Time flies. A month has passed since I first arrived, eyes widened, to Vicente Guerrero - and since then, I've started to learn "Spanglish," I've made a handful of wonderful friends, and I've even begun to fall into a daily routine here (which I thought I'd share with you):
06:20 – Accompany the bus driver to pick up all the kids for the day (if it’s my turn). We have two wheelchair-accessible buses, since more than half of the kids use wheelchairs or walkers.
06:45 – Pick up breakfast from the main kitchen (usually rice porridge) and eat back home over a good book.
08:00 – Devotions with all staff & visitors (unless it’s Tuesday or Thursday when I report straight to work). Various departments of the mission take turns each day of the week to host the worship at the start of the service, followed by a speaker (usually a staff member, either a current or returning one).
09:00 – Bring the kids over to the learning centre to feed them breakfast, brush their teeth, and bathe them (not all of the kids have running water, so this may be their only opportunity to be bathed). If there’s time, we also give them puzzles for cognitive development.
10:00 – “Circle time”: we bring all 20 kids together for singing, reciting Bible verses, prayers, and a Bible story. (Aside from “circle time,” the kids are divided into three different groups, mainly according to ability, in order for us as staff to best teach them and respond to their unique needs).
11:00 – Snack time: sometimes we have oranges for the kids to snack on, fresh off the vine!
11:30 – We assist the kids in working on fine motor skills, agility, learning numbers, and sign language (some of the kids can’t verbally communicate); make crafts; go on bike rides around the mission site, etc.
12:45 – Bring the kids over to the cafeteria for lunch at 13:00. We often have corn tortillas, rice, beans, & salsa.
13:15 – Clean up the cafeteria, take the kids outdoors for sports, to play with dolls, and go biking (and get plenty of exercise chasing after the shenanigan-causers of the bunch). In Baja California, it’s about 10-20°C during the winter (we experience cooler temperatures than mainland Mexico), so outdoor play is just about always feasible.
14:00 – Free time: usually we still try to work on the kids’ coordination and fine motor skills, like playing with Lego or play-dough.
15:00 – Start cleaning up and loading the kids up on the buses … it’s a fairly long process to load and secure all the wheelchairs, so we leave ample time for this procedure!
15:30 – Accompany the bus driver to deliver all the kids home (if it’s my turn), which takes about an hour and a half. If not, we clean up the learning centre, debrief, and plan out activities for the next day.
16:45 – Time to pick up supper, which my roommates occasionally eat together back at our place. We often have soup, or beans & rice, and sometimes some other kind of pasta.
18:00-20:00 – If it’s Wednesday or Sunday, we have church. If not, it's time to chill!
Rest of the evening – Being here is wonderfully conducive to relaxing—mostly because work is exhausting!—so most of my evenings are spent vegetating with friends from the mission or catching up on non-academic reading (I’ve been swapping books with other staff members on a regular basis). Even with the good-natured teasing by my friends here, I acquire a few decades in age every Thursday when I play Scrabble and drink tea with three middle-aged/senior women. I also try to accompany the outreach team on trips to the migrant camps each week, as well as visit the kids living at the on-site nursery during my weekday evenings.
Weekends are also all about recovery. My friends and I make frequent trips into town—either for groceries, to go for ten-peso ice cream, or to take some of the kids from the orphanage to the park. To me, nothing could surpass starting off a Saturday morning with a cup of coffee and a stellar book in my sunny backyard, or an afternoon spent listening to music and journaling in the prayer garden. I’m always partial to walking or biking around the orchard on beautiful, blue-sky days, or going for coffee in the evenings to my favourite Vicente Guerrero coffee shop called Mi Kazza. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my time here, it’s that being so wrapped up in emotionally-exhausting, physically-demanding, and heart-breaking work demands self-care and relaxation. So ... carpe diem!
I loved reading about your day, Katie!! Sounds exhausting but like such an enriching experience too.
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