Hello World

Dear World,

Today in Tijuana I was woken up way early by my roommate's alarm, but I ended up being too awake to do anything remotely close to sleeping so I decided to go to the panadería. If no one has mentioned the panadería yet it's a small bakery down on the Main Street that has absolutely delicious pasteries for incredibly cheap. If you only bring a dollar with you you can easily buy three pasteries. ((Ohmygoodness their donuts are actually out of this world.))

After breakfast one of the staff members, Eduardo came and talked to us about immigration and the Mexican-American border. Now if anyone hasn't blogged about HIM well then here it goes, basically he's the volunteer coordinator at Esperanza and he goes and works with groups at various work sites. Just so you can picture him properly, Eduardo has long (and incredibly luscious) locks that go down to his chest, a mustache, incredibly massive arms and nearly every time I've seen him he has had a huge smile plastered on his face and a joke not far behind. 

Today was on the more serious side and he shared his seemingly endless amount of knowledge about immigrating to the U.S. and the amount discrimination Mexicans face, especially; two things that he has been very familiar with for a lot of his life. He told us all about his first hand experiences and difficulties with gangs, and how he completely turned it around when his father died. I personally thought he was incredibly inspiring and I learned more about our border from him than I did from the countless news stories and coverage that I have read/seen over time.

 After learning all about our border and Mexico in general we all headed off to our respective work sites. At my work site we moved roughly 250-300 cinder blocks in one go (which was no problem because of my amazingly chiseled biceps OF COURSE) and finished the second half of the floor. Thankfully lunch was on time today and the wife of the house, Claudia, made a delicious chicken, carrot and potato stew with rice, beans and tortillas on the side.

After heading back to the Posada for a quick shower the St. Louise group headed off towards an all girls orphanage closer into the city of Tijuana. At first it was hard talking to the girls because language barriers and shyness but within half an hour I was having the most fun I've had in a while. The youngest girls loved the cameras,  they ran around taking pictures of anything and everything. You practically had to pry the camera away from them. They all taught us a game and got us to play it with them. They would have a group of people stand against the wall and have people take turns and each have three chances to hit people on the wall with a ball, if you got hit, you were out. The most surprising thing out of all this was that not only did the nuns taking care of the girls start the game, but they also threw the hardest. Right before we left they sang us two songs, one in Spanish and another in English, and then coerced us into singing two of our own. 

Practically every single person I talked to before going on this trip told me that it was amazing and absolutely life changing, and to be honest, up until this day I hadn't really seen that. But those girls at the orphanage, I don't know how they did it, or what they changed, but they moved something in me, something I don't think I'll ever be able to change back.

-Emma Kimmell

P.S. I also recently started rocking a pretty hardcore farmer's tan.