Working With Children and Animals

There's one thing that lets you know that you are in the middle of August in Cusco.

KITES!

Kids flying, making, fixing or going on field trips to fly them. It's supposedly the windiest month in Cusco and everyone wants to get a piece of the action. We decided that project CORASON shouldn't be left behind in the kite phenomenon. So we made kites with the kids. The younger kids just did a paper version that I had made with my kindergartners in years past but the older ones got pretty elaborate.

They went searching the mountainside for the perfect sticks, lightweight that grow from a local plant. Then they covered their kites with plastic bags or tissue paper. Some even went to the lengths of decorating the kites with designs and giving them fancy tales. They rolled up mounds of yarn for string (some I think wanted to fly to the moon with the quantity they were taking!). I don't ever remember learning how to make a kite when I was a kid but the kids here just seem to know it instinctively!

Then one day we were off singing "Let's Go Fly a Kite" (from Mary Poppins - the kids loved singing that song) and climbing a neighboring mountain by the project. The kids were ready with their kites and excited to fly them. The littlest ones starting running around with their small kites and getting some air (while mostly getting exercise!). The problem with our little outing is that the wind did not cooperate with our kite flying plans. Some kids gave up on their paper kites and tried to find plastic bags.

Then someone decided to start picking flowers and gather them in bunches with the tissue paper from the kites. They looked like the ladies from the market who sell their bunches of flowers. The best was little five year old Angela whose bunch started getting bigger and bigger and bigger. She ran out of tissue paper and started using some "peligro" (caution) tape that some child had brought from somewhere (maybe for a kite tail?).

View from the opposite mount

Thus my English roommate shared with me a saying that fit perfectly with the moment:
"They say in England that you should never work with children or animals because you never know exactly what they are going to do!"

Ha! That's exactly why I like to work with children... They are unpredictable but they are delightful and I think they express a little more of the joy and spontaneity Jesus wants us to always have in our lives. Our kite flying field trip may have not been exactly as planned but the kids and volunteers had a blast out in God's beauteous creation.