8/25/09

so, google just spazzed and lost a post i'd just written. that sucks. will write another later

8/9/09

so a couple frustrating/baffling occurences last week:
i saw a primary school kid (not one of mine) drop kick what looked to be an 8 week old puppy. seriously, he picked the terrified little puppy up, dropped it, and kicked it. i yelled at him and he ran off laughing. i will say that one of my girls actually went over, picked the puppy up, and tried to comfort him. this girl, mamello, really likes my puppies, and plays with them when she can. so maybe learning to play with them has helped her to be more sympathetic to dogs. maybe my having the dogs is a good learning experience for the kids, and a lesson on how to treat animals.
also, one of my girls here, who is around 12, got into a fight with another one of my girls, probably about the same age, and bit her in the back. why? i don't know. they are a little old to be doing that kind of thing, though.
i've started my after school study program, so now from 3 until 6 i help kids who have homework with their homework. i eventually want this to be something where all the kids come on time to study or read, even if they don't have homework, but we're taking baby steps. it has been interesting to see who comes, and to see some of the kids brighten up and make an extra effort as soon as someone shows an interest in them. i helped one little boy a couple days in a row and he came up to me on the third day at the beginning of study and gave me a huge hug. it was really sweet.

1/9/09

yesterday a couple of my older girls stayed home from school claiming to have swine flu. i can't believe the house mothers actually let them skip school. these girls were up and walking around like any other kid. i started talking with the house mothers and they explained that they have to be very careful with the children because they have all been through trama. i thought this was interesting, and explained a lot about why the children at the home are so undisciplined. yes, the kids here are all traumatized: they are orphans, many have been rejected by their families, some of our girls were abused before coming here. that doesn't mean that they don't need structure. so i talked with the house mothers about setting up after school study programmes. these don't exist here now. basically the children come home from school whenever they like, play around, and then suddenly realize at about 9 pm that they need to start doing homework. so they go to bed late and are tired the next day. and goodness knows what they do between the end of school and dinner. so now they have to come home after school and study. i'm trying to get at least the primary school students finished with homework before evening devotions and dinner (this is at 6 pm). we'll see how well this works. many ideas here are operative for a few days, and then the authority figures get lazy about enforcing the rules and everything reverts back to how it was. i'm hoping the house mothers will keep working with me on this. i can't watch all 54 kids study at once. i need their help
other than that i'm continuing with my library, with teaching kids to read, and i've been to a couple meetings. and i've met an amazing child. we have a little eleven year old girl here who was living with her aunt and uncle until the authorities found out that she was being molested and took her here. the uncle was taken to jail, which is not always done. many times the man will just get away with these things. anyways, this little girl actually went to court last week, stood up in front of everyone there, and told her story. she's an amazing child. i'm not sure how okay she is. she acts like a normal child, plays, interacts with the other kids here really well, so i hope she's ok emotionally. she's really smart, too. she's comes to me for extra maths work, and sometimes just sits on her own to read. most children here don't. anyways, it came out at court that the aunt knew what was happening to her and didn't do anything, so now this little girl has got to go back to court in a couple weeks to tell everything again. i hope she'll be ok.
oh, and we had an austrian guy here for a couple weeks. he was great with the kids and really handy. i hardly ever saw him because he was always off either playing with the kids or fixing something. he really bonded with our 12 year old here who can neither walk nor talk. the austrian guy actually made the kid a stationary bike to help strengthen his legs (we are trying to get him walking now). it's really sweet.