taller de arte

Well today was interesting. I want to write about a typical day at Aldea but to be honest they don't really exist. You can experience a whole range of things all in one day. One minute you can be thinking how well everything is going and then the next minute two girls are chasing each other with the cups of water you were using for the painting taller and a water fight has errupted.
Or today for example, we had a taller de arte on the negative impacts of smoking. A lot of the girls at Aldea smoke, and they are allowed to do so in the hogar and ask the Tia's (who all also smoke) for a light if they need it. I do have to say they are kind enough to offer us a politely declined cigarette on occasion. So Stephen brought in some information and statistics for the girls then they drew posters. The girls actually seemed as if they were really into it and did some great work. We finished up, and it only took a whole 5 minutes before three girls got bored and decided to use the pastels we had been using, to start drawing a certain part of the male anatomy on the windows of our Sala de Arte. Yep. One girl stole a pastel then ran outside and continued defacing the walls & windows, so every time we had scrubbed off one 'picture' there was another one waiting for us. Sometimes all you can do is laugh, and today all I could think was how absurd the whole situation was if you were looking from the outside in. Although when I was getting bark thrown at the back of my head as we left the Sala de Arte by the particular girl responsible for the 'drawings', who was now mad because she was told she couldn't play with us for the rest of the day (a whole half hour), because of her bad behaviour I'm not sure if I was laughing. But of course you can't take life too seriously, which I was reminded of again when I saw another girl who had just enthusiastically participated in our taller lighting up a cigarette outside her hogar.
And tomorrow is a new day :)