one more week

i keep thinking of things to write and then when i get to it i have forgotten... i think my memory is going too. haha. well, as of this saturday i am here for one more week. my month stay will be up and i will be headed back home. its crazy how fast it went. i couldnt tell you if my spanish it better or worse but the kids seem to think i speak it better than i actually do... which i find quite funny. they will ask me to translate or just say something and be on their way. its still frustrating but oh well.
after so many years of coming here and especially after last summer, i love that you can start to know personalities, likes and dislikes, strengths,weaknesses, tht kind of stuff. kevin (6yrs) likes to be held sometimes. he just does. he came up to me yesterday and gave my leg a bear hug. so i picked him up and he let me hold him for no reason and kept giving me giant huggs. :)kevin was the little one that was here last summer that didnt talk at all. nothing. this summer he is talking is i can see a difference in him. he sat in my lap as we sang with the team and i traced his finger along the words of the song. every once and a while he would look up at me and just smile he goofy, big eared, cute smile. as crazy and frustrating as the kids can be sometimes i love those sweet moments.

a search party for a missing car

so last friday i found lizandro (6 yrs) sobbing... i mean, something could have died. he couldnt even tell me what happend, he was so upset. so i asked his brother, gaudencio (7yrs), and he told me that lizandro lost a new toy car, that he had gotten in the last 30 minutes. so a search party started... me, guadencio, and osvaldo (13)were all searching for a toy car... in the dark no less. lizandro was just walking aimlessly and crying. so, i take him by the hand and we go looking int he dark for a small blue and yellow car. well, we can´t find the car and lizandro is heart broken. but i saw that one of the other boys had a pack of three cars. i ask him if i could see the pack and he said yes. i then asked lizandro if he liked any of the cars and his face lit up when he pionted to a spiderman one. so i asked the other boy if lizandro could have one of his three cars. yes, he said. i am thinking, wait... what? i don´t have to ask him twice or beg or explain that lizandro wants a car?! nope. he just said yes and i asked agian just to make sure and he gave the same answer. no questions or arguments or posessiveness. it always amazes me when these kids just share everything without hesitation. now, that doesn´t happen all the time... but more than it would bac k home. i love it. they are a family and although they have little they are able to enjoy it and let others enjoy it. anytime they have food or anything they offer it to me.
so jumping forward a few days... sunday the sermon was about family and what a christian family should look like and stuff like that. i was sitting there wondering what the casa hogar kids are thinking. most of them are not orphans. they have family that abandoned them, or couldn´t or woun´t take care of them. how do you grow up knowing that your family didnt want to take care of you or did want to but just wasn´t able to? some of the go back to visit family. i know they are used to it, in some sense, but i can´t imagine how it feels to go back and ¨visit¨your familly and go back to an orphanage. despite all of that these kids are so resilient and just great kids. i would take some home with me if i could.
thats about it... its really hot this week. i am hoping my toe will hold out until i get home.