Last Friday, we visited an orphanage down the street from the volunteer house called Ciudad de los niños. The orphanage is connected to the church Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Guadeloupe.
The kids we visited with were between 6 and 14 years old. Right off the bat, they seemed pretty excited that we were there, with a few of them coming up to us saying hello and asking what we were doing there.
Manolo started off by talking to them about whale sharks, asking if they knew what it looked like, if anyone had seen one before, how big they thought they were. The kids were all shouting out answers, not afraid of being shy. We had a tape measure that Manolo held one end and Tobias started walking back with the other and we told the kids to stop when they thought how big a whale shark was. They were really surprised when Tobias walked all the way back to 20 meters and they could see just how big our spotty friends can grow.
From there, we moved to our first game, which was to throw a ball through the whale shark's mouth. Each ball had a fact about the whale shark written in Spanish that the kids had to read out first before they could attempt to throw the ball. Some of the facts were 'a whale shark's throat is the size of a tennis ball,' 'whale sharks don't have any bones' and 'the whale shark's only predator is humans.' The mouth that they had to throw it through was a piece of cardboard that we painted and cut a hole through. If the children were successful in throwing the ball, they got a piece of candy.
The candy, of course, was a huge hit and each time the kids were grabbing bigger and bigger handfuls. Even one of the nun's got in on the action and was sitting in the shade licking a lollipop.
When the candy was exhausted, we played a game of whale shark tag. One person was the shark and everyone else was plankton. Once you were tagged, you became a whale shark eating all the plankton and the last plankton left won.
We brought along a whale shark puppet that Nicole, one of the previous volunteers, had sent as a present. One of the girls really attached to it and we had to kindly ask for it back before we left. On a similar note, one of the boys really like the whale shark mouth and decided to wear it around.
We did a game of limbo, where each kid had to crawl under the bar as a different animal. We tested the kids telling them they couldn't pick the same one twice and they started getting creative, saying orangutan and sea horse and such.
Next, we did an activity with an ocean and beach scene. The kids waited in line to pull something out of the bag and had to decide if it went in the ocean or went into the basura (trash). Some of the kids were jokers, putting the animals in the trash (no!!). Others weren't too keen on pulling trash and ran to queue up again so they could put an animal in the ocean.
Just like that our time was up and we said goodbye to our new friends. I think they were genuinely interested in us being there and teaching them about the ocean. I hope they appreciated our time there because we were really happy to spend the afternoon with them!
Sarah
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