"He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much."

This morning was the first time, in a very long time, that I have actually needed the alarm to wake me up. We made it to Escuela Especial (still a little later than intended) and got right to work. Harry and I started off in one of the deaf classrooms, the two teachers are Mirna and Marino (but Marino was not there yet). Immediately, I was amazed at how fast these kids could sign to each other, understand what their friend said, and then respond. Unlike my class yesterday, in which I had to use my lesson plan, the teacher was fully prepared with a lesson that would not only challenge the kids, but would teach them. The class started off with a little written quiz, and then began to review new signs for opposite words like "bonita" and "feo", and "abrir" and "salir". The kids all caught on quickly (and I managed to remember a few words myself) when the second teacher, Edgar Marino, came in. Marino, just like the kids, is deaf. He has an amazing personality, and was willing to sit down with me later to teach me some new signs. After quickly reviewing the newly learned signs with the class, Marino asked Harry and I what our names were, then asked the class to come up with signs for our names (once you spell out your name, you can come up with a sign that represents you). So after a little bit of debating, the kids decided that my sign would be an "a" in sign language, then a "v" which you slide under your eye. After they finished their sign lesson, the kids moved onto math, where I was surprised at the level of multiplication. As the kids finished their last math problem, the bell rang. I will admit I sat there a little awkwardly, not knowing if I should walk out, or wait for the children and the teacher to realize it was lunch. But we all walked out sooner or later.

During the students' lunch, we made plans as to which children we would each specifically work with afterwards, and interacted with the students. I was assigned a little preschooler named Josuan, who is blind, and who the teachers say cannot walk. Considering that he was only in preschool, and that he wouldn't be able to see what I was doing, I didn't do any lesson plans, but rather sat with him and held his hand (if his hands weren't already in his mouth). It was astonishing to see the amount of educational activity in the preschool class compared to the deaf classroom. All the students were sitting on the floor, squeezing plato, rolling around, or not doing anything while the teachers sat and talked to each other. I tried to engage all the kids in some activity or another, but my efforts fell flat. I focused mainly on Josuan (I kept asking the teachers to let me try and walk with him because they had tied him to a chair) until the teachers put him in a wheelchair and rolled him out of the classroom.  After that, I worked with a little boy named Jose Andres on a shapes game. Soon, Jose Andres left too, and the only two students left were a boy named Francisco, and a boy named Ever. I tried to ask Ever what he wanted to play with, but he just gave me a weird look and rolled away on his yoga ball. Francisco, however, sat at the door, looking for the bus to come and pick him up. I asked if he wanted to play with anything. No response. I asked him if we wanted to sit down. No response. I handed him some plato, and he picked it up and threw it at the ground. There were only ten minutes of class left, so I rubbed his back as he laid on the ground, and he soon fell asleep. The bell rung once more, and Ever finally opened up to me and held my hand as he danced out to the bus. All the kids piled onto the bus and began waving good-bye, a younger deaf girl came around with a piece of paper and had us all write our names on it, and soon the bus was rolling down the street.

We did the same thing as yesterday, we had our lunch and then went off in separate groups (today, Nathaniel, Gena, and I were going on home visits with Sarah, one of our translators, Zach, and a social worker named Magali). As we waited for our taxi to arrive, my group sat with Marino as Sarah signed to him. Our first trip was to Veta Cruz, thirty kilometers away from Escuela Especial. The "house" that we visited, was really an old bar, that was only visited by people rarely on Saturdays. Of the five children in the house, two (nine year old Kenny and seven year old Alysia) were disabled. Alysia has back problems, and she is cross-eyed because of mishandling during birth (she was barely a pound when born, so the doctors kept her for three months, and returned her cross-eyed). The kids lived with their grandparents, as both their parents had left. The grandmother, Maria, told us that the father stopped by every so often to drop off clothes and shoes, but the mother was supposedly "crazy" and hasn't been heard from. Maria and her husband, Jose, tried to take Alysia for an examination to get her eyes fixed- but she would not let anyone near her. Kenny, is just about the opposite of his sister. He is very out-going and wanted to talk and to hug, but had no diagnosis. The grandparents told us that he would immediately forget everything you told him, but they had not brought him to a hospital to see what was wrong. Both the kids go to a normal school. The second house visit we went on was to a house with a three year old girl named Rosa with cerebral palsy. Rosa is on two medications, one of which costs her family $20 a week. Rosa couldn't lift her head, but her grandmother (her mom was at the market) told us that she did physical therapy two times a week.

Seeing the kind of homes some of the kids comes from, makes it even more amazing that they can come to school everyday with a huge smile on their face. While people in America become sad over lost Iphones or lost soccer games, these kids can come from almost nothing, and give everything.   

"He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much." Bessie Stanley