A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words...

... or so they say. Well, we have learned that it is altogether true. Reade has been really good about taking pictures of the kids as they've been hanging out in front of our steps, so we have literally hundreds of photos of them. Every time we snap a picture, we are surrounded by children wanting to see the digital image because they just love looking at the pictures.

Reade was inspired early on in our time here to do some kind of photo project where we print off one picture of each child to give to them, and let them make a "frame" out of construction paper. For children who generally do not own a picture of themselves, this is far more of a novelty than we could have ever imagined.

Kids literally came out of the woodwork and we made many more friends than we even had before. This, of course, meant that as more kids showed up and wanted to have their picture taken, we took several trips downtown to print off more and more pictures. But it was totally worth it.

To follow up on that, we spent several hours compiling most of these pictures into a slideshow (which anyone is welcome to see when we are back in the US -- just say the word). We even found some good tunes in Spanish for the background music. We told the kids we had a surprise, and they were all invited to our house the night before we left to see what it was.

Two hours prior, we had kids literally hanging on the front gate, waiting to be let inside.

When the time finally arrived and we had gotten everything set up and ready, we let adults in first, which was no small task seeing as though there were probably 20 kids piled onto the small front steps. We were just thrilled that adults came! By the time we finally got everyone piled in, there was almost no room left whatsoever. We fit probably 50 people in there. Here's a glimpse of how full it was.

The kids had a blast. They laughed and laughed. The joy was palpable. But then it was time to say goodbye, and that is always hard. Let's just say that there were tears, some gifts, and lots of hugs. There was even one point where two little boys were fighting over who got to hug on Reade more. It is hard to fathom how different our lives will be because of these people we love and this place called Nueva Suyapa.