Kermes: Take 2

I’m a little far behind on my blog…sorry about that! SO! September 5th we had my second Kermes since my time here at NPH and the theme was “Alrededor del Mundo” aka Around the World. There were 5 stations, one for each of the different continents (excluding the Americas), and each one featured a game having to do with that section of the world. From Antarctica came the “Penguin Waddle” where kids had to carry a ball between their feet while waddling like a penguin. Next up: Australia – aka the “Kangaroo hop” – potato sack races. Asia was a race to carry words from a fortune using chopsticks from one end of the cancha (black top) to the other, after which the kids had to unscramble the fortunes. Then came Africa where the kids had to listen to a beating drum and dance in rhythm (with paint on their feet) on a large piece of paper to create a painting. Slightly messy. Lastly came my game – Skiing in Europa! In their sections, the kids had to work together to move a pair of skis across the cancha together. It was well…interesting.

One of the bad parts about Kermes is that we often don’t have a meeting about it/know what we’re doing the day of until the Monday beforehand. This means that we have roughly 6 days to get together all the items that we need. It sounds like a lot of time, but when you’re working/spending time in your section/sleeping…it can be hard to get it all together. If only we’d had the weekend before to figure it out…

Katie, Michael and I were in charge of skiing…which we kind of sort of forgot about until the day before…oops. How to make skis that are going to last through 200 kids pushing and pulling them in ever which direction? We finally decided to use rope. Any and all rope we could find between all the volunteer houses. Which meant that we started cutting down random ropes that were in our houses…why were they hanging from the ceiling anyway?? We secured the rope onto equal sized wooden planks using nails. Which of course we didn’t have enough of. And the hardware store was closed. Oh well, we finished what we could and just sort of prayed for a miracle for the next day.

Unfortunately our prayers didn’t come true. Every single time the skis were used at least one part of them broke. We would then spend the next 10-15 minutes figuring out how to fix the aforementioned mess. While it turned out to be a pretty stressful Kermes, it was also the most fun I’ve seen the kids have at any of the booths at Kermes – apparently they really like skiing in the Alps ;-). Hopefully next time we’ll have a little bit more time to prepare…

Ruth and Michael sporting penguin hats from Antarctica

Meghan skiing in Europa with some of the boys, Elmer and Felipe

Mariela and Maria from my section cheering on their teammates :)

Me with Luis, aka the cutest little boy ever!