A hard day..

Yesterday was a difficult day. We moved from matt painting to gloss, painting the playground equipment. We knew we had come here to do a painting project, well, we found out about 5 days before we came and had the choice of making curtains for the children’s rooms or painting the playground, both of which I had to pay for the materials. I opted for making curtains and the girls wanted to do the painting (that is not strictly true because they didn’t want to do either, they wanted to play with the children,, but worse case scenario ‘would you rather make curtains, eat your own leg or paint the playground?’ they opted for the playground!) not that I am apportioning blame here! Anyway, back to the gloss painting… In high wind standing on precarious ladders with paint going everywhere and I mean everywhere, it was not much fun. We were covered in red, green, yellow, black and blue gloss and the equipment we were painting looked awful. To make matters worse I then fell off from the top of a ladder, luckily into sand, so only a bit bruised, but enough to really shake me. By lunch time I had had enough and sat in the room and just cried, I really was ready to leave. Poor Jo’s eczema on her hands is also in a really bad way.

After a good cry and argument with the girls, Jo was ready to leave but Mili is feeling really sorry for the kids and wants to adopt them all and is not prepared to leave without at least 3 in her luggage! We went back to work in the afternoon and it wasn’t quite so bad so know we will see it through to the end. I think we are all learning quite a lot of lessons! I feel proud of the girls and the way they are coping and of the insights they are having about themselves and others.

One of the main reasons to come to Peru was to visit Ross in the jungle; he has now left the jungle, so we are not too sure what we are going to do. We all feel there is no point coming to Peru and not going to see the Amazon and the rainforest, for us that was to be the highlight. We have decided to still stick to our plans and see if we can meet him somewhere else on our travels, as the girls still want to see their dad.