Finishing Touches

Our fourth day was basically the last time we would be painting, cleaning, etc. The majority of our group worked on finishing the lower half of the girl's dorm and painting the bathroom. The pictures above will give you an idea of what the rooms looked like before (blue and green for library and white and blue for girls room). It took a long time to paint over the blue in the girl's room, but we finally did it and then we scrubbed every inch of the room to get the paint, dirt, and dust off. The children tried to help us clean the floor by swinging a wet rag back and forth to splatter water on the ground while another child mopped it up. It was funny because they kept doing this to the same area and that is probably the cleanest part of the entire room. After the floor was cleaned, we moved all the furniture and beds back in (that is easier said than done). Another group of volunteers cleaned up the "meeting area" where children could meet with their parents who can't provide for them and gave their children to the orphanage so that they would have a better childhood than if they were kept at home. Before the "renovation" there was a dirty, smelly, green carpet that had to be hauled off to the trash. We also bought picnic tables with umbrellas so that they wouldn't have to sit on dirty chairs. In the girl's bathroom, we bought new shower curtains and painted the entire room. A group of three or four people painted a tiny bathroom next to the basketball court because it had writing and feces (mostly from the younger boys who thought it was funny) all over it. After lunch, we played with the children until they had to go get dressed for Mass. While most of them were changing, we brought out the ice cream sandwiches we had bought at the store as a special treat.