Jueves (Thursday) and Saint Patrick's Day

This morning I woke up to the sound of squeaking beds...okay, get your minds out of the gutter.  :)  Lorenza was cleaning up the room across from mine and was dragging the beds across the floor, making squeaking sounds as she rearranged the room in order to clean the floor well.  I asked Mari if there were other volunteers coming and she said there were two coming soon.  By the time breakfast was served, Tino had brought the two new volunteers back to the house.  They are two girls from Wellesley.  Today they mostly just slept, but came with Tino to the mountain school in the afternoon.

I was planning to teach my classes about Saint Patrick's day today, so I looked up a story about Saint Patrick and how he charmed all the snakes and led them to their death in the ocean.  I wrote it up on the board and had them look up the words they didn't understand.  I told them a little more about the day and wrote down words particular to the day along with little pictures.  I thought I would give myself a little bit of a break and have them draw shamrocks, rainbows, leprechauns and four-leaf clovers for me.  :)  My morning class was working on their drawings even after the class time was up.  They really ended up enjoying the lesson.  I thought I would give the afternoon class a little more time to draw, but they ended up finishing really quickly.  It was really interesting to see how different the classes are from each other!  Joselin and Justi from my morning class both gave me their drawings.  Justi drew a really good leprechaun!!!  I was impressed.  He had been very secretive while he was drawing though and wouldn't let me see it until he was done.  In my afternoon class, Geraldina and Ingrid drew really impressive pictures and hung them up on the wall.  Geraldina drew a shamrock and Ingrid drew a leprechaun.

Joselin's picture.  They thought the shamrock and clovers were trees, so that's why there's a tree under the rainbow.   :)

Justin's impressive leprechaun and his pot of gold!!!

Between classes, during my break, I braved the post office again.  The woman there has to know me by now with the things I've sent and the people I've helped send things.  :)  She gave me a box when I got there and after I finished packing everything up, I had to fill out all the paperwork.  When she was reading my paperwork she said I couldn't send one of the things and so I had to open up my package, take everything out and then redo the paperwork.  By the time I did that, she weighed the package again and said I didn't need all the paperwork I had just filled out, that I just needed to fill out a smaller form.  I'm glad I left enough time for it even though I thought I had the procedure down pat.  Finally I got everything straightened out after filling out three sets of paperwork!  haha  She was very nice about everything though, so it really wasn't that bad.

Right when I'd come into the post office, my friend who sells jewelry came up to me and said hi.  He has his jewelry stand outside the post office, so he told me to come by and say hi.  Sometimes I hope he doesn't see me when I go by there because I always end up getting something new from him.

After the afternoon class, we all played with the kids outside.  All the little kids want me to throw around big plastic balls with them.  I prefer that to playing volleyball with the older kids because I am horrible at volleyball.  A couple of the girls were having me do races with them too.  We had to hop all the way from one side of the school to the other.  Then they wanted me to pick them up and swing them around.  It was getting chilly outside by the time we closed up the school, and a little girl who was walking with us held my hand as we walked.  She said to me, "Que frio!!!"  My hands were freezing cold.  She put her notebook under her arm and rubbed my hand between hers.  It was really sweet.

Doane had been saying he wanted to get drunk tonight for Saint Patrick's day.  I gave him a good pinch this morning since he wasn't wearing green.  He's Irish and should know better.  He said his friends had been drinking since 11 in the morning.  Mabel keeps talking about going to karaoke tonight.  I think she wanted to go along with Doane's desire to "drink loads" but I'm not sure if it's going to happen.

Fridays are used mostly to organize sports for the kids, so I'm going to bring my camera.  I hope it's sunny!!!  Okay, now I'm off to wash the day off of me...as Kevin, one of my brightest but cheekiest students, says, "Hasta tomorrow!!!"