things found

Ok, so while I have been spending a lot of money on hand-made things like the shirt (and earrings from the Peruvians, and woven bracelets, and more earrings...), not everything I find to collect costs money! Walking home from volunteering at the Catholic-run all-girls orphanage tonight I found these on the street:
That's right, those are x-rays. There were actually 3 sheets in all that I rescued, and I am rather excited about it. When we walked past them on the street they just looked like shiny black pieces of something, but I felt like I should go back and take a look. So we did. And how cool is that?! I think I am going to take them and make them into book covers.

Speaking of books, we made little journals at the all-girl orphanage for the activity tonight. My roommate Chelsea and I were in charge of it and I think it went pretty well! We made sure we were really organized: we cut the paper ahead of time, separated the girls into 6 groups (which correspond to the 6 tables in the room where the activity is held), made 6 ziplock bags full of the materials we would need to make the books (2 bottles of glue, 3 colors of embroidery floss, 8 markers, enough paper to make 10 journals, hole punchers, beads, and 3 pages of stickers), and included a list of helpful phrases—glue: goma, "We are going to make journals!": ¡Vamos a fabricar diarios!). My biggest fear was not that we wouldn't be prepared (clearly if anything we were over prepared), but that the girls wouldn't be as excited about it as I was. Also, after doing prep for the activity for over 2 hours I was almost so tired of the project I wasn't even excited about it anymore.

Luckily, all my fears were for not. The girls all seemed to really like the project, and once I was there my own enthusiasm was renewed. While we got some of the run-of-the-mill kid-type creations, some of the girls were really creative with their journals, coming up with their own ways to bind the journals or drawing their own pictures for the covers. When we had to leave after our alloted 45-minute activity time the girls didn't want to stop decorating their journals to let us go. It made me happy.

PS I'm not supposed to post pictures of any of the kids on my blog unless it's private, and I don't want to do that, so instead I'm going to make a private Picassa album of the photos from the orphanages. So if you want to have access to that little gem, let me know and I'll put you on the list, or whatever I have to do to give you access to that. Pictures of some of the girls with their journals will be there.