Hello All,
I am going to write the first part of this update about the toys the children use and what they do for fun. The second half will be about what is going on at the foundation. You can also see a short video(less than 1 minute) of kids playing with a tire and their homemade kite at here
Currently it is the windiest time of the year in the Dominican Republic, so for the children this is “kite season”. None of them can afford to buy a kite, so instead they make them with what they can find in the street. They generally use a few sticks, string, a plastic bag and something round that they can wrap the string around. I have attached a picture and in the video link below you can also see one of younger kids flying a kite. The kid flying the kite is young and doesn’t have too much skill. The kids who are a bit older can really get the things up high, it’s pretty amazing.
They also all love cars but cannot afford toy cars. The standard practice to “make” your own toy car is to find an old plastic oil bottle and cut a chunk off the top, because who doesn’t want a convertible? Then they find two pieces of iron or sharpened wood and 4 plastic tops of water jugs. They stick the two sharp pieces through the oil can and use the plastic tops as wheels. Lastly, there is the option to tie a string to the front so that the car will follow while you run.
The kids also make great use of old tires. They found one giant one that they brought to the foundation. I have attached a video of how they play with it. They also get smaller tires and push them with a stick. They usually attach some type of plastic to the stick so that they can better control where the tires goes. This is a game that you see in movies about America in the early 1900’s but rarely see these days(it is also way harder to do than it looks).
Another way in which some of our more mischievous children entertain themselves is fruit theft. They walk around the street all day looking for various types of fruit trees (the type of tree they look for changes based on what’s in season). If they find a tree and the owner isn’t around, they climb up, take as much fruit as they can hold and run off. We discourage this behavior and punish the kids if we find them with stolen fruit or see them in the act but both of these occasions are rare. To be completely honest I have never been able to get that angry at a young hungry kid who saw some fruit hanging and decided to get himself a snack. I also secretly admire the 8 year olds whose main activity is walking around the streets all day, climbing trees, avoiding angry owners and generally just being free.
I am thrilled to announce that today we finished our last major construction improvement for the foreseeable future. I do not think we have gone 2 weeks without some major undertaking since November. As Catherine wrote in the last update, the construction since January has been about improving our structures and making the foundation a safer place. We have completely knocked down and rebuilt two buildings. Neither was going to fall on its own, but any type of earthquake would have brought them down. If this had happened during the day lives could have been lost, so in the end knocking them down and rebuilding them, despite the expense and disruption, was a no-brainer.
We also now have an official math curriculum. I have contributed very little to this accomplishment. Catherine researched and made the curriculum and then made each child a packet that follows said curriculum. In the past we had taught the big lessons- counting, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, etc. However, we had missed many little skills that kids really need in order to really comprehend numbers and math. Things like skip counting (counting by various numbers), counting backwards, pattern recognition, even and odd numbers and a multitude of other seemingly “minor” lessons are actually quite important. We had already made our children the best math students in their public school classes, and with the new skill sets they are learning it won’t be long before they are considerably more advanced than their teachers.
As Always thank you all for your generosity and support. None of this would be possible without you.
