Dear Reader,
My introduction into the world of babies has been an uphill battle and it's a battle that I'm still fighting, but my experience has led me to come to 3 conclusions: Babies are temperamental. Babies are whiny. And finally, babies are irrational. Like honestly, if you are tired, why would you cry about it? Just go to sleep. If an adult tells you not to do something, it's probably for your own good and thus you shouldn't do it. That's just a few of the things I want to tell the kids at the shelter, but A) My spanish is not very good and B) they wouldn't listen or understand me anyway. As you can see, today was not a good day at the shelter. There was mass hysteria, crying, and poop explosions. Today, I was forced to change my first diarrhea diaper (an experience I never EVER want to have again), hold a baby that screamed bloody murder if you even remotely moved a muscle or changed into a position she didn't like and finally turn 4 crying babies into 4 happy sleeping babies. Mind you all of this happened just one hour into my four hour stint at the shelter. I think I was slowing slipping into insanity. Okay, that's a slight exaggeration.
I like the kids in spite of the frustrations that they bring. It's kind of hard to get into the mindset of these kids, as my world view and life experiences don't nearly compare to theirs; however, I often try to sympathize with their situations. I remember being 3 years old and following my mom out of daycare simply cause I didn't want her to leave me. These kids are the same way. 80% of the time when they are crying, it's because they want their mothers and though it is my job to placate them, there is only so much I can do. What they really need is their moms and what their moms really need is to get through school. Its a situation that a 2 or 3 year old can't possibly wrap their head around. In their world there is only one thing: their mom. Whenever mom is around life is great. Mom can make all the bad things go away. She can make them smile when they are sad. To them their moms are super heroes. In the real world, their moms are teenagers struggling to put things back together after tragedy. It's a perspective that some of them, unfortunately, are beginning to grasp. I want these kids to hold on to their innocence and playfulness, for them to live in the world of imagination where everything is perfect.And for the most part the orphanage does a good job of protecting these kids from that, from losing that innocence, yet slowly, but surely these kids are beginning to see the cracks. They're starting to see that the world isn't perfect. And once you realize that, once the illusion is over, it never comes back. That's the moment when you grow up and these kids are way too young to grow up. They haven't even lived yet and they're caught up in the adult world. It's really sad to me.
After volunteering, Kit and I walked home for lunch. On the way we stopped at McDonalds for some much needed Mcflurries. The first day we arrived in Xela and saw the McDonalds, Kit and I agreed that we would go there if we ever missed home or just needed the comfort that only home could bring. Today was just one of those days. When we got home we ate lunch and then I went to work on my spanish homework. I was to write two sentences for each of the new verbs that I'd learned the day before, one was supposed to be singular and the other plural. Once again I barely finished, having only 5 minutes to spare, but when Jaime saw my homework he only said that I'd done a good job. Fortunately my rushing was not evident in my homework. Today I learned about the prepositions por, para, de, con, and en, how to conjugate ER and IR verbs, as well as some new vocabulary words.
Also in the middle of our lesson, Jaime and I took a hike up to higher ground in order to get a view of Xela as a whole. There are two things I learned on my hike: 1) Xela has a dog problem and 2) Xela has a trash problem. First lets tackle the dog problem. When walking up the mountain road, there were so many stray dogs on the streets and in the brush. I'm a dog person and it just made me so upset to see how many abandoned dogs there were.When I asked Jaime he told me that many people in Guatemala buy a dog as a puppy and think they are very cute, but when the dog gets older they prefer not to have the dog anymore and abandon them on the street. Furthermore, people also often find themselves financially unable to provide for the dog and thus they have to let them go. Secondly, there is the trash problem. It's not as if people in Xela don't value the earth or the land, in fact, for many people it is the key to their survival; however, there is just a lack of places to put trash and thus it ends up rotting outside somewhere.
From above Xela looks huge, but that's to be expected of the second biggest city in Guatemala. Its an amazing place to live and be, despite its problems and issues. I hope with time so of these issues will die down and eventually disappear, but until then I'll continue to do what I can.
Sincerely,
Journey
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