Santiago

So, since I'm home now and have more free time that I'm able to use the internet, I figured I'd post a few little stories about a couple of the kids that I met at Hogar Madre Anna Vitello.  

This is Santiago. He's 8 years old.

     Santiago is an outgoing 8 year old that I met on my first day at the orphanage.  My friend Nikki had been working at the orphanage for 2 weeks before myself and 2 other volunteers got there, so she introduced us to almost everyone. The one thing that was different about Santiago right away that he was determined to learn our names and remember them.  A lot of the kids constantly ask our names, and will almost immediately forget and come running back to ask again. But, Santiago rarely got my name name wrong and every morning when we got to the orphanage he would run over and say hi to all of us individually.

    On one of the first few days, Santiago saw me sitting alone just watching the kids play on the playground. He come over and motioned to see the little green book that was sticking out of my sweatshirt pocket. It was my Spanish to English pocket dictionary, so he started flipping through it. When I explained to him that the front half of the book had English words so I could find the Spanish meaning, he just kept flipping through and showing me different words. He found the translations of the numbers from 1 to 10 in the back, and proceeded to read them to me in English! Once he reached 10, he calmly handed me my book back and pointed to his head and said "cabeza". He repeated it twice until I repeated it back to him, mimicking his movements. We went through almost all of the body parts, and he was impressed when I would beat him to a body part and already know the word for it in Spanish. Sometimes, I would repeat the word in English and he would also repeat it, but he was more set on him teaching me rather than the other way around.

    Another day, Santiago was kicking around a soccer ball and we started playing pass. Now anyone who knows me understands that I have no foot/eye coordination. I quit soccer when I was probably Santiago's age; after we switched to the "big kid's" field I didn't see the fun in running back and forth all the time. (I'd like to blame my asthma for this, but it really was irrelevant. I just didn't really like soccer). Anyways, we started playing pass and gradually started running up and down the playground. Eventually we tried juggling the ball up into the air, and passing it. That didn't work out so well, but it was fun.

       Santiago is the little boy I played cards with that I mentioned briefly in a post earlier. We had a little crowd watching us play War, and then the next day we had a group of kids playing Uno.  What I failed to mention was that after Santiago realized that I understood exactly how War worked and that I really knew how to play (Jackie and I used to play all the time when we were kids) he decided to take matters into his own hands. He started cheating!!! Anyone who plays War knows that the Ace's are what will eventually win you the game, if you throw them at the right time. So, Santiago held onto his Ace's and pretended to drop his cards to mix them up when he realized he would have to give up one of them. The kicker was that he knew that I knew that he was cheating, but he also realized that I had no idea how to say that he was cheating in Spanish! I kept throwing him looks, and he just kept laughing. Needless to say, I lost (technically) but that wasn't really the point. It was just fun :)

Santiago is a sweet kid, and I was lucky to have met him. He was one of the few people I met while in Guatemala who didn't see lack of knowledge in Spanish as an obstacle; but more as a fun challenge.