Church, sickness, and Kid's Day!

This week started out with a very beautiful, contemporary, ENGLISH church service! Our host sisters are pretty active in a church here that is just a couple blocks from our house. Every first Sunday of the month, their church has a service that is entirely in English, so they invited us to join them. The service started out with almost 45 minutes of just songs. A couple a recognized from home and even more I recognized from Camp Luther! =) It was very refreshing and I am happy that they invited us. The pastor that preached is actually a missionary that has been here for 20-some years and is from Minnesota! (He definitely still had his Midwest accent and was talking about foundations and how “where he is from the need to be sturdy because of frost” .. he was a dead give-away!) Everyone there was so nice and we realized how active our host sisters are in the church. We told them we would definitely like to go again, even in Spanish! I think it would be awesome to hear some of those songs in Spanish. The had drums, guitar, and some fabulous singers.

I started to not feel so hot on Monday night and when I woke up Tuesday I ended up feeling not so great at all, so I stayed home from school. This actually made me homesick because when I’m sick, all I want is my mom… haha I basically slept all day and just sat alone for awhile. Part of me thinks I really just needed a "mental day" for myself to be alone and just sleep for awhile. Anywho, I went to school yesterday and the days are getting better every time. Granted there are some moments that the language barrier is still frustrating, but I feel very comfortable in my school, with my students, and with the other teachers. Which is kind of a bummer because I only have four weeks left at the Montessori before I move onto my next placement, crazy!

THEN today was ¡Día de los Niños! AKA “Kid’s Day”. It is apparently a National Holiday here and was a blast! All of the kids dressed up like it was Halloween and all of the teachers got their faces painted. And when I say painted, I mean intricate, beautiful works of art on our faces. A lot of the teachers got mariposas (butterflies) on their face, so I decided to go with something different.. here is the starting step.

The day started with a “fashion show” by the children all getting on stage and showing off their costumes. There was also a room for dancing, a puppet show, a piñata, and plenty of other fun activities for the students to participate in. It was a lot of fun to see a different culture’s festivities for a certain holiday, especially one totally dedicated to children.

Gaby and I with our faces painted!

Gaby, Me, Isa, Isaí, and Santi

Tomorrow is Friday and we are off to Puerto Viejo! (Well at 3 AM Saturday morning) I am very excited because it is on the Caribbean side and apparently that side is nice and warm and DRY right now! So hopefully we will get a break from the rain!

I will upload more pictures to the picasa site when my internet starts working better and goes a bit quicker =).. Love and Miss you ALL!