So since we last talked lots has happened. Lets catch up.
My first week at placement was terrifying. I didn't speak enough Spanish to feel like I was making any kind of impact or being of any kind of help to my kids or my placement overall so I had to reassess. This was a different kind of placement for me than what I'd experienced before. They didn't have a goal for me as a volunteer that I could latch onto. In Russia I needed to spend time with the children, take them outside, and help care for their basic needs to give them the best chance at thriving as tiny little people. In Tanzania, I needed to create lesson plans and IAPs for the children based on their specific strengths and deficits to work towards integrating them into the community. Casa Hogar was a little less clear. I was meant to help them with their chores and homework, get them dressed for school, and be a positive role model since they had not really been exposed to one before coming into the orphanage. Once this was clarified, it was much easier to integrate myself into the placement.
In my first half of my volunteering, I have really gotten to know and love each of my kids. I saw that they could benefit from IAPs (individual action plans. They essentially set up specific behavioral and cognitive goals and objectives in tandem with the kids to improve their quality of life), so I introduced this concept to the nuns. They seemed receptive to it and thought that this was something that they could continue with children who come to Casa Hogar even after I've left. I also think that this gives the kids something to help each other with to increase their sense of community and family during a time in their lives when these two things might be severely lacking. I hope to revisit this sometime in the next week to make sure they are being used and if not see what they think might be more useful.
I've also started to teach a few of the kids English. One in particular is smart as a whip. We have a few books in English and Spanish and he is amazing with the pronunciation. While we do chores, we teach each other phrases and his face lights up every time. Scrubbing floors becomes exponentially more fun when he can laugh at my ridiculous pronunciations of Spanish and blow me out of the water with how quickly he's learning English.
As lots of people have heard, we also had/have a lice outbreak. It's literally like going into a microscopic war zone every day and the sense of victory I feel when I go home bug-free is only comparable to how itchy my head is when I watch a lice fiesta on the heads of my kids while I'm helping them with homework. I tried to bring lice shampoo but they don't seem to be using it as much as I push for it and my lack of Spanish makes it hard for me to do any education on what kids of behaviors are and aren't safe when you have lice (ie don't rub your head on my head and don't have a lice race on the table while doing homework). I've gotten to the point now where there isn't much more I can do. Some battles you win, some you don't. It won't stop me from stealing kids away to shampoo throughout the day though.
That covers most of what's been happening at placement for the past month. I promise I'll update this much more often in my next month and I promise that from now on these blogs will be MUCH funnier.
Ciao for now!
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