Opa!!

Well our time at the orphanage is now finished. Things went really well overall, and now that it is over, we realize that we will most definitely miss the kids and youth there. For those of you who have ever worked at camp and been in cabin for a week, you will be able to relate to our feelings of leaving the orphanage. It is kind of like the last day of a week at camp and you are excited for some real peace and quiet but then when they actually go, you do have some mixed feelings.

On Thursday night at the orphanage, we were invited by one of the older guys to his school about 15 minutes down the road. He was involved in a night that included all forms of dancing. Some of these were traditional Paraguayan dances and some were hip-hop. But nothing beat out the rendition of "Grease" where there were the boys and the girls dancing to "Greece Lightning" and "Summer Lovin." Us Canadian boys were bellowing out the lyrics that we recalled from when our parents played the movie for us when we were knee-high to a grasshopper. And then at some other point in the night, some Paraguayan girls from the orphanage grabbed each one of us boys and started dancing with us before we had any chance to be embarrassed that the attention of the people had turned to us and away from the stage.

We did not have a subtle good-bye on our Friday evening at the orphanage either. There was a skit that they had prepared for us which was in Spanish and no we did not understand everything but we were still almost on the ground laughing. It included a few of the women that were over 20 from the orphanage (a couple nearing 40 years old) who were all over these guys in the skit who were supposed to be the "Canadian boys." You can imagine how amusing this was to us.

Then after the skit, they turned on the radio to some hip-hop music and once again, we were yanked out of our chairs and forced to dance for the group. This included some of our coordinated camp dances from the summer which they loved. It also included a dance off between us three Canadian boys. After all this, Thomas and I (Adam) got up and did a skit for them while Bryan took pictures for us. Again for those of you who worked at camp, Thomas and I worked together to do the Phoenix Dirk Banana skit. They loved it, and as soon as we finished, a women and man got up from the orphanage and impersonated our skit.

After the group prayed for us, we decided that it was time to speak to the group. A couple hours before this, we had scrambled to come up with a short speech in Spanish that would express our gratefulness to the people at the orphanage. Now this was a risky idea because our Spanish is usually barbaric at best so the meaning may not come out the way we intended. Sure enough, this came true and got a great reaction. In the speech we were trying to say "Thanks for the food, it was always delicious. So we wrote, "Gracious por la comida, estueve siempre ricisimo." Now, if you know Spanish, you are probably already laughing because the verb "estar" is an irregular and we forgot that the same rules didn't apply that we had learned. The word we were looking for was "estuvo." Close right? Well what we said instead was "Thanks for the food, I was always delicious." Thomas was the victim of saying this statement. The joke after was that the girls at the orphanage thought he was delicious anyways. Needless to say, the people at the orphanage had plenty to make fun of us with as we were leaving.

This week we are once again fully occupied. From Tuesday afternoon on, all of Jesus Responde and us as well are fully dedicated to the upcoming festival. It will be a blast and its going to be an experience of a lifetime...