It’s a Saturday morning and my alarm in the other room is going off at 1:07 AM! I drag myself out of bed as quickly and quietly as I can to get to her before she wakes up all of the other kids or the three girls still sleeping in my room. And as I hurry through the dark I think about my brother and sister-in-law with my little nephew and how this must be what it’s like when he is up in the middle of the night. I feed the baby girl and head back to bed. As I am about to fall back asleep, I pray that the other baby girl does not wake up so I can get some sleep. I am definitely not ready to be a mom.
For the past 3 days, Courtney and I have been on duty as house parents for ten kids between the ages of about 4 months and 9 years old. By the way… did I mention… none of them speak English. They know a few phrases like thank you and good morning, but that is about it. So the language barrier is definitely the challenge here. Thanks to my friend Valerie, I have a little Spanish book that we keep handy to look words up when we don’t know what they are saying to us or when we can’t tell them what we need to. It is funny to see them stand there and wait patiently while we flip through that little book. Or sometimes, they just stand there and repeat the same phrase over and over thinking we will eventually figure it out. We are able to learn a lot more Spanish working with them since that is our only choice though, so that is nice. More of less, it forces us to learn quicker.
We have been lucky to also have the help of Jaime and Liz. Between the four of us, we have taken care of these boys for 3 days to fill in for a house mom who is having vacation this week.
As challenging as it has been, we have had a lot of good times with the kids. We have colored, played musical chairs, and watched movies. We have also been able to take them outside all three days we have watched them! Up until the last few days, it has rained continuously and been freezing cold every single day. I don’t know how we all did not get sick from being out in the rain all of those days, but God definitely blessed us with good health in those times.
This place is amazing! The more time we spend here, the more we love it.
The work has been hard and we are all pretty tired, but they are so grateful for all of our hard work. Yesterday was our last day of picking beans. I am excited to see what other projects we will be starting… well besides shelling all of those beans we picked.
We have also been given more time with the kids lately. Getting to know all of them is so much fun. These kids come from all different backgrounds and just need to be shown love. I pray that we can spend as much time as we can here showing them the love of God. They are all blessing me so much. I can tell you already that it is going to be really hard to leave here when the time comes.
