And the craziness begins...

We have now finished two days at Instituto de Oscar Scarpetta. Yesterday we met the director, the rest of the staff, and TONS of super cute kids. It was more of an orientation/observation day for us, but boy was it busy. With our limited and rusty Spanish and their limited English, communication was a tad rough but we managed just fine thanks to the spanish-english dictionary and google translator. One of the psychologists brought us around and identified the children the institute had chosen for us to work with. As soon as we walked into each "sala" or room, we were greeted with smiles and lots of questions. The kids bombarded us left and right with questions in VERY fast Spanish.

We share an office with one psychologist and a psychology student from one of the local colleges. The kids are able to come in and out of the office freely and many stopped by to say hi and ask more questions. They loved taking pictures and asking us to speak in English. We were told that we would also be receiving salsa lessons from some of the kids! Below are some pictures from yesterday.

Today we actually began evaluating some of the kids on our list. It was a lot tougher than we imagined because all the other kids would swarm around us making it very difficult to focus on the kids we were evaluating. We are going to talk to the director about using a separate room. We were able to work with several babies and some kindergarten-aged kids today. We feel one of the kids would benefit from an AFO (ankle foot orthosis) so now we need to figure out how to fabricate one or ask a local physiotherapist for advice on the best way to go about making or buying one.

We are already exhausted from these past two days, but are looking forward to the next 7 weeks here! Our Spanish can only continue to improve! Buenas noches! Hasta luego!