Madre Mia

So Spain hates Gmail, and the internet connection I´m using blocks it.  Yeah, I have no idea why, but it´s making me angry.  So instead of writing an e-mail to everyboy, I can only post on this blog which I doubt anybody is going to check without an e-mail blog.  Oh, and this is a Spanish keyboard, so this should be a little interesting, but not too bad.  A quick review:

I´m in Toral de los Guzmanes, a dusty pueblo in northern-central Spain, about 4 hours by bus from Madrid.  I´m here working in a Christian summer camp that draws from all over Spain.  The first week was 6-11 years old, this week is 9-12 years old, next week is 13-15, after that it´s 16-18, and then it changes to music camps.  I don´t have a lot of time to write right now (maybe more later this week) so I´ll make this quick.

Help!

The first camp was fun, but really hard.  I had the worst behaved cabin in the camp, 11 year old boys, and they would not listen to me to save their lives.  Well, that is until I cracked down and made them sweep the street one by one.  That leads me to my first point: punish campers early.  The Spanish boys are a lot different than the American ones--there´s a significant cultural difference in that the Spanish don´t engage in formalities as much as Americans (think of a 10 year old saying "hey you, get me some water" and that being normal).  But on top of that, it seems like the parents don´t punish them for anything.  Needless to say, I was pretty tired after the first camp.  I learned a bunch of Spanish though, and I´m communicating much better now, though there´s still a really long way to go.  The accent will be the hardest.  I really like the other camp counselors, and the camp itself is pretty fun.

Unfortunately, there´s been no break--students left Saturday morning (or at least half of them did.  A lot are sticking around for this camp) and more came the same day later on.  It shows on all the people working her4e--we really need to sleep more.  I think I might pull a disapeering act and go to sleep when everyone goes to the pool tomorrow or something.  It´s especially hard because I´m always thinking and speaking in Spanish, and that takes a physical toll on you.  Pluss I´m the biggest guy at camp, and there´s some kids that love to wrestle.  It´s tiring, but fun and rewarding.  I really do need to sleep more.

This camp is a musical camp, and we spend about 4 hours a day practicing for a performance on Saturday.  It´s not exactly my cup of tea, and again difficult because the songs are in Spanish, and again my room this week isn´t really interested.  They´re way better than the other group of guys though, even if they bring different problems.  It´s only a year difference, but the camp feels a lot older.  The kids are a lot meaner to each other, less cute, and interested in relationships.  The jokes are dirtier, and they hit each other harder and more often than normal.

I´m in Toral´s library, and it´s only open 1.5 hours a day, 3 days a week.  A problem?  yeah.  It´s all I got.  I´ll write more later though.  I really gotta go.  Love you all.