Blog / News
Casa Uno
- Sep 8, 2011
Yesterday we headed back to Anini orphanage, which is home to 65 children with special needs. Anini is divided up into six houses that are mainly separated by medical diagnosis and/or gender.
Upon arrival, we learned that a group of Guatemalan students were also there to play with the kids and help the caretakers. We knew we only had one day to work with the kids at Anini, so we had already started brainstorming which kids to focus on since we knew there was a high possibility that we wouldn’t be able to see every child in one day. It quickly became clear that the best way we could help would be to focus on Casa Uno (“House One”) – the kids in Casa Uno have the most severe needs, and they were the only kids who weren’t participating in the fun activities with the volunteers.
It was a long day, but we pushed through and worked as hard as we could to help as many kids as we could in such a short period of time. Paige was able to assess their speech and language development, Abby fitted several kids for hand splints, and Holly also fitted lots of kids for braces. All of the children we saw today were in wheelchairs, so we made adjustments to each of their chairs as well. A lot of the kids we’ve seen this week have the same exact wheelchair, and it’s not exactly the easiest piece of equipment to adjust. But now that we’ve had a crack at it for a few days in a row, we’ve become pros!
The entire day passed by, and we hadn’t even seen all of the children from Casa Uno. Anini could certainly use lots more help! But rather than being discouraged that we didn’t get to help every child at Anini today, we were grateful to build relationships and work with several incredible children who greatly needed our help. We were also able to leave lots of books and toys, and instruction handouts in Spanish for the various things we worked on with the kids today. Anini has a part-time Special Education teacher, so we’re excited that she’ll be able to use a lot of these things to help the children learn and grow and take steps forward towards a better quality of life!
This is just the beginning – and now that we’ve had the opportunity to spend some time at Anini, we can develop a plan for coming back in the future and helping these kids the best we can. Blanca left this morning, and the rest of us will spend our final day visiting more orphanages with Mike’s Angels and fly back early Friday morning.
