I realized after I left the internet cafe on Thursday that I didn´t finish talking about what i do with the kids all day, and that I often repeat things that I have said before... so I´m sorry about doing that. Mostly I just play with kids.

Wednesday, though, I started working on my project for my independent study with Dr. Foltz. I took a little while to figure out what their normal schedule is, and how the kids are in the development, etc. I am going to be taking a group of drawings from kids at the Early Learning Center (American kids) and then drawings from the kids here at Welcome Home. Then I will be analyzing, studying differences and similarities, etc. After the kids drew me pictures on Wednesday I got very excited about what they had given me. Although we told them to JUST draw a picture of their own self, Evelin ending up drawing a picture of her AND me. That little sweetheart. Earlier in the day she was just enamored with my post-it notes and wanted one for herself. She made me write something on it, so i wrote "Clase de Brigida" (Brigida´s class) on it, and Claudio read it aloud for her. However, she still wanted me to write my own name on it. So i did, and i stuck it on her nose.

Thursday I went with Brigida to pick up the kids at school. Brigida has to go to the principal´s office and hand over papers for the kids that will be going to school in August. She was in there quite a long time and left me to be in charge of the 9 kids from Welcome Home. We hung out on the teeter totters, and Evelin made me guard her humungous glob of homemade playdough. It became 20 minutes of me counting over and over the kids to make sure they were all there, and to see that I knew where they all were. In that twenty minutes Evelin got a frisbee stuck on the school´s roof (and it was someone else´s, too), Ulises got into the garden hose, the kids were running in and out of the principal´s office, I had to hold onto someone´s lunchbox. Finally I sat down and gave up chasing them around.

There were other kids at the teeter totters. Converse shoes are very very cool here, it seems that most of the teenagers wear them. I was wearing mine, and another little boy tried to ask me where I bought them. I couldn´t understand him, and I had to ask him to repeat himself about 3 times, which just made him roll his eyes at me. I finally told him I bought them in America. He then bragged that he had three pairs himself. A girl came up and asked me if I spoke English, and I told her yes, I did, and that I only spoke a little Spanish. She eyed me for a little while and then left.

Maybe it´s because I miss home, but it seems that I tend to associate people I see with people from back home. There is a girl I see every once and a while at the school who reminds me very much of what my sister in law, Rinda, looked like when she was younger. It´s quite an alarming similarity.. I wish I could take a picture of her. One of the girls at the center, Esmerelda, has the same face shape as my cousins McKenzie and Breanna. I hope when I take a picture of her and show her to my family I´m not the only one who thinks so.

We had lots more rain on Thursday, which meant that there were no kids again on Friday. It was warm and sunny yesterday and it still is today, so we should have kids tomorrow.

Dr. Foltz-- I have been thinking about your last question. The only thing I can think of right now is for culturalization of nature. Here there is only one paved highway that is the main street through town, and then only a few short offshoots that are paved. Everything else is dirt. There are many potholes and when it rains it only gets worse. Every once in a while a crew will come by to level off the dirt. I would think that making that leaving the roads as dirt, and then trying to level out what nature has down would be culturalization of nature. I will still have to think about the vice versa of that.

I have been really bored the last few days. Earlier this week I read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. It is my favorite book and I brought it along as a comfort, which it was. I then re-read The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara. Yesterday afternoon I started reading Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and finished it before I went to sleep! Yikes.

I feel like I am running out of things to talk about. If any of you want to ask more questions, I am very open to those. Also, the shower in my bathroom has a VERY stinky drain and it is driving me nuts. Does anybody have a remedy for it? That would be greatly appreciated.