My Welcome Back Party

    I entered Guatemala without a hitch. With all my passport issues cleared up, I was ready to enjoy some time with the children from the United Arab Emirates that I serve. As soon as I arrived back on campus, my two kids were buzzing about the the previous week. We sat down with a basket of french fries I purchased at a nearby fast food joint and talked about the things we had missed out on in each others lives the previous week.
    Afterwards we unpacked my bags filled with my personal teaching supplies, a much needed math curriculum for home-school, and gifts for my two kids. The one thing I was really excited to give the 11 year-old-boy was a study bible I bought for him. He loved it, and he has been reading it every chance he gets during school. I struggle to tell him to stop reading the bible to learn about reading, writing, and mathematics, so I can't say the State Department of Education would deem me as being an outstanding Teacher.
    Just to remind you, I live in a house with 14 girls and typically teach home-school in this house. The house parents of the house needed to renew their passports, so they were in the states.The next day after my arrival to CB the reality of serving at an orphanage was flown in my face. One child stayed home from school, because she has been throwing-up all night.  While I was cleaning up the mess of her adventures of being sick during the night and home-schooling my two kids. Two more girls came home from school because they weren't feeling well.
    For the next four hours I juggled making sure the girls were hydrated, eating as much as possible, cleaning, and teaching.  By the afternoon, the three girls and the 11 year-old-boy I home-school had fevers. They weren't getting better, and it was impossible to keep the medicine from being rejected by their bodies. Luckily, I had another adult's help in the afternoon. It was nice to have someone else to worry with me (yup, that is what we did-worried) about the kids' steady decline and to have another opinion of what to do.
    Caring for the kids continues, but today the kids are on a steady climb to surviving a brutal sickness. I was welcomed back to CB the best way I could imagine. I was needed.