Day 5

Today we worked in the orphanage all day - though starting tomorrow we will spend 1/2 of our time in the orphanage and half of our time in the school. We are each feeling more comfortable in the orphanage.  Today I brought the iPad for Paolo, who is nineteen, and wheelchair bound since always. Cognitively, she is totally together though she only attended school through third grade.  She just has a body that has her trapped.  The three of us just can't stop remarking on how different her life would be / would have been in the United States.  Medically there would be things to do, so that she would be both more comfortable and more accepted.  She has a wheelchair that is pretty modern and allows her to get between the rooms of the orphanage, but I wish she had a tray, and an iPad!! She has access to everything with the iPad and it is totally accessible.  She laughed and laughed as she interacted with the iPad. I held it for her for almost three hours.  If it could be attached to her tray, she could have access to so much.  I am having her write her story, and she can just touch the keys.  It is very very cool.  

At the end, the nuns asked us to prepare a craft for the 13 orphans who would return to the orphanage after the school day.  They gave us a box of what amounted to trash.  We found 15 soda bottles, which we rinsed out and recapped.  Then Henry cut out 13 circles for heads out of random packages that had been thrown away, and Madeleine found blue party paper that she tore into strips for hair.  I took the labels off the bottles and reversed them and cut them into sort of hula skirts. We'll see how they turned out tomorrow!  

In the afternoon we went to a musuem of artifacts.  A guide helped us to understand the art, starting at 9,000 years before Christ.  Crazy town . . . Once the Spanish came in the 1500s, everything changed.  So many problems today come from that conquest . . . At the end we got to make pottery, which gave us a true appreciation of the art.  At night we went to a very beautiful, modern mall where we had to buy Mads pants because even the long shorts are not o.k. with the nuns, and we had to buy a sweater, too! It was a good day.