houses)
where there to help. Walker, the force
behind the pizzas, had other things to do. It ended up being eight mamás and
me. They quickly took charge. I was useful in that I knew how to open flip-top
cans of pizza sauce and they did not.
Things generally went very smoothly.
The gym was full of eighty wired kids. The minute the pizza was served, they sat and
ate. A group of older girls called me
over to talk. They asked me easy
questions that I was able to answer like, “How many children do you have?” When the kids were done eating and talking, I
played basketball for quite some time.
Bolivian basketball apparently has special rules that allow kids to hang
on my arms while I try to shoot.
The Americans all played with different sets of
kids. At one point, a group of girls
invited me to come watch TV in their house.
We watched the end of the Whitney Houston movie, The Bodyguard. We then
watched part of the middle of the animated movie 9. I left to go find other
kids.
I'm starting to know some of the kids by name. Mario is one of the youngest, around
three. He loves for me to lift him over
my head and asks me constantly to do so.
Rosalia, is about ten and cuter than I would have thought possible. Zulma is an eight-year-old girl who taught me
the word cosquillas (tickle). Evelin is seventeen,
shy, and well under five feet tall. She
was the one who invited me to watch TV.
Ariel is a boy about four who is always fighting with some other boy.
As the day wore on, we were all rather tired, dirty, and
thirsty. The women had gone to la
concha, a large open air market, to buy things like pots and pans for the
houses and unknowingly had taken our water bottles with them on the bus.
We finally returned to La Morada after stopping on the
way back at a small grocery store.
Walker could not stop talking about how it had been the most amazing day
ever. It really was a great day.
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