This week saw the end of Carnaval, a four day city-wide food fight wasting perfectly good pancake ingredients. Chris and I were comprehensively soaked by our host family for two days and by perfect strangers armed with bubblegum flavoured shaving foam for another, and found the experience both enjoyable and exhausting.
With no excursions planned and a corresponding lack of anecdotes I have decided to provide a brief run-down of an average day as it's not all picnics and volcanoes here.
7.30am Alarm goes off. Generally ignored.
8am (ish) breakfast. Usually this is bread, cheese, juice and a banana. Has also consisted of cake, pasta and leftover popcorn. Juice ranges from the infrequent piña (delicious) to the extremely frequent tomate del arbol, a small, bitter fruit native to south america. It produces mud flavoured juice.
8.30am walk to work. Lasts about 20 minutes unless we have to make a detour around a dog in the street. Dogs are unpredictable here and some of our co-volunteers have the teethmarks to prove it.
9am congregate in office to collect other volunteers. Catch bus to the market for the day. On bus, fend off advances of travelling salespeople peddling crisps, chocolate, fruit, ice cream, eye drops, brooms, clothespegs, superglue, CDs of romantic music, cookbooks, keyrings, empañadas, and an ointment that apparently cures "infirmities of the back, knees and hip joints, inflamed sinuses and bedwetting". Powerful stuff that.
10am-ish. Arrive at market. Catch market children with nets (kidding!) and escort them to our designated space. Open bag with books and puzzles in. Observe with consternation that the book entitled Yo Mama is a Llama is in the bag for the third week running, along with the morally suspect Barbie book and the one about the spoiled badger that won't go to bed. Decide to play football instead.
10.05am. Football has been abandoned due to boredom or one child kneeing another in the goolies and causing a scene. Back to the book mat. Fight with other volunteers for possession of Sesame Street Alphabet book from which letter H has disappeared. Attempt to do Shape puzzle. Fail to do Shape puzzle. Lose temper. Ask other adult volunteers to assist with Shape puzzle. Group effort fails after half an hour. Three year old child takes Shape puzzle while making tutting sound and effortlessly completes it in under five seconds. Look abashed and turn attention to Disney Princess puzzle. Fail to locate piece with Ariel's head on. Lose temper again. Back to the football.
10.30am singing time! Unfortunately not too clear on the words. Make loud, exaggerated fish-mouths and roughly correct noises. There is a song about a little worm, one about hungry chicks, and another which invites you to mimic kitchen utensils. The kids roar along happily. A trans-atlantic argument breaks out about whether the correct name is 'Incy-Wincy Spider´or 'Itsy-Bitsy Spider'.
11am Activity Time. This can go very well or very badly, largely depending on the number of children under the age of five. Activities have included making cards for Women's Day, learning the names of geometric shapes, drawing your family, a puppet show about strangers, cutting nails and combing. The kids are generally compliant although there is always at least one who tries to eat the crayons or stick them in their nose or ear.
12noon. Line up the kids and give them a sticker for being good. Sometimes we give them small gifts too. We sing the song about relojito, the little watch, and then we take the kids back to their parents. This can take a while as sometimes the kids don't want to leave, and sometimes they take you the scenic route home just for the fun of it.
We then have lunch. Sometimes we bring lunch from home but we usually supplement it with chips or rice. In the afternoon we run another market, usually with a mix of new kids and kids form the morning. In the afternoon we normally play running around games which are designed to wear out the kids or kill the unfit volunteers, either result will do. Games include tiburones (sharks) a variant on bulldog, duck-duck-goose and any number of throw and catch games, and generally last until a small child is knocked flying or until the volunteers give up and retreat to the shade of a tree. Then we sing some more.
4pm- 5pm. Hometime. Leaving some of the kids is quite difficult as they tend to attach themselves around the ankles or demand 'vueltas' (being swung in the air). Giving vueltas is a dangerous undertaking because before you know it there are 25 kids in a line all waiting to be swung and the small matter of your shoulder joints popping from their sockets doesn't deter them.
The evenings were previously spent watching the BBC entertainment channel and by this we mean back-to-back Top Gear. However, in a disaster of biblical proportions this channel appears to have been wiped from the house TV and replaced by yet another channel devoted to cheap Venezuelan soap operas. So Chris is currently spending his evenings howling and beating his head against the walls. I've become properly addicted to a reality TV weight loss show that the family has christened 'The Fat Beast Show'. And thus the weeks roll by...
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