CIPI Dance

I started a dance project with the girls at CIPI at the beginning of 2nd wave. It originally started with the adolescent girls without infants and the teen mothers. We started off with aerobics and basic hip-hop. Because of the difficulty of watching a baby while dancing, the mothers attended only a few classes of their own. The adolescent girls continued to want to have classes. This class was extracurricular for the girls; meaning they had to attend all of their school classes and do their homework in order to attend. These girls also wanted to perform in a competition at the end of August. We prepared a near 1 1/2minute routine filled with salsa, jazz dance and hip-hop. The girls practiced twice a week with me for an hour each time. HELP funded pink fabric so that the girls could sew matching skirts. The girls are definitely missed and I wish them the best of luck at their competition this month!

CIPI Young Mothers

We have been doing a lot of exciting things with the young mothers at CIPI the last few weeks, and their favorite activity so far has been building their own square foot garden! To get them excited about the garden we had an activity where we used fruits, vegetables, and peanut butter to make fun snacks. On the left is Debbie with one of the young mothers and her vegetable face, and on the right, I am pulling out a very exciting item...peanut butter! They went nuts over the peanut butter. They were also super excited about the fresh food, and they would applause whenever I pulled a new fruit or vegetable out of my bag! The next week we wanted to start on the garden, but it looked like it wasn´t going to work out. However, one of our volunteers, Sam Brady, (in the picture below, explaining the gardens to the girls) worked super hard to make sure it worked out. We wanted the young mothers to feel like they owned the project, so we brought the supplies, showed them what to do, and let them do it. They were so excited, and they really worked hard! The girls dug out a spot for the garden, sifted sand, made a rock wall around the garden, put in posts, tied string to partition the garden into sections, and planted and watered the seeds. While we were working the girls told us that this was their favorite activity so far, and that they liked to work more than they liked to do crafts or play games. The girls are so much fun, we have loved getting to know them all!

CISNA Carnival

This post is long overdue, so here it is!

Our Carnival day at CISNA was our big closing activity with the 1st waivers and was led by our project lead Britney Watts. We started our big carnival with all of the CISNA boys in the auditorium room. They were lucky enough to see all the HELP volunteers (1st and 2nd wave) put on some pretty sweet presentations. Because of our lack of men in our group, the first act involved some women dressing up as men. We´ve never looked so good :) The 2nd skit involved a crazy step dance with the sounds of New York City in the background. The boys got a kick out of both performances.
We then split up the four Hogares (houses of the boys) into 2 groups. One group used team work to do a water balloon toss game and also tear apart a gigantic Batman piñata. The other group could visit up to five of the nine stations we had set up. The stations consisted of a picture behind a muscle man and elf, face painting, fishing for prizes, duck pond, fortune telling, football through a tire, and a few more. After 45 minutes, the groups switched. After a fun day of those activities, they celebrated with an overabundance amount of candy and pizza.
The boys really enjoyed working with the HELP volunteers and each other in this activity. After the carnival, HELP volunteers left them a poster with many pictures of the volunteers and the boys having a good time. The boys still enjoy looking at the poster and seeing each other´s pictures.