The bunks are starting to smell, it’s the toilets. You can’t put tissue down the bowl so some kids do, and two toilets are blocked, and others but it in the bin at the side so the smell is everywhere. The smell of poo, wee, mould, wet wood, the water also stinks here because it’s ground water, the smell takes my breath away whenever I enter the bunks.
We took the kids on a 8km walk to a cave up in the mountains, this took 7 hours. It was an easier day than yesterday but hot, the kids were tired, and I was worried for their safety as they wandered to the edge of the cliffs to see what was down there. My heart jumped so many times. Walked past olive trees, apparently they’re worth thousands of pounds each, some of the kids were allergic, came up in big rashes, that was fun. We arrived at the cave had a picnic brought up in van, played some games then took it in turns to go in the cave.
Today I taught a girl how to squat and wee, proud moment, or maybe not so much. She was desperate so I took her behind a bush, left her to it and stood guard, ‘Bicky (Spaniards have difficulty with ‘V’), I can’t do it’. I turned around and she was obviously in some difficulty, ‘Help me’. Eugh. I told her to pull her knickers forward and stick her bum out, you know, the way you instinctively do it. Of course she couldn’t do it, so I pulled her knickers forward and she weed. Oh my god, I’m disgusted. Is this my life? For the rest of the day this kid stuck to my side, I couldn’t do anything without her following me. I think she was grateful for my help.
The cave was brilliant, stalagmites, stalactites, you could, if you were insane and wanted to die, go all the way down and scuba dive. Nikki and Christian put on a show for them pretending to be an American Indian Chief and a Shaman with fire and candles and smoking potions, they loved it. Then we walked back.
Bed time was always fun, us three girl group leaders trying to get 5 bedrooms of girls asleep. Tonight was particularly interesting as all the girls had decided they’d been robbed, everything was going missing and so they said they’d seen someone come in in the night and take it. 60ish hysterical girls, accusing each other, accusing anyone, coming up to me in their tired, whiney voices moaning in broken English was too much. When one of the girls told me her dirty knicker bag had been stolen I went slightly mental. Managed to get them all to calm down in the end by saying we’d look in the morning.
Staff meeting was after 1am, we’d all gone crazy and it ended up being very fun with lots of delirious giggling at nothing in particular.
