A Tuesday at Pronino

April 17

Today was insane. It started out as such a great day, I got to bed early, it wasn’t steaming hot at night, I slept so well and dreamt of having a coffee with my mom.

Tomorrow is Gerardo and Margarita’s last day at Proniño (they are a couple from Holland who come every year for two months to volunteer), so I thought it would be nice to have the kids make cards for them. I thought…we can use some paint and make handprint cards and that will be nice.

One of the projects Gerardo and Margarita and I did last week was paint two of the classrooms at La Montana. It was a lot of work, and they look really nice. So the handprints seemed appropriate, yeah?

So in the morning I got everything together outside the school. The first group came up for English class and I told them we were doing the cards first. Then Osiris, one of the educators at the center (who’s first day back from vacation was today), came up to the beautiful, newly painted, cleaned, organized classrooms and starts taping and gluing all sorts of Pooh and cartoon foam things on the walls. And I tried explaining that we are going to paint pictures on the walls with the kids, like they had done at Las Flores

PICTURE OF LAS FLORES PAINTING

But she hasn’t seen that and she didn’t care. I tried telling her how much work scraping off all the old glue was, how hard we worked on the painting. But no. So I was frustrated about that, and then came out to start the cards with the kids…to find that they had knocked over both, big, half full cans of bright red and yellow paint. It’s flowing like giant lakes of ketchup and mustard, mixing together and pouring down the steps of the school. And the kids are playing in it, swirling it around, stepping in it, walking all over in it, smearing it on each other, on clothes, on the water tank…

And I’ve no idea how to clean up ½ inch deep of wet paint off cement stairs. So I start scooping it up with my hands and dumping it in a bucket. The kids who are usually such willing, tough workers are not helping and think this is the funniest thing they’ve ever seen.

Even while I was so frustrated, so fed up, while I was scraping my hands against the concrete, I was thinking… sometime soon this will be funny.

So my new Proniño strategy is: The hours and the days that I am the most frustrated, most angry, fed up and ready to quit…if it is not funny after twenty four hours, then I can cry. But everything makes me laugh the next day.