Over halfway already?

Today was the hottest day thus far. It’s 91 degrees, and that’s at 6 in the evening. With that being said, we split up the teams today, and only half the team was at the house, so we didn’t have time for breaks. The work I did was intensive, and after we cut down bamboo and finished the garden (finally), we moved to digging a trash pit in the backyard. I have a new respect for Stanley Yelnats and the rest of the crew from Holes, because that was an incredibly difficult and draining endeavor.

For lunch, we had peanut butter and jelly, with an apple, a bag of chips, and water. Which means I had two peanut butter and jellies, two apples, two bags of chips, and two waters. The lunches aren’t as filling after a long day of work as you are led to believe by the AE staff.

After lunch was naptime, where I fell asleep on a mattress nearby and woke up covered in sweat. It took me a good hour before I recovered from that nap, and by that time it was game time with the kiddies again. For the lesson that I sat through and didn’t participate we did Noah and the Ark. They were moderately involved in that. They were incredibly involved in the games though.

They didn’t start out as incredibly involved, but they got going. The first game was goats and the fence, where the entire group of 40 or so hold hands to make a circle around 5 “goats”. The goats try to get out of the circle, and the “fence” tries to keep them inside. It’s great because the goats always get out, so everyone feels like a winner!

They weren’t particularly interested in this game, but that happens. The next thing was relay races. We had 5 teams who all competed, and they weren’t too excited to start. But the leaders (Me, Logan, Paul, Matt, and Riley) and Colton, the coordinator, were able to pump them up real quickly by being excited.

The next game was duck duck goose, and they lost interest in it quickly. Their favorite was what we ended with. Red Robot Green Robot. Stoplights are called robots here, so that’s essentially Red Light Green Light. They loved it last week when we played, and PJ led it today. He was a great leader. He ran around so they were chasing him, but when he turned around they had to stop. He eventually took off down a road and they all followed him. I felt like I was watching the Pied Piper run off with all the children.

Except this Pied Piper came back with them and we hopped on a bus back to AE. Now a relaxing night before doing it all again tomorrow!