In addition to
providing health treatment to hundreds of local San Eduardoans during this
trip, the St A’s team also keeps the kids entertained while they’re waiting to
see the doctors by providing arts and crafts. And the arts and crafts
room is where you would obviously find me. I mean....obviously.
On the first
day, the team organized a craft that included a photo of each child that then
went into a photo frame they had decorated themselves. So I would first off
like to point out that the St A’s team in Ecuador is not fucking around with
their arts and crafts. I mean....we can’t figure out how to eat vegetables, but
here we are in the middle of a jungle taking and printing color photos
of kids in the equivalent of a M*A*S*H-like Glamour Shots studio. Judging
by the expression on the kids’ faces in their pictures, they also thought “what
the fuck?”
The first part
of this activity is taking the child’s picture. I don’t know who decided Tara
would be our team photographer, but I feel your qualifications should include
more than having seen pictures before. It turns out Tara had a seemingly
compulsive need to cut off the top of each child’s head in their photo. Like….is
she trying to avenge a bad part in her hair from her kindergarten picture or
something? I could understand if she were trying to photograph....say...my
5’12” frame and therefore ended up with the pate shaved off. But shit,
these little munchkins barely took up the frame as it was. One kid’s shoes are
squarely in the photo but not his eyebrows. You would think she would have
gotten the hang of it after a few dozen photos, but nooo. What she
did decide to do about thirty kids in was to start posing the children
in the photos, which I’m pretty sure is not what their parents were expecting
when they sent them in for church camp.
First, the
boys started showing up with fonzi-like thumbs-up signs. Then another boy was
smiling handsomely while holding a soccer ball that came from who knows where.
Then the girls started showing up with a side ponytail here, an
over-the-shoulder-smile there. It was when one girl took her hair bun down to
reveal about 4 feet of hair that I was sure we were going to end up on the
wrong side of someone’s abuela. Tara claimed the new poses were to make the
photos look less like a mug shot. Which I have to tell you, when a gaggle of
slightly older ladies grab you, nudge you against a wall and start giving you
indecipherable directions, your expression does tend to go full mugshot.
But the real
fun was in decorating the picture frames, which included various little
stickers or sequins of whatnot that were either stickers or could be glued to
the frame. Maybe we didn’t explain the objective very well, but for the most
part, it seemed like the kids’ strategy was to stick as much shit as possible
on your mini picture frame. Death by bedazzling. Also, it might have been the
fact that a meeting with el doctoro was on the other side of that arts and
crafts visit, but some kids aged out of arts and crafts eligibility before they
finished their frames. Como se dice “don’t make a career out of it, kid, let’s
keep it moving”. In my continued (much appreciated, I’m sure) efforts to be
helpful, I just walked around a lot saying “andale, andale”. You are
welcome, Ecuador, you are welcome.
Bringing glue
guns to Ecuador continues to be a marvel to me. Like it’s 1000 degrees in this
country. Do we think we need to bring artificial means of melting
glue? Half my makeup bag is now a gluelike substance, can’t we just use
that? But after spending an hour dabbing glue on the backs of an endless
stream of googly eyes, I must confess - your visiting missionaries started
getting a little bored. We finally decided the kids were better at that glue
gun business than we were and turned them loose on the glue guns. I second
guessed our decision when I looked up to see a five year old gluing a gum
wrapper to her frame, but....art, right? I did have to intervene, however, when
one little boy at the end of the table was reaching over his little four-year-old
sister to grab the gun, dab the glue on his sequin and pull it back to where he
was sitting. After watching this for a few minutes, I realized that glue gun
was leaving a trail of thin little “glue strings” when he pulled those beads
back to his work station. And as a consequence, when I finally checked on
his sister for the first time in ten minutes, the top of her head was
practically encased in a cocoon of these trailing glue strings. I don’t
want to lay claim to being missionary of the year or anything, but I challenge
any of you to pull a head full of strings out of a four-year-old’s hair without
her noticing.
So that was
the first morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment