I’m so glad that I’m staying in after working today. It was a full day of painting today for me. We are working on painting the outside of some of the buildings. I believe that some of them are where the kids sleep. They aren’t small buildings. I’ve been mostly using a roller on a long pole, and doing the top half of each building. Today, we nearly finished our second building, and we began painting our third and final building. The three buildings we painted were light green, a slightly darker shade of green, and blue.
A team of people went up on the roofs and swept them off and were working on painting them red. I’m not comfortable getting up there to do that. Another team continued working on replacing one of the tin roofs. They were up there all day. Measuring, cutting, and screwing in pieces. They worked very hard in the hot sun.
The kids helped out with painting all day, except when the orphans were out for recess – then, they went and played with them. It was neat to watch them play on the see-saws, play tag, play soccer. One of the girls was a “hugger” and came around and hugged all of us. Everybody was very nice to all of us.
At the orphan’s snack time, which is mid-to-late recess time, four of our girls who were playing with the kids at the time were invited to join them for snack. First, they brought out plastic sandwich bags which were filled with some kind of drink and tied off. The kids bit a hole in the bag, and then drank the liquid out. I have no idea what the drink was. I’m hoping it was some kind of juice and not made with any tap water. After the drink, they ate a slice of Domino’s Pizza.
I heard that those who went on the food run visited three locations, but only one of them had orphans there (the others were at school). The place they visited, all of the orphans were very special needs kids. I bet that was hard to visit.
I’m not sure if I took the time to share about the drives to and from My Father’s House. Tons of cars, and tons of people. Everywhere. So many shops, but it didn’t look like lots of shoppers. Nearly every store had security bars on the storefront. Some of the shops were like a little convenience store, and those had bars up the whole time. people wouldn’t go in to the shops – they would window shop, and tell the worker on the inside what they wanted. They would do the whole transaction through the bars. Nearly every store or home or anything has barbed wire surrounding it. Everything is pastel colored. There are tons of places to get your cars worked on, and they all seemed busy. Lots of the roads have speed bumps in them. And some of them are fairly close to each other. Nearly every car has tinted windows. The public transportation buses look really awesome. Bright colors and stylish metal work. So cool. Plenty of street vendors selling various things such as flowers, or electronic bug zappers, or little dogs with bobble heads on them. While the cars definitely produce plenty of pollution, there are often some very nice smells of street vendors selling food. I’m not sure if I’ll get the chance, or if it would even be smart to take the chance, to try any of it.
One thing that I’ve been thinking about is how nice the people we have run into have been to us. I’ve been wondering how that would be in the USA. I mean, were we have foreigners (Americans) going in to a foreign land, and helping people out. If we had any foreigners who didn’t speak English come in to the USA to help with orphans, I can’t imagine they would be received with such open arms. Or if a group of foreigners came to preach to the homeless and hand out food on the street. I mean, to me, it just seems like that’s just asking for trouble. Why is it okay for Americans to go to other countries and help them out, but it’s probably not as acceptable for others to come to America to help us out? Maybe it’s just ignorance on my part. Maybe it happens. I really don’t know.