After I finally allowed people in my life to start calling me Ed, or Eddie, or Eduardo or some derivative of that, it was only inevitable that one of my nicknames become "Special Ed". I've never really been offended by that nickname. You usually only receive nicknames if you are being shown love. Anyway, a few days after I returned to Palacagüina, we went to Los Pipitos which is a school for special needs children. I wasn't really sure what to expect.
I went to the school knowing that I know nothing about helping children with special needs. I went knowing that If we do something wrong with these kids, it could impact them negatively for the rest of their life. Of course when we arrived, my expectations were not met. Some of us were asked to help with physical therapy for the kids and the rest of us were asked to clean. I was on the cleaning team. I was OK with that. They didn't have water that day (there are frequent water outages in Central America) so our cleaning was limited to sweeping.
Then we had recess time with the kids. They have these two concrete slides pictured below. They are kind of scary – long and steep. The kids pile on these things and hit each other at the bottom and purposefully try and hit each other.
After recess was lunch and then nap time. There was one boy who had some trouble napping on his own, so I laid him on my chest to help calm him down a bit.
As you can see, I was more about taking a nap than he was! He never did go to sleep, but that's OK too. It was crazy because I never expected that the expectation of the staff for me would be just to love the kids. They didn't ask me to help tutor them, or teach them new things, or help some of them walk. God used me that day maybe to just show this one kid that he's not that different.
We also continued work on the parking lot at the Baptist church that we've been residing inside. It's hot and tough work. The ground is tough clay and my team mates are rock stars at moving dirt like crazy. Kwak is awesome at working the huge 18-pound bar and chipping away the top layers of dirt. Christopher is obviously the pickaxe man. Close does a great job of shoveling loads of dirt in to the wheelbarrow and taking it away. Laura is also a great pickaxe operator and shoveler of dirt. Erin is great at rotating from position to position, being useful wherever she ends up!
