Madness... In A Good Way

Rawr.

What do you get when you mix 30 kids, 3 chaperones, a broken down car, a zoo and and one of the most dangerous cities on earth? Madness, that's what. I woke up yesterday, after sleeping 12 hours straight, feeling like I got hit by a train. It is stressful being in charge of other people's children.

A lot of cotton candy was involved in this day.

This was the second excursion that my youth group went on. I met my kids at 6am and we walked up to the entrance of the community to meet the Alex with his kids and bus we hired to take us to San Salvador to go to the Zoo. After we picked up lunch for 35 people we hit the road. It is about a two hour drive to San Salvador. As we were arriving into the city, Natalie (the third volunteer involved in this project) called and told us that she and her kids were 30 minutes outside the city but were stuck in terrible traffic AND their transport had broken down. Poor girl, she has had such terrible luck with transport during this project. On our first excursion to the beach, the transport she had arranged canceled the night before the trip. She ended up finding new transport, but now on this second trip her transport broke down. So I took 22 kids to the Zoo and Alex went with our bus driver to go find Natalie and her kids.

Tired kids after the scavenger hunt.

I set down some guidelines for the kids. Pretty straight forward stuff, do not talk to strangers, do not leave the Zoo, do not touch or feed any of the animals etc. We had created an informational scavenger hunt for the kids to complete, but I did not want to start it without Natalie's kids, so I gave the kids that were with me an hour of free time to explore the Zoo. Luckily Alex was able to find Natalie and her kids pretty quickly. When they got to the Zoo, we broke the kids up into groups of three (one from each community) sent them off to complete the scavenger hunt. We gave them two hours to find the answers to 40 questions. A lot of the answers could be found by simply reading the plaques in front of each animal. But some of the more complicated or strange questions you had to examine the animals or ask Zoo staff for the answer. Example: How many toes does an ostrich have? What kind of food does a hippo eat? When looking at birds, which gender tends to be more colorful? We also told the kids that they needed to put the scientific name of each animal with each answer, that way we could ensure that they had actually visited the animals. I think the kids really enjoyed this part of the trip.

This was also there...

Castle and slide

After the Zoo, we gathered around and ate our lunch. We then headed to a small natural history museum, where we learned all about the topographical, animal and sedimentary history of El Salvador. There were lots of stuffed animals, fossils and maps for everyone to get a good sense of what our guide was talking about. Our guide was very well informed and kept the kids engaged, which might be a miracle since it was around 2:30 at this point and everyone was starting to fade. After our museum tour we headed over to this really cool park that was on the same property. We gave the kids an hour or so to blow off any extra steam they might have had. There as a really awesome slide that was connected to a castle type house. All of the kids loved it. And of course I had to take my own turn on the slide just to see what it was all about. Pretty awesome.

Oh yeah we did matching shirts!

We headed home around 4, which was a little later than we had wanted to get on the road, but the kids were having such a good time that it was hard to pull them away. We ended up hitting some traffic and did not actually make it home until 6:30. Parents were starting to get worried at that point, but we all made it back in one piece. Oh and Natalie's transport driver was able to get the car fixed while we were at the Zoo, so she was able to make it home safely as well. When we got to our community I asked my kids if they were exhausted and they replied that they were not tired, but were still having fun from the trip. I am going to count this as a success, even with the AM craziness. Two trips down, one to go!

One last thing: RAINY SEASON HAS OFFICIALLY BEEN DECLARED OVER. Halleluiah people, halleluiah.