Day eight:
Well so I am off with my blogging days. Today is Saturday and I am just now doing Thursday. Haha oh well, I’ll try to get back in the habit. So Thursday was another good day. We went to Kuyasa again. It was raining when we got up, so we were a little bit slow moving to get started. We ended up getting out there at around 10:15. When we got there it had stopped raining. We headed in to find Jenny and find out what she wanted us to do for the day. However, we found that she was not there yet and so we set out to find other things to do. We started by cleaning and sweeping out the apex. The apex is what they call the garage that I described the first time I talked about Kuyasa. It is a lot bigger on the inside and there are some rooms on a second story in the back. The first thing we did was to organize and stack some wooden chairs. Once that was done we set about sweeping. We got about half of it when the guy that was supervising us said to go ahead and stop and pick up the piles we had made. Once that was done, we threw away the collected dust and stuff and headed off to do some other work. The next thing that they had us do was to straighten up one of the lofts that they use for storage. It was a lot like the first on that we did, but there was much less stuff in it. I think that took Drew and me about thirty minutes to sort out. I took pictures of the room, so once I get those up you will have a better idea. Once we were done with that, Jenny gave us the job of washing the walls of one of the classrooms that they have. This was a very tedious job. The room was painted like an ocean, so there were fish, dolphins, see turtles and other ocean life all on the walls. Well kids in the past had taken pencil, crayon, and other writing implements and doodles all over the walls. We went down and talked with one of the mammas (that is what they call the older women working at Kuyasa) and she gave us a mixture of soaps, some rags, and sponges to clean it up. So at around 11 o’clock we got started on that. We started on one wall and just tried to work our way around. It was really tough going. The pencil took about five to ten scrubs to get off, the crayon took about fifty and even then some didn’t come off. We worked and worked and worked, making slow progress. Drew was quoting movies while we worked and I was sitting there judging him every second of it (it was all in good fun). After a while the kids came for the feeding scheme (that is the official name that they have given the lunch handouts). We knew this because they came running down the hall that the room we were working on was in. Some even poked their heads in and waved at us, and we waved back. Then two girls came in and offered to help. So we gave them a sponge and the four of us got to work. Other kids came in and offered to help, but they thought that we were getting paid to do it. When we told them that we weren’t, they quickly lost interest. The four of us worked for a while and then the girls seemed to have had enough and ran out of there. At that point we had gotten two walls done and a majority of the third. While finishing the third wall, two boys came in and then offered to help. We gladly gave them some cleaning implements and they got to work. After a while we finally finished the wall, and there were high fives and fist pounds all around. We then then thanked the two guys for helping us and decided to call it a day. After all I think we ended up spending about four and a half hour cleaning that room. Our hand were prunny and they wrecked like dirty dish soap. I mean my prunes had prunes. I think that I am just now getting over the smell as well. I mean my hands are peeling and it is Saturday. Any way, it was really nice to have all the help that we did. It was very encouraging to see the eagerness of the kids. I mean they legitimately wanted to help. And then another thing that kind of stuck with me was that they had called us “teacher.” I mean teaching is what I want to do some day, but I had not expected to have someone call me that. Something I hope that I was able to teach them was that, they shouldn’t have to expect to be paid to do everything. It is ok to do things out of the bottom of their hearts. I also found being called teacher was a sign of respect and that the kids respected us even though they knew nothing about us. So after we got done at Kuyasa, we went back to the house and cleaned up. We then headed to the Spar to get dinner at the cafe and then do some shopping. I ended up getting the Thai chicken wrap. It was kind of bland so I don’t think that I will be getting that again. I most likely will go with a pizza seeing as I can make two meals out of it. Anyway, when we got back to the house I showered and watched a movie. All in all, Thursday was a good day.
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