GREAT DAY AT FUNDACION KOINOMADELFIA !!

All 46 of us woke up on the morning of Wednesday, January 14th really psyched up for the day at the orphanage. It took us about an hour and a half to get there and whilst we were on the bus, our tour guide Catalina told us we will be assigned different activities to do once we arrived.

We were warmly welcomed by the director of the orphanage, Monica and Eric from Southbridge Access and they showed us the gym and told us we could keep our bags in there. After our warm welcome we were given brief information about the orphanage and what goes on there. This foundation has approximately 80 children who have had their human rights violated and at some point have had to be separated from their parents. Monica continued to say that they are very grateful that we were there to work with them and help them because they do not have the necessary resources to do everything that needs to be done to maintain a home away from home. She ended her introduction by thanking all of us once again and by telling us how grateful she and the children were to have us there that day to help them.

We were then given a short tour around the orphanage and we were told that there were 10 houses and each house had a "mother" that takes care of the children.

After the brief tour, we were taken back to the gym where we were then assigned the different activities we were supposed to do. So there were the morning activities and the afternoon activities, the morning activities consisted of weeding the soccer field, painting picnic tables and the doors of the houses, painting the bathroom walls and cleaning the bathrooms as well. My group, the rojos (which means red in Spanish) were assigned the soccer field to weed for some time then we could switch to painting with the other group. When we got to the soccer field, we were all wondering how we were going to clear it because there were so many weeds and we were not given any tools to use so we wore gloves and had to pull the weeds from the roots. TRUST ME IT WAS NO EASY JOB!!!! Especially under the HOT SUN!! Some of the children offered to help us clear the field and they were so cute and adorable we just could not say no to them. We all encouraged each other, eventually got tools and help from the other groups and we cleared the field within the twinkle of an eye ;)