My Hogar

So I haven't blogged much about what I am actually doing everyday..... mostly because it is very overwhelming and a little stressful so after a long day I don't really want to write about it, but here you go.

So I am working at Hogar San Francisco, this is a Catholic home for girls who have been sexually abused and have been removed, by the courts, from their families and their homes. Currently there are 30 girls living at the Hogar (this is the term for home or orphanage in Spanish). They range from 3 years old to 20 years old. I was working for 8 hours, 4 days a week, but it was so overwhelming with the girls and with my Spanish that I now work 8 hours on 2 days and then 4.5 hours for the remaining 3 which will help my sanity SO much.

So a typical day..... for the 8 hour shift...
I will get there around 10 and find the 3 and 4 year  old unsupervised playing in the big open patio. The whole hogar is huge, big buildings with lots of gates. You can't see the outside expect for some windows on the second floor, but in the middle there is a big patio with tables, chairs, some grass and an old slide and an old rusted seesaw. There is a swing set, but it casued too many fights so the swings have been removed.

The 3 and 4 year old are sisters... I can't use their names so we'll call them Little V and Pammy. They have underdeveloped speech so even if I could understand spanish, I couldn't really understand them. No one can... can you imagine how frustrating that must be for them? So we "play" for about 3 hours with the 2 kids until the rest of the girls get home from school. There is a "salla de juegos" which is a room of toys, but it's locked and they are only allowed to play with the toys in the room. So some days we color for a while on the patio and then ask to go play in the room. Of course, once we're in the room all they want to do is take the toys out of the room.

These 2 girls are one of the most frustrating parts of my day. They are so stinking cute, adorable little kids, but because they've lived in hogars and they can't really talk well they are really tough. They hit, spit, fight, use cuss words and will push you to the limit. But then the next morning when I get there Little V will come running up to me as fast as she can give me a HUGE hug and kisses. It's so sad because if we weren't there then no one would really be playing with them or talking to them. They shouldn't be living in this hogar it's for older girls, but for some reason they were placed here. And the older girls do help out A LOT with them, but they just don't know right from wrong, they don't really have anyone but each other or anyone to look up to.

Right now we're trying to teach them how to count.... they could care less, but sometimes, just sometimes, they listen and we count to 10 together.

The other big thing that we have been trying to do AND HAVE HAD A TINY BIT OF SUCCESS is saying please and thank you. Because they don't know! They just take things from each other or from me. Yesterday, I asked one of them if she wanted the blue pencil and she actually said " Yes, please" on her on!!!! Without me saying "say please tia". It's the smallest things that make my day a little bit better.

The little one - Pammy- also loves when I sing Twinkle, Twinkly little star and now walking around singing it and making up her own words..... it's so cute.

I will elaborate on the 2nd half of the day later.... it's spent with a lot of the older kids.

Ciao!