The Dangers of Being a Kid

Kids fall down a lot. This is a known fact. Everyone knows this. It's not only that kids are clumsy, it's that they don't think. It's been very apparent while I've been here that kids just get hurt when playing - especially when playing outside in the street. Last week, we had one particualarly injury-filled day. Kids kept getting hit in the head by the soccer ball (no thanks to Carlos who was purposefully aiming for heads) - bringing them to tears more than once. One boy fell while playing with the ball and scraped up his knees pretty good. Then after grabbing on to a passing car and riding it down the road, three came back with scraped knees, elbows, and sides. Like I said, they don't think.

Today we had more accidents. After lunch, the kids introduced us to a game they like to play. It starts out with everyone facing each other & holding hands in a circle. Then one side of the circle goes under the other side which flips everyone backwards. Then you proceed to run around in a circle until someone lets go and kids go flying. It was all good fun until the older kids started plotting who they were going to make go flying. Dulce got flown into the side of a house (made out of tin), another little boy got thrown and ended up with road rash on his bum, and Juan also got thrown down and ended up with a few scrapes. This wasn't the worst part though. After the kids started crying from being hurt, the older kids taunted the hurt kids which enraged them and they cried harder. Needless to say, we stopped that game.

 

 

Sadly, the injuries didn't stop with the game though. The older kids began swinging the smaller kids around. The kids were loving it. Until...two boys were swinging Juan, got distracted, and swung him too low. He hit his head on the ground and started bleeding. It wasn't a deep head wound, but as all head wounds do, it bled a lot. As much as I wanted to confort him, he can't understand me, which makes it hard. Darn my language deficiencies.

(I had another video for you, but I can't upload it at the moment...maybe later)

Needless to say, it's been a bad couple of days for injuries for these kids. I hope that the rest of my time here is injury free, but I highly doubt that. Well...I'm off to the beach now. I'll tell you all about that when I return on Sunday night.