9/13

So, I´ve been feeling a bit ill the past three days, so I went home early from school yesterday and took the day off today. Volunteering has gotten easier now that I´m an assistant to the 2nd grade teacher. The kids are so wild that they haven´t learned anything yet! My Spanish vocabulary is now composed of phrases like, ¨Sit down, be quiet, stop, and listen to the teacher¨. I watched a video the other day about the Remar Foundation. It´s an international Christian organization that will take in people who need shelter, education for their children, or drug or alcohol abuse related counceling. So, they will take in these people in return that they work for them. All the money that Remar makes gets distributed throughout the people in their projects on a need basis. It´s very communist. I think it´s cool that I´m an agnostic-atheist-hindu-soto zen buddhist volunteering for an evangelical Christian organization. I´m not sure they would think it funny if they found out, though. Just trying to be well-rounded here. I have a ton of fun with the kids and I´m always exhausted by the end of recess. I went to watch that video Tuesday morning, and I returned to the classroom about two hours later, and a third of the kids put down what they were doing to run up and hug me. They call me ¨tia¨which means ¨aunt¨. It´s how they refer to all of their teachers, and I think it´s really sweet. I try to hug the kids as often as I can because I know that some of them come from really difficult situations. The woman in charge told me that about 75% of Ecaudorians live below the poverty line, and sometimes the parents will make the children go out and beg all day for money. If they don´t come home with money they are sometimes beaten. The woman told me that kids will come to the organization to get away from their family situations and the organization will have to go through a ton of paperwork immediatly to get them in their care, and sometimes the children have to return to their families. Some of these kids are really shy and adorable, and I have to repeat to myself ¨do not adopt one, Krystina¨.

Tuesday was Sean´s birthday. He´s now 22. He says he´s catching up to me. Both of us were too sick to eat birthday cake though, he with a head cold and me with a stomach thing, so there´s a whole birthday cake still siting in our fridge. Hopefully tonight will be the night for that. Tomorrow we have an appointment to look at an apartment. It sounds great, but we´re not sure about where in Quito it is. Sean´s getting tired of his super long commute every morning, understandably so.