hogar life

I’m interrupting the account of my travels in order to tell you a bit of what’s going on at the Hogar.

The kids were on winter vacation from school for two weeks, so they were here all the time. However a lot of them were gone to visit family, or someone from the church took them along somewhere, so we didn't have so many.

We did one or two reading workshops with the smaller girls. We had discovered about 7 copies of a Clifford picture book in storage, so we started out with that. You know, the big red dog? The book was called “Clifford’s first Halloween” and it was all about him dressing up and eating candy and stuff. After they finished reading, we talked with them about Halloween to find out what they know. Linda said “Halloween is the day of the Devil!” Which was my first inkling that maybe this was not such a good idea. I said “No, no!” and started talking about trick-or-treating when I was little and the origins of Halloween. While we were talking, Tia Barbara came in to prepare for the Sala de Estudio and once she heard what we were talking about, she took me outside. She said that Halloween is considered occult and a forbidden topic and that we might get in big trouble if they start telling the other Tias about what they did today. And instead of having them draw the pumpkins, we might rather have them draw candy instead, since Jack O’ Lanterns are considered occult.

I thought it was pretty funny, but by that point it was too late. I told the other Tias about it later in the kitchen and they didn’t seem to think it was too bad either. But I think Barbara was more worried about repercussions “from above” (this is a Christian Hogar after all). She had no idea why, if the topic is forbidden, we had 7 copies of this book in our library. Later we gave them all to Tia Viviana (our boss) and I assume she got rid of them. (However, yesterday another one turned up in one of the houses!)

Another thing that we did over the holidays was make Kaesespaetzle, the German version of mac and cheese. Unfortunately, I did not think to take pictures of us, in the kitchen, with 8 children and giant pots and Spaetzle dough EVERYWHERE. They were not very authentic, because we did not have the right size holes to make the noodles….once a Tia got the idea of nailing holes in a can the dough was already too liquid and we couldn’t go back. So the spaetzle were really small, but at least they tasted good. We made a salad to go with it and also Apple Crumble.

We also went bowling with three of the girls, which was a lot of fun. None of them had ever been bowling before. Tabita was terrible, she couldn’t hit anything except the gutter and had a long row of 0’s…and then suddenly she bowled a strike!

 

Recently, two new girls arrived, I will tell you a bit about them and their reasons for being here. (Achtung, this does not make for easy reading!) One is 8 and one is 6.

The 8 year-old comes from a rural area and has not had much schooling. She has a younger sister who has some sort of brain damage as far as I understand, and is paralyzed. The mother would leave her in bed and walk the older sister to school, which apparently took a couple hours. One day, while they were on their way to school, some people came by and sexually abused the handicapped sister. I think that since then, she has not been back to school. She is behind and not up to the standard of her class. When she arrived she was incredibly filthy, the Tia had to spend half an hour scrubbing her and cutting her nails. She was also surprised when she found out that all the girls here have to shower every single day…I assume that they probably did not have running water where she lived. She also had encephalitis, but she seems to have recovered and so far it doesn’t seem as though it affected her in a major way.

Our new six-year-old was sexually abused by her father when she was 5 and put in a home. However, the home continued to allow her to see her abuser, so she was removed from that home and sent to us. She seems really bright and has a strong personality! She is even already standing up Maria, who is 9 years old and very bossy.

They arrived on the same day about 2 weeks ago and are still behaving fairly well. However, I think both of them will turn out to be real handfuls….the older one insults the other girls and lies (but then, they all do), and steals, and the younger one has already started refusing to finish her plate at dinner.