A few weeks back we had a Guarderia Exposition in Montero’s Central Plaza where each Guarderia sets up a table with crafts, food and presents a dance.  So, it fell to Carmen and me to teach our kids a traditional Bolivian dance.  This is not one of my strongest talents but I rose to the occasion and now can put Bolivian dance teacher on my CV, ok maybe not really but we did alright.  Here’s a picture of us herding our troops as they perform for the mayor.

Here’s a picture where you can see more faces, the boys from front to back are Albaro, Saul and Limbert, three of my favorites from this year.  Albaro’s mom is the woman in the picture above shaking her finger at him.  He’s a good kid but she keeps a close eye on him.  Limbert’s a real sweet heart but he comes off as stupid because his parents only speak Quechua at home so he doesn’t really know Spanish.   That’s a story for another post though.

Also, at the Guarderia we had our end of the year party which included the Kinder-aged kids putting on a Living Nativity Play for everyone.  Since this is the main classroom I’ve been helping with I ended up having a large role in the organizing of this.  Luckily one of the other workers volunteered to write the script so I spent most of my time drilling the lines with the kids (hoping they didn’t pick up my pronunciation) and teaching them Christmas carols.  Madre Inez said they needed to sing two Christmas carols at the end so with the help of the other educadoras, I quickly picked up two spanish Christmas carols and helped teach them to the kids.  I even choreographed a dance to one of them.  We also had to fit the kids for their costumes (safety pins) and build the set.  It was a lot of work for a very short production but I hope the kids at least enjoyed it.

You’ll notice how authentic the baby Jesus looks.  That’s because it was a real 2-week-old baby.  One of the workers in the baby room was very pregnant when I got here and just gave birth Nov. 27th.  For this reason, I helped out in the baby room for a week to give an extra hand.  They didn’t need me any longer than that because she and the baby were back at work Dec. 7th.   That’s just 10 days after she gave birth!  The baby seems pretty healthy but it makes me really nervous having it around so many other children and I can’t believe that the mom was able to just go right back to working 11 hour days.   I joked to Tom that I think we had a more authentic Jesus than most movies have.