Los Ninos!

Hey! Just an update about how our project is going.

We are still at Madre Teresa, and love it! The kids are so wonderful and we have been doing all we can to help the kids with their needs and improve the facility. Recently, we cleaned out the entire physical therapy room. It was needing a good scrub, and there were a lot of broken toys and blankets that hadn't been washed in lord knows how long. We removed everything from the room and washed all the toys...down to the legos! It looks wonderful now, and there is a lot more room for exercises and playing! The nuns really appreciated our hard work!



One of the boys, Luis, bangs his head on everything... even cement walls and has a mark on his forehead from it and probably some other complications. Obviously, this is not good.. so we came up with the idea to get him a helmet! Nick and our housemate Tyler went to El Molino to try to find one and came back with a boxing helmet! With a little cutting, sewing and adjusting Tyler was able to make it the right size for Luis's cute little head! We were all so excited to see it work the first time.. and he seems to like it! :)

One of the girls puts her hands in her mouth a lot and the doctor is getting really upset because it's hurting her skin. The doctor apparently asked the nuns to do something about it, but without much knowledge on this type of thing the nuns did what they thought was right and just tied her arms down/back in her wheel chair. Well, one evening we noticed that the tie job had cut off the circulation to her hands and they were losing color and she was clearly upset. We decided that we needed to do something! The nuns agreed to let us try out some different ideas. Nick and Tyler again went to El Molino in search for some gloves! They returned with children's boxing gloves! They are perfect... and again our efforts were really appreciated.

Today was Laura and Tyler's (two our of housemates)last day in Peru! They have been in Cusco for 8 weeks and worked mainly at Madre Teresa! We wanted to do something special for their last day with the kids! So... we went to the Zoo!!!! This was so much fun! It was so great for the kids to get out of the house for a while and walk around see the animals! We had 10 volunteers and 11 kids on our little field trip! The zoo had lots of different birds... including Condors, a few bears, lots of monkeys, and a puma! Nick was watching Martin, who has down syndrome and is totally awesome. He loves to make growling bear (we call him "the bear") noises and was really digging the monkeys! I was with Judith and my little buddy Carlos who helped push Judith's wheel chair... even though Judith is blind, she enjoyed the noises at the zoo and was laughing the whole time (we got a good video of her laugh in our Picasa Album)! When we got back to the orphanage we enjoyed some cake that Tyler had brought! The kids thought this was awesome, we are not sure how often they get to have something sweet! We took lots of pictures so hopefully you can get an idea of where we are working and how special all of the kids are to us! :)

Here is the website for the Picasa page with more pictures from our project!: http://picasaweb.google.com/thom1571/MadreTeresa?authkey=Gv1sRgCLaH7ImPyafqFg&feat=directlink