Halfway (ish) Point

I've reached the point in my stay where I've gotten all the basics down and now I want to push things further and do more. At the orphanage I know almost all the kids' names and personalities and have really bonded with them. At Aurora, I feel like I've gone as far as I can in that I know their schedule and what needs to be done most of the time. Aurora is extraordinarily different from the orphanage, obviously, but especially in that Aurora is very structured, there's a lot of discipline, and the people working with the kids actually care about them and pay attention to them. At the orphanage, and I was told this upfront, we the volunteers can do basically do whatever we want and are encouraged to bring our own ideas to the table so to speak. On one hand, it's great to have that freedom to do lots of activities and such with the kids. However, this also means that there's very little structure to these kids' lives. The pre-school kids (6 and under) essentially have free play time every day, all day. Seems like every little kids' dream, but eventually they get bored and sometimes end up fighting just because there isn't much else for them to do. They do have a lot of toys and such, but every one of them is broken or in very bad condition. It also means that they aren't necessarily learning numbers and letters. We've been trying to teach the older kids the alphabet and some of them have really gotten it and like to write their names and then all of our names on a blackboard in their play room.

Thankfully, one of the new girls works with children and their parents back in England so she knows lots of songs and activities to do with the kids. She's also really motivated to do stuff for them and go the extra mile for them. Yesterday, she and I put on a puppet show for the kids. We told the story of "Goldilocks and the 3 Bears" fairly badly as we made it up as we went along with no review of the story and neither of us could remember the ending. But, the kids seemed to really enjoy it. They also love singing the "Hokey Kokey" (English version) and doing the funky chicken dance. I've taken lots of videos of the little ones dancing around - they're all just so cute.

The older kids (the ones who go to school) also enjoy dancing, but most of them can dance better than I can. Most of them do Michael Jackson dance moves and I can tell that some of them are going to be even more amazing as they get older. Most of the afternoons the older kids like to run around, play and talk with us, but recently we've started helping them with homework. All of them say they have no homework and if we weren't there to go through their bookbags to find their homework, I'm not sure that they would actually do it. It doesn't seem like any of the staff check their homework or schoolwork and I'm not sure that their teachers pay that much attention either. Another volunteer here, Anne, was helping a little girl and a little boy who are in the same class. The girl had a bunch of classwork in her notebook, but the boy had absolutely nothing in his notebook. Anne tried to get him to do some writing like the girl was doing, and discovered that he didn't know how to write any letters of the alphabet. It seems to me that the learning at their school is really up to the kids, that the teachers don't necessarily put in the effort.

There's another girl at the orphanage who just shuts down whenever she's asked about her homework or school. She has literally stood and stared at the ground for 2 hours instead of responding to us about her work. One of the careworkers said she's like that at school as well. One day, Anne was talking to the girl, trying to get her to get her schoolbag and Anne asked her if there was someone scaring her or hurting her and the girl looked up at Anne for about 10 seconds before resuming staring at the floor. We're fairly certain that something has happened in this girl's past that was horrible and is now affecting her schoolwork. I'm not sure how much schooling she gets because I suspect the teacher probably ignores her instead of working with her, so she's just falling behind. I really hope that we'll be able to make some progress with her in the next 5 weeks.