FIJI

">BULA! Fiji has been so so amazing! My 6 weeks is over in 11 days and I am so sad it went by way too fast! I am lead over nutrition and recently a project I just proposed called the Ba Boys Home. The Ba Boys Home is an orphanage and vocational school. There are 10 orphans who live at the home and while they are at school during the day they have 60 boys ages 14-18 who go to school in the classrooms to learn skills like welding, carpentry, mechanics, and agriculture. Most of the boys dropped out of school due to financial reasons or a death in the family; the other boys failed or just were not motivated to finish. We go teach the boys English classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2pm-3pm and then they go home and the orphans come home from school and we teach them a little English and then play games with them from 3:30-5pm. It has been so amazing, the boys are so sweet and always answer “yes Madame”. We did an exercise the other day to see how their English is and we wrote four things up on the board and had them write as much as they could about them. The four things were: 1. Tell us about your family. 2. Tell us about your hobbies. 3. What do you want to do in the future? 4. What is your favorite thing about Fiji? We graded the papers the next day and there answers were seriously adorable. They gave answers like, “My favorite thing to do is be friends with those who don’t have any” “I like to give service, carry groceries and help people” “My favorite thing about Fiji is the nice friendly people and the peacefulness, I like to have a picnic” and “In the future I want to be a mechanic so that I can take care of my family”. I almost cried reading them because they were the sweetest answers ever, and some of the boys told about deaths in the family. We taught our second lesson yesterday and split the boys up into 3 different classes, levels 1, 2, and 3 and it went really well I am really excited for this project; the boys at the orphanage are maybe the cutest boys in the world. There are 10 of them and 3 have disabilities. We go there Tuesdays and Thursdays also and we usually just work with them and their English and then we play soccer and games. It has been so fun and I am getting really sad to say goodbye to them.

We also do nutrition and exercise classes at the Ba Senior Center which is so fun because all the old ladies are so cute and they always have yummy food for us after. We have been doing nutrition classes with the health team in the mornings at the hospital. We usually just go talk to all the different waiting rooms and talk to them while they are waiting to be called back. Being here has been so amazing, I have learned so much and I am so much more grateful for all the amazing things I have. We met a boy at one of the projects and his parents put him in a chicken coup when he was little and that’s where he grew up. He is 15 now (I think..) and his back is really arched probably from never really being taught to stand or walk, his eyes are very cross-eyed, he cant speak and has a really hard time listening and understanding. It makes me so grateful for such an amazing family and for a home, food to eat, education, a bed, and just everything we are so blessed to have. This has been such an awesome experience and I hope we are blessing peoples lives as much as they have ours.