Feliz Dia de Amor y Amistad

Happy day of love and friendship, or as we say in the States, 

Happy Valentine's Day!

I appreciate the Honduran's take on the holiday, and the focus on friendship. I appreciated receiving text messages throughout the day from friends here.

I made cookies for all the girls to celebrate the day. :-)

Friday Night

This evening we celebrated three birthdays. This was the first time to celebrate so many in the same night, and since two of them were new -18 year olds- I decided to make three mini-cakes.

Tonight was also a special night because it marks a change in what has become such a tradition since I've lived here at the Finca. My Friday Night Group has changed alot over the past two years. Only 2 young adults from the original group are still here at the Finca, so the group has changed and in essence is a new group, especially with five leaving and three joining the group in the past month or so. Now we are faced with another change. School starts next week and most of the kids in the group will be going to school in the evenings, and will no longer be able to come to my house Friday nights. So I must decide what I want to do and how I might make some changes. :-)

RANDOM ALERT>>A strange enough site to make me go get my camera....

The other night I found this strange site---a group of tiny ants carry part of a dead cockroach across my floor. Large cockroaches (preferably already dead ones) and tiny ants are not an uncommon site in my house...but in this combination it was uncommon. The funny part about it is that over time I would look over at it and it appeared to be that the ants seemed to go in a big circle over and over again. I don't know much about ants and how they communicate but it looked like they couldn't agree which direction to head, or didn't know where they were going.

English Class

Today we started learning about clothing, and played a game to practice our new vocab. :-)

 

Today most of the students from one of my classes won a prize for good class attendance. :-)

What's Normal?!?!?

So, I was going to post a blog about the sleepover I had with one of the groups of girls last night. Then I thought, 'I always do posts on the "special" activities that I do with the kids, and hardly ever write about the "normal" things I do'. As I was thinking about this I thought about how my "new normal" IS doing all those "special" things. Yes, I continue to have two English classes a day four days a week, open up the library, have nightly devotions with the younger girls, Friday night game night, and two weekly Bible studies. But even these normal weekly activities are sometimes put aside in order to do something different with a certain group of kids. It keeps life interesting.

Enjoying baleadas at 10:30 at night.

Picnic Time!

Today I took "my girls" over to the other Finca property for a picnic and to play. Some of the girls were especially excited to know that they were going to eat sandwiches (a special treat) instead of the soup that the rest of the kids were going to eat for lunch. 

We also had fun playing soccer. We started out pretty energetically...

...and quickly got tired...or started trying to use the goal posts as a jungle gym.

One of the girls, Andreita (Andrea +ita --ita means little) had my camera for awhile and took alot of pictures. I thought I'd share some of the things she found and chose to take pictures of...

 (Andreita)

 One of the things that the kids like about going to the other Finca is getting huge lemons...and eating them plain, or perhaps with some salt. (You can see the size on the photo below and also on one up further.)

Happy New Year

Happy New Year! With the start of a new year life is a little more calm here at the Finca. A bunch of the kids went to be with their families for the month of January, and there are not as many activities going on; but its still pretty easy to keep busy finding things to do with the kids. :-)

This past Thursday I took a few girls with me to visit Ceder, and elderly home in Teguc. I believe that its a great oppurtunity for these youth to get out of their comfort zone and reach out to these elderly people. I wanted to combine the time of reaching out with fun too--so after spending time at Ceder we ate lunch at a restaurant and walked around centro.

 This past Friday we celebrated another birthday..and a "new member" of the Friday night group.