It rained for a fair bit of the night, and again this morning when we first got up to go to El Jordan. When it rains here, it comes down in a hurry and then stops for a while, and then comes down in a hurry again. Its somewhat different from the way we get rain at home. When it comes down in a hurry, the streets get flooded and then they drain and then repeat the cycle all over again. Here is a picture from the drive over to El Jordan this morning to give you an idea of what it looks like.
We got to El Jordan and started on wrapping the little gift that each person on the street will get with their food. The gift is simply a plastic cup and a cola flavored sucker. It doesn't sound like much but having their own cup is a big deal to someone who has nothing. Melody had spent most of the evening last night cutting Christmas wrap into the right size to create "pockets" to put the cup and sucker into. We took everything she had cut back to El Jordan with us and set about wrapping the 3000 cups. They don't seem to grasp the idea of an assembly line here, after an hour of everybody sitting at 3 tables and each doing whatever part of the task they wanted to, I decided I couldn't take it anymore. I got up, took a table and filled it with plastic cups and started putting a sucker into each one, then had Melody take charge at a table and had them tape the pre-cut paper into the little pouches and had the 3rd table become the sealing table. So, my table got cups and suckers ready, stuffed them into the pouches, and then had runners take them to the sealing table while the pouch table continued to make packets and bring them to my table for stuffing. WAYYYYY more efficient than each person doing a little of everything.
By the end of the day, we had completed 2000 packages and will finish off the other 1000 tomorrow with some luck. All the packages were put into the boxes that Logan and Heidi went to get. As you can see, they stuffed the car as full as possible. That meant the only room for Logan was on top of the boxes on the way home. (cue overprotective parent comments and emails now). Lukas and I will not be helping out on that item tomorrow however. Lukas was invited to go along with a local doctor who works for money 1 day a week and then works for free the other 4 days a week to provide basic medical services to the street people. I figured it wasn't prudent to send him off by himself, so I will be going along with him tomorrow and will hopefully be able to snap a few pictures as well.
Later in the afternoon Andres picked Lukas, Logan and I up to go downtown to get the kids Christmas presents. We had a family talk and the kids all agreed they didn't really NEED much for Christmas so each of them said they would be happy with a soccer jersey of their choice. Since it was there choice, I took the boys along so the sizes would be right and so they could pick their own jersey. Logan of course chose a Barcelona jersey with Messi on the back, Lukas chose a Bayern Munich jersey with Robben on the back and Jordan had asked for an Argentina jersey which was quite difficult to find for some reason. Luckily we managed to track down a Di Maria jersey for her in the right size. Lukas also spent some of his own money on a German national team jersey with Goetze on the back. We will be wrapping them up so they have something to open on Christmas when the rest of the kids at the home open their presents up too.
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