Back to the 90's (Lord help us all)! (2/10)

Thursday was nice because I had both of my normal descansos to look forward to that day, so, as evidenced by my blog entries, I was finally able to do a little more than sleep during my time off.  We also had some German visitors walking around the place who were volunteers from several of the other houses.  It really pays to be German with NPH because not only do you get a two week seminar prior to your time here, but midway through your stay they provide an all expense paid trip for one week to another country for all the German volunteers and it doesn't count against your vacation time.  Monika gets to go to Costa Rica in July.  We're all super jealous.  It was also interesting to hear about how the other houses compare.  Mexico is about twice as large as any of the other houses but has only about a third of the volunteers.  Volunteers in the other houses, therefore are much more central the general functioning of things.

What else happened Thursday?  I somehow became the resident artist of Grandes A during homework time.  I'm not sure exactly how it started, but pretty quickly I was getting requests to draw all kinds of things, a legacy which has stayed with me into today.  I didn't have to teach English due to a mix up in the schedule (thank you!).  After dinner, a bunch of donated clothes were found by the girls and they had fun putting on a fashion show of ridiculous and outdated styles.  Below are a few of the photos I took to document the hilarity.  Look at them hamming it up for the camera!  The clothes were pretty bad.  I think most of them were from the early 90's.  It will be interesting to see if any become absorbed into the wardrobe.

After our fashion show, Blanche, one of the top guns here, came in to do some activities with the girls.  I think this was probably as a result of Tuesday's fight and other negative behavior reports we've been receiving.  Activities centered on self and group love.  I was especially touched when one of the girls shared her marshmallow with me which had signified some kind of personal love cache during the talk.  Blanche is a really neat person too and I've really enjoyed getting to know her better.  She's the one standing in the background in the purple shirt.  Eventually the girls calmed down and made it to bed.  None of these photos have all of the girls in them.  We have thirty in our section in all, not including the girls from Milpillas who only come for school.  But that's a story for another day.