OSSO Orphanage

Hi guys!

Today was my first day in the actual OSSO orphanage.  (It's completely funded by the group I'm volunteering with, and only houses kids with disabilities.)  It was wonderful.

We got there just around breakfast time, so we started off by feeding the kids.  I was with a boy named Edison, who has severe cerebral palsy (that's one of the most common conditions for the kids here.)  He was, in general, a good eater--he could support his own head, actually wanted to eat and opened his mouth when the spoon approached.  I was very lucky on this account--one of the girls here is constantly shaking her head, so trying to feed her is a challenge.

I then went to go spend time with one girl named Lucy.  At the volunteer house, there's a book with entries about each child, detailing their special needs, a bit of their history, and their general preferences for the volunteers.  It mentioned that she was blind and nonverbal but loved music, especially songs with her name in them.  I sang to her, but the only song that I know with the word Lucy in it is "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds."  So if you want to picture innocent me singing a song about hallucinogens to a wheelchair-bound Ecuadorean orphan, you can.  (However, I only know a few lines of the song, so I made up the rest.)

The tías (orphanage employees) then asked me to change the clothes of a girl named Maria--she is also blind and nonverbal, and has microcephaly (not from the recent Zika outbreak in Ecuador, though).  It was physically harder than I would expect, because she was a teenager, probably about 60 pounds (she's the size of a young child), and can't really move her limbs much, so it was like changing deadweight.  Also, she can't eat by mouth, and therefore has a feeding tube, so I had to be very careful around that as well.  She did well, though--throughout the whole process, she only whimpered twice.  And I discovered that if you rub the base of her thumb a certain way, she lets out the most adorable giggle that I've ever heard, and that makes it all worth it.

Everyone then went to the courtyard, and I pushed Maria around the yard in her wheelchair.  She loved it--she would giggle whenever we went over a bump or crack in the cement (so I made sure that we went over a lot of bumps and cracks in the cement.)  And the other volunteers who could see her face said that she was grinning the whole time.  But the courtyard has a pretty steep incline, and I probably went up it 20 times, so I'll probably find out tomorrow morning exactly which muscles are used in wheelchair-pushing on hills.  While we were walking around, we were somewhat alone (although there were a few other volunteers and kids doing the same thing), so I sang to her, too.  I started with "How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?", then went on to
"Eidelweiss," to keep the theme.  And then a bunch more, because we were walking for a while.  It was probably good for me, though.  It was essentially long-distance pacing, but more productive.

Then Maria had to go in to work with the physical therapist employed by the orphanage, so I went over to a girl named Laura.  Laura always carries around this doll which she calls Wawa--Quecha for baby.  (Quecha is the language of the native Ecuadoreans).  There is a swingset in the courtyard that Laura had just come off of, and she motioned towards it.  She didn't want to go back, and I finally realized that she wanted to push her baby doll on the swing.  It was the most adorable thing--her in her wheelchair, concentrating on pushing her beloved doll.

While she was doing that, I was pushing another boy, who proceeded to fall asleep.  The swing had a back on it, so it didn't matter--it was just very sweet.

We then broke for lunch--the food here is awesome, but this post is getting kind of long, so I'll tell you about that another time.

After lunch, all the volunteers and OSSO orphans went to an all-abilities park (parque inclusivo).  It was actually created by the same organization that made Brandon's Village and Aidan's Place in LA (fun fact--my parents helped fundraise for Aidan's Place on the Westside, so they were allowed to name a piece of equipment.  One of the swing sets is called Swinging With Taylor.  I'm officially a permanent part of LA.)  The park was really fun.  They had this sort of wheelchair teeter-totter--it's sort of hard to describe, but basically a lever that can fit 2 wheelchairs on each side and sways a bit instead of going all the way up and down.  I was with a girl named Vanesa, who was wheelchair bound, and she loved it.  They also had bikes there that had wheelchairs on the front, so we rode on one of those, which was fun for both me and her, but also very difficult (for me) because the path was on a hill, and I was pedaling with a bunch of extra weight on the front of the bike.  Eventually, we all had to leave to go back.  It was about an hour bus ride back to the compound, and Vanesa ended up sitting pretty much on my lap the entire way.  She doesn't have the muscle tone to support herself sitting, and will just slide down the seat, so she ended up leaning on me while I held onto her shoulders.

This entire city is quite pretty--the nice parts look like you took a bunch of Spanish Colonial architecture and popped it down in one of the parts of the South that's just completely forested.  It's astonishingly green here (especially coming from Socal, which sort of looks like 50 Shades of Brown during this part of the year.)

Also it's cold here.  It hit like 55 today at the warmest, and there's no heating indoors.  One of my roommates is from Idaho and she thinks it's cold, which I think is hilarious (but she said that subzero is ok if you're prepared.)  But it's fine if we keep moving, which we are, most of the time.

Love you guys! Thanks for reading!