Abram's List

When people here ask me what my job was back home, I have a pretty standard answer; it goes a little like this:

“Era la niñera por el chico más precioso del mundo.”

(I was a nanny for the most precious child in the world).

It’s a pretty strong statement, and it’s also kind of a lie.  In reality, I was a nanny for several equally wonderful children; and furthermore, I don’t know every child in the world, so I don’t have the credentials to make this claim.

However, when I do make this statement, I’m usually referring to one little boy in particular- Abram.

Abram!

Hmm yes, that’s not exactly fair, but let me try to explain it.  I’m not playing favorites; he’s just very, very special.  For one, he’s two and a half, which is a great age for so many reasons.  And for another, he has a “list”.

The first couple of days I was watching Abram, I was a little confused about this “list”.  You see, he would just stop in the middle of what he was doing and start naming people.

“Mama, Daddy, Eden, Kodi, Donna…”  and the list goes on.

It took me awhile to realize it, but I finally understood that he was just stopping, and naming the people he loves.

You have to agree with me- that has to be one of the most precious things you’ve ever heard of, right?

While I’ve been here, and while I was preparing to leave, I’ve been surrounded by a tremendous amount of support and love and generosity.  I felt it before I left, and I feel it all the time now- whether it’s through messages I get from home or from fellow Yagms around the globe, through prayers, or through the new people who have become my community here.  Being away from the familiarity of this season is hard, but it is made easier by this web that has been spun around me by all the people I am blessed to know.  This Christmas season, I wanted to come up with a way to show my gratitude to all of you, and the most sincere thing I can come up with is this:

I feel like Abram.  At any given point of any given day, I just want to stop and name you all, and name out loud how grateful I am that this list continues to grow.

You are all on my “Abram’s List”.  Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

Abrazos,

Kari

Something Awesome.

Something awesome happened Monday, and I really want to tell you about it.

But I have to tell you a few other things, first, so you can fully appreciate the awesomeness.

At the Obra (my placement site), there are various workshops for the kids.  One of these workshops is health, and it takes place on Mondays. Recently they’ve been learning about the environment, and as a part of this, they decided as a class to clean up the public plaza that’s across the street from the Obra. 

So, they went over with sticks and garbage bags and picked up the trash, but then they decided they could go even further.  One kid had the idea to collect old plastic soda bottles from the neighborhood around the Obra, fill them with colored water, and then plant them around the lamp posts.  It actually looked quite nice.

See? It's pretty.

Since this plaza is a public plaza, the rest of the neighborhood was free to benefit from this beautifying project.  Unfortunately, this also means that a few of the kids in the neighborhood were able to dig up and break these plastic bottles.  Some of the kids from the Obra found the broken bottles the next day, and with much urgency, marched them back the Obra and asked a teacher what they could do about it.  Well, the culprits were tracked down, and you know what the teachers did?

(This is where the real awesomeness starts.)

They went up to those kids and said, “Listen!  This is your plaza, too.  You’re going to join us next Monday, and we’re all going to paint that old bus stop together!”

So, on Monday, those of us from the Obra walked over to the plaza, paintbrushes and paints in hand, and met the kids who had previously uprooted the beautifying project.  Then, both groups of kids worked side by side, asked for each other’s opinions, and created this fantastic mural together.

Check out that team work!

…I guess that’s it.  It was just really, really cool- that idea of reacting to destruction with collaboration and creation.

 And I just thought you all might like to know about that.

I, for one, got really into it.