The boy in the blue shirt.

General overview:

                Monday was my first day of volunteering at the AIDS orphanage.  We are going to be volunteering Mondays and Tuesdays 8:30-11:45am. There are seven of us that go (Lindsay, Katie, Steph, Melissa, Anne, Eric, and me).  It is a small group but I think it will be good. I like having a small group because then hopefully we will all bond while we are working and playing with the kids.  When we got there we realized that there wasn’t really going to be much of a schedule for today or a structure.  No one seemed to know what we were supposed to do. We just had to go with the flow.  First we were told to go to the school to help the teacher, but when we got there the teacher wasn’t even there yet.  Instead we went back into a playroom in the house.  There there were about 16 little kids who seemed to be between the ages of 2-5.  As soon as we stepped into the door we had kids hugging us and holding our hands.  They wanted to be picked up and spun around and played with.  They thoroughly enjoyed using us as their new jungle-gyms and were determined to climb all over us.  We spent lots of time just playing with the kids.  The teacher spent a little time with them going over prayers and teaching them to count.  Then the kids got to color for awhile and then it was playtime again.  Some days while we are here we will be helping with other projects.  It looks like for the most part though, there won’t really be a big schedule. 

                Tuesday was a very different experience at the haven. I didn’t even get to see the kids.  When we got there, Renee took us around and showed us some jobs that we could potentially help with throughout the semester.  Currently they really need 5 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms to be repainted.  The walls do not look so good. The paint is chipping in areas and has marks from the beds and just from the kids in general.  Sometime the next few weeks we will probably be doing some painting.  After we discussed the paint job, our group got split up. Lindsay and I were taken to a storage warehouse (they said it was where Santa Claus lived).  We walked in the door and my senses were bombarded.  First off, it looked like a disaster.  They had received many donations over the years and clearly keeping this place organized had not been a priority when they had so much else to do. It was difficult to walk anywhere because there was little room to place your feet.  The room also had a slight musty scent to it.  It was a storage room so that was to be expected.  Along with the smell and no room for movement, there was also a lack of air flow.  On this hot day, the room was very stuffy.  Our task was to sort through boxes and make sure what was in them matched the label on the box.  Most of it was kid’s clothing.  Once we sorted through quite a few boxes, we decided to start to clean and organize the room for them.  We tried to sort everything and put all of the similar items together.  We did not get even close to finishing, but we did get a lot done. 

The boy in the blue shirt:

                I met him on Monday.  He is maybe 4 or 5.  When we first arrived he was super quiet.  He did not run up to us or talk or hug or climb like the others.  He sat by himself and sniffled a lot.  I don’t know his name.  A few of us asked him but he did not say (either he doesn’t understand English very well or he was just being shy).  As soon as I saw him, I knew he was the one I wanted to talk to.  His eyes had a look.  He looked so sad.  I knew I wanted to make him smile.  Throughout the morning I tried and tried but was not very successful. He would not even put on a little grin.  Then we started playing with some legos.  I was holding them while he stacked them to make a tall tower.  I don’t know if it was the legos or just that he was finally warming up to me, but he started to smile.  I was so happy that I accidently let go of the tower when another kid ran into it.  I was afraid this would cause the little boy in the blue shirt to stop smiling, but instead he started to laugh and his smile got bigger.  I was relieved.  By the end of the morning he even started saying a few words to me…not many..but he would mumble a few things every once in awhile. 

                I cannot wait to go back next week. I want to find out his name and I want to make him smile again.  You are not supposed to pick favorites but he is probably one of my favorites.  All of the others are super cute too though.  They run up and give you a giant hug and then run off to play again.  They repeat this many times while we are there.