Bloggy blog

My first blog since I've got home, back to my life in the Aldea and it has definitely been harder coming back to it. The children are still not in school because of the flooding and the really high rivers which means the people who live along the river have been moved into schools until the river starts to go down and so because this is Peru nobody thought about the schooling of the children who've been displaced so all the children in the aldea are off on holiday for who knows how long! The fact that they've only just had a really long holiday makes it even harder because they were so ready to go back to school and socialise with other children and now they're stuck in the aldea for even longer.
This week we've both been finding things a bit difficult to keep ourselves motivated since we said goodbye to our parents. I always knew it would be harder saying goodbye to them a second time round even though time here is flying by and I know I'm going to be home before I know it, it's still been quite dificult.

We had Alex's birthday on Tuesday so a well needed excuse to eat lots of junk food.  After some massive palava with my cake making skills-even from a ready made packet where all I had to do was add water it's still so much harder to do it in Peru! ANYWAY it worked really well, ended up being a little personal birthday cake but everyone was singing happy birthday in the comedor and she got to blow half the candles before the kids got there first. She also loved my birthday gift of cheerios. Putting this into perspective for those of you who don't know Alex, cheerios are by far her favouritest food ever ever ever. She could quite easily talk to you for hours about them: how she eats them, how often she eats them, how much she misses them, how excited she is to eat them when she gets back, how cheerios are most probably going to be her sole source of food when she gets to uni-the list goes on. So you can imagine how excited she was when she saw them, and I swear down I thought I knew people who could eat their weight in cereal (Hannah and Ross...) but honestly!? This girl wins hands down! She's finished them by Thursday dinner time-that's got to be a record? After her birthday lunch, we went into to town for a relaxing chilling out AND my personal highlight of the day has to be the massive, massive, massive new supermarket we found. It was like a peruvian version of  Tesco Extra amazing, very exciting. It even had it's own cheese section, just like England, and a whole aisle of bread! wow who knew I could miss supermarkets so much...

Last Saturday night we had a celebratory night out with the Spanish volunteers to join Alex's and Yaiza's birthday. We took them to a really yummy barbecue kebab shop where you get to pick which ones want AND AND AND they even had mini jacket potatoes! It was awesome, not only the jacket potatoes-which were super yum and the first ones I've had in 8 months! But in general the whole night, it was lovely to relax and have some fun time fuera of the Aldea. We took them to our favourite Iquiteño bar-Musmuqui which they enjoyed. Today we've spent the day relaxing in our tree house swimming pool bar, Yaiza who'se been a bit poorly this week has had some recuperation in the hammock. I've also tried my first alligator nuggets-surprisingly yummy, once you get over the weird chewiness. But something else to tick off the list!

 This week we said bye to 3 of our kids who went back to their familes, which was really crazily hard. I think because our time to leave is creeping up on us qicker then we thought it reminded me of what it's going to feel like when we leave-which I really really don't want to think about anytime soon! It also made me think about my feelings towards the kids because in an extremely selfish way I really don't want any of my favourite babies or kids to go home before we go because I honestly don't know how I'll be able to stand it, I was a complete crying mess. But at the same time, it's really hard to keep remembering that as much as I love them this isn't their family, if they have the chance to be with their family, surely that's a better option- for the majority they are here because their parents want to give them better education or because of issues between parents. If their parents are determined enough to go through the paper work to get them back, even if it is only to one parent that's got be better in some ways. They need the social interaction and education that isn't always available in the Aldea. It just makes it harder to let them go, and this week has given me a future insight into what it's going to be like when we actually leave. Forever-fingers crossed!