Today was our first day of work. Pat, Alex and Mary are assigned to INA, a local two year college for teaching young adults English. More on that later. Rachel and I are at a local home daycare with another volunteer, Susan. The kids are cute, and range in age from 1 to 5. They speak only Spanish, as does the daycare owner. Since we speak little Spanish, things can get challenging. After work we had a Spanish class during which we learned some key phrases like no peleen, no pateen, y baje de conejo. (no kicking, no fighting & put down the rabbit). See - challenging.
The owners daughter has a tiny baby, pink rabbit that runs around the yard with the kids chasing it. It's pretty scary when the wobbly toddlers and fighting boys run after it, so most of Rachel's day was spent carrying around the baby Chispica.
Ciudad Quesada is an area with a lot of poverty. The Costa Rican government has a program where they provide money to home daycares that care for low income children, many with single moms. The daycare providers pay for all food and expenses. Anything leftover - which is not much - serves as payment for the providers services.
Our job is to watch the kids from 8:00 AM til 11:45 AM, while prepares lunch and cleans up. Thankfully, she also seems to appear as if by magic during the most boisterous times. It might sound like our work time is short, but it is very tiring. The kids have so little that they have a hard time sharing. They understand some English choose to ignore it. If we find something that interests them, they will stick with it for a long time though. Today they played bowling for a long time. The pins are empty plastic bottles and the ball is a rolled up ball of plastic bags. After that the boys played futbol with a bigger wad of plastic bags. Girls were absolutely not allowed. It is very evident that machismo here starts early. I don't think that we will bond as tightly with these kids as we did with our girls in Peru, but all in all it is good.
-- Posted from my iPhone
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