First Week of Work... Plus some

Our first week at La Granja has come and gone. The children have started school and I learned that the kids used to be in the lowest percentile in academic achievement according to government testing and they are in the average range now. This coincides with the overall rejuvenation that La Granja is undergoing. As Janiene mentioned earlier the sisters here are uber organized and are slowly but surely making this place a top notch facility for the kids. This includes new dormitories, a new infirmary, and whole bunch of other smaller stuff. We are mostly with the children in the afternoon, after school lets out. There isn’t a common living area here so the kids go from their classroom in the morning to a shared study room after lunch. There are three different study rooms with their age group and each room has a ‘titulado’ that is in charge of that room. I help Pakko who is in charge of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders. During this time the children do different activities according the day and time; there is painting, puzzles, writing, and we also help the kids with their homework. We also spend a lot of time outside either playing games that we organize or giving the kids some free time to run around. The kids are in these rooms from 2pm until dinner time, which is normally around 7-8pm, after this they are in their dormitories for the rest of the night, and me and Janiene are off for the rest of the night.

In the morning we help out to get the kids ready for school. In the later morning I spend my time at the farm. We have some rabbits and chickens and Cornish hens and sprinkling of ducks. It’s amazing how relaxing it is to feed the animals and clean their poop. We are also trying to grow some tomatoes and other crops. The person in charge of the farm, Raul, just went to Mexico to attend a conference on organic farming. We also have a nice sized compost area where we recycle the animal poop and some of the organic waste from the kitchen. Our hope is to become a lot more self sustained as most of the food and animal feed comes from donations. It’s awesome because Raul asks me for my input in what and how we do things at the farm. It’s also awesome to use my biology degree outside of academics. Well, that’s all from me now, we’ll try to keep up with this blogging thing. Thank you all for your prayers and well wishes.

Luis


Last Tuesday was our first day of work. On the weekdays, I help the 6-10 year old girls get ready for school. I help the other staff member to keep them moving and to help them get their hair combed or braided. At noon I go with another staff member to help her with the youngest children here and we help them quiet down (quite challenging) and then take a little siesta. They have an hour to sleep, and typically everyone has been asleep by 12:30, which is not too bad in my opinion. Soon I am going to do this on my own with about eight 3 & 4 year olds. Wish me luck!

Luis and I both help out with the lunch fiascos, but we are still trying to learn how to help control such a large rowdy group of kids. It´s an interesting event, that´s for sure. We try to help them line up with the others who sit at their table (outside before entering the cafeteria) but we mostly are just guards to try to catch fights before they break out. I´m sure we will become more involved after we get into the swing of things. Different groups of kids are responsible for the sweeping, mopping, and cleaning dishes after each meal, so we stick around after meals to try to help them stay focused on the tasks. Again, I say ¨try.¨ We are still really so new that we are in the process of figuring out what we can do in our jobs. We are watching the staff a lot and trying to learn how they handle everything first before we come at it from our own perspectives.

In the afternoon I work with the first and second graders. We have our own room with an area for homework to be completed first, and then with three other sections of the room where arts and crafts, books, and games & puzzles can be pulled out later. Usually we play outside for about an hour and a half afterwards before dinner. Dinner is similar to lunch as far as our responsibilities go, and we usually get home between 8-8:30 each night. Sundays are different because my job then is to check in all the kids who are returning from home. Many of the children get picked up on Fridays or Saturdays by a family member or friend and then return on Sunday afternoons. This job is quite a challenge for me because I am really struggling to understand when the kids tell me their last name. I´m looking for the father´s last name because that´s how the cards are organized for check-in, but most of the kids have two last names: their father´s first and their mother´s second. It´s a lot to sort out when I have a difficult time hearing the kids and they don´t always know what letter starts their last name. Hopefully, though, it will help me to get to match faces with names more quickly! I also check their bags if they have them to make sure that they´re not bringing in candy or anything dangerous, and then I check their hair for lice (although we are currently out of the shampoo for it) and ask them to show me their hands so I can see if they have clean fingernails.

[Our director, Rick, asked us what are our current successes and challenges, as well as where we see God in our experiences here, so I´ll include what I wrote to him as well.] Overall, working with the sisters here is going really well. They are extremely organized and seem to bend over backwards for anything that we need. What´s going well for me personally is the fact that everyone is being incredibly patient with my Spanish skills. Speaking Spanish here is definitely also my current biggest obstacle, but I am finding that no matter whom I´m talking with, I experience patience from them. If I´m talking with a child and just can´t seem to understand what they´re wanting, I send them to the classroom teacher or another staff member. Hopefully, that will start to happen less and less. I still have a long way to go, though. Another challenge is trying to work with a large group of children when I do not know the consequences for misbehavior. This is a tricky idea anyway—consequences--because it´s difficult to enforce almost anything with such a low ratio of adults to children for a group of children with such an aggressive and unstable history. At night, somewhere around forty or so girls sleep in the same room without an adult. It´s the same for the other groups. That would just never fly in the States, so that´s why I´m just trying to learn how they manage here.

