Nuevos Caminos

Well after sort of a lonely day yesterday by myself all night I had a fairly busy day today. This morning I started work at my placement. At the moment we (the teacher Jenny and I) only have two kids, though I guess on Monday we will have 13 more. I spent the morning working with a girl Karla helping her with some math equations. Then we did a¨dictation¨ together...where a read a small passage in Spanish and she wrote it out. The other boy in the class Juan Jose likes to think that the entire world is his girlfriend. I think that he has down syndrom but it´s difficult to tell what each of the kids dissabilities are. Some seem just to have some learning difficulties and others are severely disabled to the point where even speaking is difficult. At the end of the day today Juan Jose told me and Serena (the english girl who as there to observe the project today) that he was going to start a restaurant and we could be the waitresses. He shook both of our hands as we left and told us to remember our business agreement. I guess I only work Monday through Thursday so tomorrow will be my last day of work this week. Some of the volunteers want to go to the beach this weekend or possibly Cuenca. Camilo the country co-ordinator is going to the beach on Saturday so it sounds like I will end up going somewhere. The adjustment to life here is not quite so smooth as I had hoped. In our house there are two floors. I basically have the entire first floor to myself...since I am the only volunteer at the moment. It´s nice but at the same time, after work it gets pretty lonely downstairs all by yourself for hours and hours. Last night I ventured upstairs for a bit and talked to my host sister Viviane...she is a teaches english to kindergardeners. I listened to Dora the explorer and sesamee street songs with her as she planned her lesson for today. I think that things will be easier once I start going out with the other volunteers. For some reason they all live with the same host family and I am the only one who lives by myself. But Serena assured me that once they know where I live and I know where they live we can visit eachother often. In any case now I am off to the mall to hopefully find a watch and a spanish-english dictionary. Hasta Luego!

Rosie