Before, the end of the school year was celebrated as impressively as always. In the school the year was finished with the day of the bono and the guarderia celebrated the end of the year with the day of clausura. Every class had prepared a nice dance or music number with their teachers and entertained their parents and civilings in colorful costumes. It was fun watching all the kids in their traditional costumes dancing to typical bolivian music - especially the youngest group with all the babies who still have a hard time to stand up or walk.
After the end of year celebrations more than 700 children and some of their parents of the community Mineros San Juan came together in the yard of the guarderia to celebrate christmas on the 22 of december. As every year the health center of Proyecto Horizonte had organised a christmas breakfast for the children. My and my friend's job was getting some sweets for the gift bags. So we went to the "Cancha", the biggest market here, and got 700 chocolate bars and 3000 candies that we payed with money which my sister sent me from a sell of Tantakuna handikrafts in Germany. I can't remember having so many sweets in all my life - even if it was for a very short time and we didn't eat anything of it - and this will probably never happen again... The kids were excited when they got their gifts. It was great to watch all the happy faces when they were playing with their new little cars and dolls and eating their chocolates.
I'm happy that - thanks to my teacher Carla, the kids of my class, the other volunteers and workers of Proyecto Horizonte - my spanish has gotten so much better so that I can also work in other initiatives now. Though I really enjoyed working each day in the guarderia for the first few months. It helped me a lot with improving my spanish, settling in and getting to know many of the staff and functioning of Proyecto Horizonte.
After this time I feel ready to work more independently. And I'm glad that we are allowed to do so and to bring in our own ideas and own projects. Together with interns of the areas psychologie and social work the volunteers sarted homevisits in the community of Mineros San Juan with the goal of forming women groups that Proyecto Horizonte staff and other professionals will teach about different themes like diseases, the solar waterdisinfection method of SODIS, bakery and whatever the community members are interested in. This is a lot of work but we are supported by one of the psychologists and it's very satisfying to see that the initiative seems to be successful so far. Still we are at the beginning of work and I think and hope we will be working on it for a long time.In addition to the house visits I go on working with my guarderia group which is in the grade "Kinder" now. I don't think that the teacher and her assistant really depend on my help but I would miss my kids too much if I didn't go anymore. So I will just go for a few half days a week. Because of my new level of spanish most of them really follow my instructions and respect me as their "profe" although some of them still mix my name up and call me "Callie".
Also I help with offering free time in the computer room of Proyecto Horizonte. That's a nice opportunity for me to get in touch with some of the older kids of the community. It's so much fun watching them losing themselves in their computer games so that you often have to remember them where they are when they are swearing, singing or making "brrrrrrrrrbrrrrrrrr" while playing a car race game.
Exactly half of my time in Bolivia is over now. The last 5 months passed so fast. I'm really glad that I still have 5 months left because I wouldn't want to leave now!
If you have any questions just contact me! I'm happy to answer them, no matter if in German, English or Spanish.
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