Weekend marathon and Monday

Another great weekend!

Saturday we had the visit from the Judge and his crew to come inspect the orphanage. The judge came with three pyscologists and a state social worker. They checked out all of our rooms to make sure they were a safe place for kids to live. The psycologists interviewed three kids a piece asking them questions like, "do you have enough food to eat?", "do you think that you are safe here?", "do you have any chores?" etc... The judge acted like he loved the place, he had not seen it since the switch in February. Also while they were here inspecting Ronal Enrique from the chicken delivery business came and dropped off another couple boxes worth or rice, noodles and milk. They are continuing to bless us. This morning they also dropped off another 5 live chickens. I didn't here about that until later in the afternoon so I guess it wasn't at 2:00 in the morning again.

The Judge with a couple of kids

Sunday was the marathon. I woke up around 6:30 and went to my spot. My group was incharge of shutting down a portion of the highway so that the runners could run on it. The police and fire fighters came to help us (about 2 hours to late). I got to watch Yhonson, Pastor Auden and Fred run by for the 5k. Yhonson ran it in under 30 minutes with only practicing two times, so not too bad. I volunteered until 2:30 pm. Then came back and got out of the sun and rested until about 5:30, then I went to the after party for all the volunteers. The party was mostly Peace Corp volunteers. I also met some people that were doing research in Lima for the graduate school program. They were doing a project on eco-friendly fish farms that people in developing countries and start and make money off of while providing sustainable nutrition for their towns. It sounded really cool.

Yhonson in the 5k race

My group responsible for shutting down the highway

Today (Monday) all the kids had the day off from school, so that meant that I took the day off too. I slept in until about 9:00 for the first time since I've been down here. Then had a relaxing day of playing volleyball, watching some videos, then playing some video games all with the kids.

Learning how to play

Ok I almost forgot to add another thing that I did today. At first I wasn't going to post it because it was so gross, but then I realized it was just too gross not to post. So there's your warning if you don't want to get grossed out you should probably stop reading now. I'll even leave a couple blank lines to make it easier on you.

So the twins who are actually in that photo playing video games have their new grown up teeth coming in. This is causing some problems for them. When their teeth are coming in they like to pick at their gums and this has caused some infection. I guess a couple months ago one of the infections in their gums got bad enough that they had to take him to a doctor and put him on anti-biotics. Ok so now for the gross part, still reading? I discovered today that Lenin had another infection. He had a cankor sore on his top gum that had swollen up to the size of a pencil eraser. Not wanting it to get any worse I showed it to Maribel and his house mom Sindy. Then I decided to take some action. So I took him into the bathroom and had him lean his head over the sink. Then I popped the fluid filled sack. There was a lot of pus and blood in my sink after that. I got some gauze and soaked it in listerine and had him hold it on his sore. The other twin Jonel had the same thing but in the back of his mouth, so we repeated the process with him. They are rinsing with hot water then puting listerine soaked gauze on their sores and they are already getting smaller. Hopefully doing this will keep the infection from getting as serious as it did last time. They told me last time they had those they didn't do anything to them and they eventually got so painful they had to go to the doctor.

Friday

Friday was a great day! It was teacher appreciation day so the kids at school had a party for all the teachers. They gave them all gifts, I got a pair of socks and a matching handkerchief haha. They then sang us a couple songs and performed some skits they had been secretly working on. After that they just played a bunch of games for the rest of the school day.

Fred and I decided a couple days ago that we are going to have the boys start doing more "man" work around the orphanage. So Friday was the first day. When I told the boys that we would be doing this some of them were excited (Cristopher, the twins, and Jose) while others were mad and pouted (Gerson, Yhonson, Joel). However, they were all going to do it just the same. So yesterday after they ate lunch we brought them outside and explained to them exactly what we were going to do. They were going to learn how to take care of the yard, paint, and do stucco. So here are a few pictures from the first yardwork day.

Remember you can click on the pictures to see much bigger versions.

Lenin (Pronounced Lenny)

Jonell (Pronounced Yo-nell)

Fred, Jose, and JoelJonell and Cristopher picking up grass clippings

After the yardwork, Ronal from the Pacasmayo company stopped by to give us a donation of food. Praise God! He drove in with a truckload of food. Two 100 kilo bags of rice, and a whole bunch of vegetable oil, sugar, pasta and canned milk. All this food is from his employees. At the end of every month they get paid a bonus in food. So all the food you see on the table in this picture plus 2 bags of rice was given up by families for the kids in the orphanage. Avis was so happy that she started to cry. This was the first time that anyone from the comunity had really contributed to the orphanage. If I added it all up it is around $600 worth of food. All that oil will last us hopefully an entire month and the rice is enough for 2 full weeks.

Here is the food (you can't see the rice) with me accepting the inventory sheet listing all the stuff the workers gave from Rosa (the woman who got us an in with the boss).

Thanks for all the cards!

So I hadn't recieved a single card in the mail until today. But today they delivered 21 of them to me all at the same time. Thank you all so much. I opened about half of them and realized the majority were birthday cards so I'm going to save the other half until next week. Thank you all so much!

Also some other really fantastic news. Today we got the official paperwork that the 7 year old twins that are pictured in the post above are declared abandoned. Meaning that they can now be adopted. The agencies are in the process of looking for a set of parents. Currently there are no parents here in the northern district of Peru that want to adopt 2 kids so they are sending their file down to Lima... But, if you guys have knowledge of someone in the states that would like to adopt 2 twin boys (very tender and well behaved at that) keep us in mind. I can post more pictures later but I got to head out to the pastors house for missionary night.

Updates

Sorry it has been awhile since I've posted but nothing really out of the ordinary has happened. I did not end up going to the birthday party for the politician on Saturday because the other people that I was going with had to cancel and I didn't really want to go by myself.

I had a great meeting again with the local business man on Monday. He came up here to check everything out and he was just amazed. He said he had no idea that it was like this, it wasn't the big scary orphanage after all. After seeing everything he told me that he would be willing to help us out. So Maribel is going to be making some lists of things that he could help us with. While he was here he tried one of Gladys (our cook) empanadas and loved it. He said that we could come down to his business and sell them to his employees anytime we wanted.

It was another visitation day but a lot fewer people showed up this week. However the lady still came to visit the twins, and Jose's and Anabela's dad came to visit. Jose was excited to introduce me to him.

In other good news we found a man willing to sponsor all the kids in the orphanage to go to school for the rest of the school year! Praise God! That was an answered prayer, because we have been worried about the school these last couple weeks.

Tomorrow I'm going to Trujillo again to supposedly sit down and talk with the judges that are making the decision about the Rojas family. They don't know that we are coming and it was our lawyers idea...so I don't really know how that is going to pan out. We'll see.

Picture of Cristopher and other kids getting ready to leave for school

Here is a picture of the twins and the lady that comes to visit them every visitation day