Continuation...

I am trying to catch up on my entries of each days activities, sorry for the confusion. And if I repeat myself it is due to the fact that I cannot view my blog to see what has been posted.
So I left off with Tuesdays activities... after the Great Wall adventure we headed to the foster home for older children. These children are 7-16 years old. We arrived before the children were home from school yet. We were greeted by some staff members who took us on a tour. The building formerly was an elementary school called the Great Wall Elementary School. It was in a typical courtyard type layout but it had two courtyards. The building was shaped like a two story capital "E". Forming the two courtyards. One courtyard was used for parking and the other courtyard had three ping pong tables. The middle section, downstairs was the kitchen/cafeteria where the children eat their meals. They showed us the classrooms etc. and the dorm rooms for older boys, younger boys, older girls and younger girls. Very nice and clean facilities.
We felt so welcome as soon as we arrived. There was a peace about the place. Soon the children arrived home from school... they were very cheerful and everyone of them greeted us hello. Quite a few of them were very eager to use their English and approached us to start conversations. These children were very intelligent and their English was very good. Our children were quite an attraction to all of them, especially little potato, who herself is Chinese and probably bewilders the children as to why she is with these American families. The children began to play with eachother in the courtyard. Our little one and one of the H girls were playing Ring Around The Rosie. The little Chinese girls were sitting watching them intently... I went over and joined our girls and invited the Chinese girls to join us... several did... and then more... and then more... and then we had so many little girls joining hands we did not have enough space... I took one of them by the hand, broke the circle and walked her around the ping pong table and joined her hand back up to the circle. Now we had a huge circle going around the ping pong table in the courtyard singing Ring Around The Rosie! It was a fantastic sight that I will always remember.
I said to Mrs. H, "What else can we play with them?" We thought and came up with Simon Says... yes! they had played Simon Says before! They were excited... Mrs. H was Simon and she began to call the commands... everyone was having so much fun... then one of the girls said, as her hands were still on her head from the last command, "It is time for us to go to dinner now". So we all went to the cafeteria and ate our delicious dinner on a stainless steel cafeteria tray. They graciously provided plastic spoons for each of the foreigners... but we used chopsticks :)
One little girl that sat with us was Patsy, she was so tiny I thought she was about 6 or 7 (a small 6 or 7) she said she was 10. She didn't speak alot of English but a little bit. She obviously did not like everything the cook had to offer that night, she had two items out of five... rice and a curried potatoe and beef dish. She was the last one to finish eating out of the 44 children and all of the guests as well. She was eating and talking a little bit with us and someone came along to encourage her to hurry up and after they left she looked at us and took her finger, placed it on her nose and pushed up while she snorted like a pig... we laughed so hard. We did not need language to understand that she was saying everyone else eats so fast, like little pigs... that began our "conversation" of farm animal sounds... she would make a mooooo and we would say, "cow"... she would bark and we would say, "dog" etc... it was great fun. (Esther... how about another sister?)
We played more with them after dinner things like Duck, Duck, Goose. It was a GREAT day and I am so glad we went along with the H's plans that day... nothing could have topped this experience!
We took our hired van back to the foster home we are staying in and arrived home quite late at night (now you know why I am having a hard time keeping up with my blog)