Yesterday morning, I woke up with only one thing on my agenda: play with the orphans at the water park! Hard life, I know. Andrew, Morgan, Annie, and I left the apartment at 8:30am in the morning to head to the water park. The children arrived soon after with smiling faces, lots of hugs, and calling us “mommie!” After getting their clothes changed and gathering some tubes, the children were running to the slides. They quickly put down their bags and were in the water. I found myself hopping in right after them. I was mobbed by children as they were all saying, “Mommie!” and wanted me to look as they went underwater or sat on the tube, or attempted to swim. The slides were soon turned on. Two girls probably about 10 years old claimed me as their buddy for the day. We would walk up the steps, go down the slide, and before we could get out of the water, they were pulling my arms saying “three?” asking if the three of us could go again. I wish I would have counted how many times I walked up those stairs.
It was quite different than any water park in the U.S.
1. There weren’t any lifeguards except for the guard dressed in full clothing and boots blowing his whistle in only the extreme cases.
2. You don’t have to wait to go down the slide until the person in front of you has reached the bottom. At one point, I was surrounded by 8 children under the age of 12 going down the slide. This resulted in many pile ups and bumped heads at the landing.
3. No running wasn’t even a consideration.
4. The kids had bananas for a snack and before we knew it many of them were in the pool WITH their bananas.
5. Children were running up the unused slides backwards.
6. Children were stopping on the slides thinking it was fun to get ran over by the next rider.
7. One girl scraped her knee and was bleeding a little. We made sure she was okay and sent her right back up to keep playing.
Although it wasn’t anything like a water park in the U.S. It was an AMAZINGLY FUN day! We were exhausted, so to reward ourselves for our hard play time, Morgan, Annie, and I treated ourselves to 1 hour $6 massages.
P.S. These pictures were taken by Annie. Be sure to check out her blog as well at http://anniebower.theworldrace.org
