Now that I have told you guys about the harshness of what the kids go through here, I will lighten it up a bit and tell you guys about my time here so far.
We live in the Alex Rocha Youth Center here in the San Francisco area of Cartagena. Our days look fairly different every day. Especially the last few days due to the high volumes of rain. When it rains a lot, it isn’t safe to go out to do ministry because crime is at alarmingly high levels. This being said, we have only been able to do our english classes and house visits on the way to lunch today and yesterday. Normally, though, our days look a little bit like this:
7:00am- Wake up
7:30am- Eat Breakfast
8:00-9:00am- Quiet Time
9:00am(which is usually really 9:30-45)- Alex (or another local) arrives to walk us to ministry
9:30/45-11:30- We play soccer/kickball with the local kids who go to school in the afternoon.
11:50/12pm- We walk 2 miles to Alex’s house for lunch.
12:30-1:45pm-We have lunch with Alex’s family and mingle a bit.
1:45pm- We walk back to the foundation.
2:00-4:00pm-We entertain whatever random local kids want to hangout. Sometimes this looks like dance parties in the front room and sometimes this looks like paper airplanes. When there are no kids, we use this as shower time! 🙂
3:45-4:00- Kids start showing up for english class.
4:00-5:00- We teach english to 13 local kids.
5:30ish- We walk back to Alex’s house to get ready for dinner.
6:00-7:30/8pm-We eat dinner and hang out on the stoop with the local little girls. This includes dancing, playing hand slapping games, and them playing with our hair. They love to play with our hair.
8ish-We walk back to the foundation
8:30-9:30-Team time
9:30-shower if it is our teams turn and there were kids in the afternoon.
10:30pm-fall onto my sleeping pad and hope that our resident mice don’t crawl on my face like they have done to Amy and Molly R in the past….
This is a typical day in our shoes here in Cartagena, Colombia if you could ever call a day here typical. For the next few days, our schedule will be very different while we help to build a house from one of the locals who has been helping us out this whole time. I hope you enjoyed the day in the life look at Team Open Arms here in Cartagena! 🙂
