So while we were here in Cochabamba, we took a few days to go to work at another orphanage in the small town in the rainforest. When I say small it was small. I would imagine only a few people live there. There were just about 6 houses and a school near where we were staying. This is a view of the yard, shower, and orphanage. The shower had to be connected to a spicket that cones out of the ground near the church where the guys set up their tents. You can see that there is a lot of water on the ground. When they say rainforest, they are not kidding. It rained a lot. The mosquitos came out at night too, but they were not as bad as in Nauta on the boat. We would work on the orphanage from about 9:30 to 5 every day. The meals were served quite punctually too because there is not much daylight after 6 or 6:30 so they had to cook while there was still daylight.
This is a closer picture of where we ate and had some of our squad meetings.
These are some of the children who hung around sometimes. On Monday night when we were there a bunch of kids showed up, some of whom who had parents that were there for a church service. The kids all stayed outside the church and started talking to me and stuff. Now I don’t know much castejano, so I just spoke to them in English. It was still fun though and more and more kids were showing up. I would lead them in the few Spanish songs I knew and they would sing some that I didn’t know. After about half an hour, I said let’s go play and they taught me this Bolivian version of duck duck goose. Two people are it at once and you have to run around the circle together holding hands. Instead of saying duck duck goose you just go around the circle with the other person who is it and then karate chop two peoples hands and the two people then grab hands and chase the other two people around the circle. It was fun for a little while and then I got bored of palying with them. This was all at night. Then the kids got bored too and then they came over and wanted me to lead a church service for them. The way I knew this was that they all crowded around me and started dragging me quite literally to the church. They did the same thing to my friend Jen Fodor. So Jen and I led an impormptu VBS for the kids. It was such a God night. I gave my testimony and we sang a bunch of songs and did a skit. It was really cool.
On the orphanage we basically painted and varnished the entire inside and outside top to bottom and built a staircase going up to the second floor. I am at the top of the latter in this photo.
Below is the front of the orphanage.
This is the staircase that Mark built.
Here are two of the tents in the orphanage where the girls were staying. Being in our tents greatly reduced the amount of mosquitos! But we did get a lot of no see um bites on our legs. Overall it was a growing experience because the guys had to leave early to work on another orphanage and the girls had 5 more days of hard manual labor after we left.
