pictures of the past few weeks

At the end of October, right after my birthday I had my language taller- which is where we all get together again and have a week of language classes to help our Spanish continue to improve. We had classes near my first host family, so I went there and visited with them! It was soooo wonderful to see them again. I may go back in January for little Gladicita's Brithday. Above is Nelson and I, and below is Mari and I, they are brother and sister.

Last week I had my third Kids group meeting where we discussed opening a community bank together, to fund some of the craft projects they would like to do. Here are some pictures of that day, this meeting actually went really well, and I felt really happy afterwards (which is not always the case!). The older girl in the orange T-Shirt is my friend Georgina, I am always at her house, every Sunday we make chicken soup together and her parents take really good care of me.

This week I had a meeting with the two women's groups who don't get along, it was supposed to be all day and I knew I had to provide food to keep them from getting even grumpier! I asked Georgina and her mom to help me with the food and they ended up making the food for me, when they realized I was paying for out of pocket, they wouldn't even let me pay them for their work! They are wonderful!

I was a really tough meeting and I ended up walking home in the rain crying, feeling so alone and very unsuccesful, I had to stop by their house to drop off thier dishes (So when I got their house I kept trying to hold back the tears), but the second they hugged me, it all just came out. When I apologized they told me not to worry, they loved me like a daughter and a sister and that I should cry if I need to cry. They cheered me up and we ended up eating rice with milk! It is sooo good, kind of tastes like tapoica pudding!

Anyway, Georgina is the one I am trying to get a scholarship for, she is 23 years old, really bright, but they can't afford to send her to school and she has no source of income. She agreed to help me with the kids group, which has been an incredible help! In the first pictures she is telling them to settle down and make a line ( for some reason they listen to her a lot better than me! :) )

Here is the demonstration we did. The tin can is their bank and the amount they will have if they all save together, the other red thing is a mini house, that is the amount of money they will have if they just save by themselves. It is 5 cordobas every month (there are 23 cordobas in 1 dollar). I also explained the importance of saving your money and we did math sums of how much we would have if there were 20 kids saving 5 corodobas every month for 2 months or 6 months or 1 year. Then we talked about reinvesting our money in activities that earn such as raffles or selling food. They go into it even if they are very rowdy!

Here are some pictures of the kids as a group, the ones with name tags on their shirts (if you can see that) are the group leaders! I assigned 6 kids in the group to help me with the meeting. They all had task names like "the Sticker" (this kid helped me stick up flip charts) , we had the "mail person" who had to go around collecting all the pieces of paper, we also had a "silence maker" (very important!)

This last picture below is a picture of a cabbage field. I just thought it was neat. Cabbage has a high price here because it has to be watered, unlike corn and beans- the main staple here.