Right now I´m looking for and seing God in the small things. Last week there was a young girl dancing up right in front of the altar during one of the songs at mass, and the priest just watched her and smiled. I saw God in her spirit and in the contented heart of the priest as well. Here at La Granja, I see God in older siblings who leave their group of friends to hug and comfort a younger sibling who is new here and crying often during these first days and weeks. Every morning I see the sunrise, and God´s beauty in the mountains surrounding us is breathtaking. I find myself in awe. I also see God´s love clearly in the eyes of Karen, the after-school teacher that I work with. She has been here two years already, and yet she draws patience up from somewhere-I-don´t-know just when I think she should be past exhausted, and she smiles warmly at a child so quickly after she´s had to chase him around the room to make him sit down or after he´s just punched a classmate. She knows where they come from and understands why they are the way they are. She shows them love every day and her eyes clearly show it. I also see God in my husband when he sits and listens to me and offers encouragement and wisdom that I truly need as we try to find our places here. It has been a bit difficult for us (I´ll admit, maybe more difficult for me) to figure out exactly what we can offer here and how we can make a difference with only one year. The other volunteers that we met who were here and in Querétero last year said that they were frustrated as well by their limitations and lack of time, but that they were able to see the impact they made more clearly when they were looking back in retrospective. I guess we´ll see. Right now we´re just trying to do what we can and figure out the rest later.

Fridays and Saturdays are our days off, so I´m not sure what we´re going to be doing today. Something relaxing. Last week I joined a choir at our church down the road from La Granja, and so far it has been challenging and fun to learn all the music in Spanish, and the others in the choir are very welcoming and helpful. Today is our eight month anniversary, which makes me think about how when we got married not to long ago, I couldn´t have imagined where we´d be today, just a few months later. Quite a different place! Who knows what will come out of a year here?

-Janiene

Getting started

We arrived in Chihuahua this past Friday around dinner-time after heading out from San Antonio, TX around 6:00am. We'd spent the week before in San Antonio at an orientation for new volunteers, provided to us by the Mi Casa Foundation. Volunteers from this past year came for a few days while we were there so that we could chat with them about their experiences and bombard them with questions. They were there for the week for Mi Casa's re-entry (into the States) retreat, which they attended in a separate area for the weekend. In our orientation we had workshops about experiencing culture shock, working with children of abuse, taking care of our own mental health, traveling safely, journaling & prayer & reflection, and advice and support filling every spare moment. I felt as prepared as possible by the time we packed up the van to head out of town.

Chihuahua is beautiful. The city is completely surrounded by breathtaking mountains and is currently full of lush green trees and plants. La Granja Hogar ("The Farm Home") is located at the northern part of the city, tucked away in a quiet neighborhood. Chihuahua actually has quite a bit of money coming from oil and other resources and therefore, has a section of town that with its Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Dairy Queen, Sirloin Stockade, Sonic, and other chains could fool you into thinking you'd crossed the border back up north. So where do these 150-some children come from? Well, not from that side of town, that's for sure. The children who will be arriving on Sunday are from the Tarahumara region (indigenous of this area of Mexico) and rural areas outside of the city. The reasons they are here are because they've been orphaned, abandoned, malnurished, removed from their parents due to alcohol abuse or other abuse, and/or because their parents can not provide for them due to extreme poverty. There are ten children here who had absolutely no where to go this summer, despite the best attempts of the sisters here to find a relative or family friend to care for them. So like I said, Chihuahua is beautiful, but it has its share of bruises as well. We are going to meet the sister who is in charge of helping us determine what our jobs will be for the year when she returns from vacation on Saturday. School starts on Monday, and all we really know so far is that we will be working directly with kids. Many people (both from the Foundation and from here at La Granja) have told us that one of the main gifts we can give to these children is our example of a loving marriage. We've been told that our faithfulness, respect, and love for each other will speak loudly to children who have witnessed great violence between their parents. For some of the children here, the violence they have witnessed was fatal for someone they loved. We have been encouraged to hold hands and show affection in front of the kids here so they can see what a different kind of relationship they, too, could have someday. This example of a loving marriage is one of the gifts we hope to leave with these children, and will hopefully make a lasting impression as they grow into adulthood.

On a lighter note, Luis and I are finally getting settled into our new home for the year. The director of the Mi Casa Foundation drove all six of us volunteers down to Chihuahua on Friday and was planning to drive the other volunteers to their sites in Saltillo (in the next state over east), but they ran into a bit of an obstacle. Rick took us shopping to get a few things for our new "house" and while we were in the store, someone tried to steal our 15-passenger van. They broke something in the steering wheel column and completely removed the lock on the door. Despite sitting in the parking lot for about 3-1/2 hours while we waited for police and an insurance representative (which we didn't need, turns out, in Mexico), I was a bit thankful for the incident because the other volunteers then stayed with us until the van was fixed on Monday evening. It was nice to have them here with us, but I know that they were anxious to get to their own volunteer sites and to get started themselves.

Today was our first day of an orientation for new staff members. We discussed for a long time what it takes to work here at La Granja and what type of character we need to have. The list was long. I am so thankful that we have an orientation tomorrow again because I really feel like I am starting to understand the philosophy here of how to work with these children, why we are here and what we can do. The sisters who run La Granja are incredible--supportive, energetic, organized, throrough, helpful, friendly, and very welcoming. If I were intereviewing at home to work somewhere with an administration like this, I would definitely be impressed. I know that over the course of the year I will find myself frustrated with different ways that situations are handled here due to cultural differences, but I think that we are off to a really positive start and that we are in agreement when it comes to the core of the matter. We'll see!

-Janiene