Work

So finally, a little bit about my work. I work in a tiny little place with an outdoor court yard in the middle and small rooms around the edges for the kitchen, dorm rooms, physio room, and office. There is a small playground set and all the wash hangs in the back. There are about 25 kids who live in this orphanage, 3 nurses, some helpers (cooks, professor), and about 3 other physios (although I have only seen one actually working). Only about 5 kids can speak to you and more often than not it is in the native language of Qechua, so this makes sommunication a bit hard, but these kids are a lot more active and like to play with me. My favorite is Jhonny who is kind of a trouble maker, but loves to play. I have a few patients that I usually work with. Rodrigo is three years old, blind, mute, and can not crawl or move much. He does roll over a lot and I am working on increasing his arm stength and practicing pushing up from him stomach. On Monday he bit me.... that was pretty fun. I now have quite the bruise on my arm.

I also work with Wara who has Cerebral Palsy. Along with the other Physio, Elva, we stretch her and get her limbs moving. My third patient, Lizeth, has hemiplesia (her left side doesn´t work) and is pretty lazy and grumpy. She will get up in the middle of working with me and just leave. So I, unfortunatly, have been avoiding her for the past couple of days since she won´t do anything for me.

I also help with feeding the kids and today I spent a bunch of time with Wilson, a little baby. I get the idea that he doesn´t get too much one-on-one attention so I held him and worked on leg strength ("standing on my knees") and stretched his arm a bit. He liked being bounced around and I finally got a smile out of him. I would love to buy some books so I could read to the kids. I don´t think any of them know their letters or numbers.

Over all, I like the work usually. You all know that I love to be busy, so sometimes I get frustrated when I feel like I have nothing to do. I am trying to get my imagination up to par with the 5 year olds and to feel "ok" to just play... I think that a lot of them just need some smiles and attention in their lives. I am also talking to the director about going to the near by pool, but it sounds like they are not heated and afterall, it is winter down here. We´ll see.

I included a picture of Albenia who is always smiling and of Jhonny and I :)

This weekend we are going South to the town of Potosí..... sounds like more climbing around, but this time in their silver mines! Should be pretty exciting.