Jamaica Day 2

Sweeties!

Studying in class

Working Hard

Rocking the tunes

Natural Photographer

What a Cutie!

Looking Groovy

Nice Shades

Happy Boy

Laughing ladies

Amanda: Leader of the trip

Boys playing soccer

Michael

Today I started off the morning at 7:00 AM with morning devotions and breakfast at 7:30 AM. After breakfast we lathered up with sunscreen and prepared ourselves for the day full of work ahead of us. Once showered and ready we met for a team bonding game where we played Super Ninja. For those of you not familiar with Super Ninja it is a game where every person has a special name and action specific to themselves and then when their name is called they call their name and do their signal and then say the name and do the symbol of somebody else. In our case we did an adjective followed by our name to help people learn names, so I was Daring Daniel. This game was a great way to wake people up and get us more familiar with the names of the people in our group.

Once we finished our morning routine and game we headed off to the Hanbury Home for Children, which is the orphanage we are working at this week. On a side note, normally I would have a better sense of time for when we were leaving for different places/activities, but in Jamaica their cultures is set up on a relaxed schedule, so clocks aren’t really used much. As soon as we arrived at the Hanbury Home we split into groups and took a tour of the area. While on our tour we were bombarded by the little kids who were not yet in school. Many of these little kids took the liberty to show us their rooms and the areas where they do their chores, like the chicken coop and the pig pen. These little children were really adorable and that is where I started taking my pictures for the day.

Throughout the day I helped clean walls for painting, by using rocks to rub off paint chips, and then we painted Babyland, which is where all the little kids live. Over the course of the week we will be painting the outside and inside of Babyland to make it more appealing to the eye and filled with educational images to help the younger students. Along with doing our painting project there were people working on carrying dirt to an area where they are planting a new garden, so there were a number of people who turned orange because of the dirt. Overall the projects were really fun because the kids were helping us throughout the whole day.

Outside of our projects we were able to spend a lot of time with the children. I was able to help out in one of the classrooms for the younger kids where I read them books, helped them with counting, and helped them with their alphabet. It was really cool to see how excited the kids were to work with us, although it did draw them away from their studies a bit. We were also able to sit in on one of the older kids’ classrooms where they were singing songs like Father Abraham. The kids also really liked to where our sunglasses, get their pictures taken, and take pictures. The thing the kids were most excited about besides us were Sweeties (candy) and the toys we brought.

Throughout the day I was able to work with many of the children and take a lots of pictures…776 to be exact. All in all today was another full of many fun and uplifting experiences!