Brazil A-Term - #9: Final Day

 Today is the last day of our A-Term. As this is the second week of the A-Term, we will participate in the same activity as we did the last Thursday. The schedule for today was first Art Therapy, then Digitalization for Adults. I was very excited to participate in the Art Therapy activity since this would be the first time I would be participating in it (last week I spent a day with the Worldpackers instead of doing Artherapy, you can find this on day #4 blog). Since this was our last day we wanted to do something special, for the kids that were showing up, so we decided to make another breakfast. This is always tricky because we never know how many kids are going to show up to each activity, it can be anywhere from 5 - to 20 kids. After serving breakfast, we started the Art Therapy activity. For today, we planned on playing many games of telephone with the objective of teaching the kids how gossip can affect the truth, and how people alter the truth when telling someone else gossip. Since a group of 15 kids showed up, it was very difficult to have a calm game of telephone, it was difficult to get all of the kids to focus on the activity. Whenever something like this happens all of the volunteers, including Fabricio and I, have to calm everyone down in the nicest way possible. Many of these kids have a difficult life at home and in order to create a positive environment at Unbottling Minds we have to talk to the kids as calmly as possible and as equals, constantly reminding them to be kind to each other. We played a couple rounds of telephone and noticed that it wasn't working out for the kids, so we tried to switch up the activity. One of the volunteers suggested to everybody draw one object, animal, or thing on a piece of paper and then tell a story about the drawing in order of how the things were drawn. I really enjoyed participating in this activity as it brought out creativity, storytelling, and drawing. Switching to this storytelling/drawing activity made the Art Therapy session a lot smoother,  and the kids were a lot more focused and interested.

    When the activity was over and all the kids went home to get ready for school, there was a big threat of rain so instead of going back home we decided to stay a little longer just to see if any rain came. Before the rain, however, we had to empty the pool that was full of rainwater from the previous night's torrential downpour. We got a couple of buckets and started going to work, but 30 minutes later and possibly a hundred buckets in it seemed like we had made no progress. Just when we found more buckets to speed up the job it started raining, so we had to go back inside. At around lunchtime we went back home because the rain was starting to pick up, and spent some time working. The rain continued all afternoon and didn't stop even after the sun had set. Closing in on 8:00, we headed back up to the HQ to do the digital inclusion classes, but due to the rain only Thiago's father was able to come. Either way we still had a fun class. We played a game where we went around trying to name things that were on phone one by one in a circle. At first it was easy, but by the 10th turn I started running out of apps and things to name and it got a lot more challenging. I didn't lose of course, but I was starting to name thing like cellular data and sleep schedule to stay in the game. 

    When the class was over Mariana, Thiago's daughter, who is around 4 years old, got us all in a circle and played a Charades-style game where we went around in a circle acting like an animal and everyone else had to guess what the animal was. We had some laughs as the animals we portrayed became more and more obscure, then when we finished we said a final goodbye to everyone. When it was time to leave I forgot to close the gate and one of the dogs, Janice, got out and started following the car. We went all the way down the hill before we noticed she was following us, so in the pouring rain we took her back to the HQ and locked the gate, making sure it was closed this time. By this point it had rained so much that the dirt road became a river that rushed down the hill, but since it was raining so much I couldn't get a good photo of it. Frankly I'm a little sad that we're leaving, but we had an excellent time and an even better A-Term. Hopefully we are able to come back and have an even better learning experience.