Orphanage Visit

And now for something completely not food related, I swear.

One of the things Okayama AJET does is organize visits to the local orphanage in Okayama City. It's seriously one of the most fun and mutually-beneficial things I've done, volunteering wise in my life, I think. The visit was fun for pretty much everyone, and required only us to be able to make it into Okayama. I completely forgot which day it was on, but it was some time over the weekend. Sunday. It was Sunday, October 24, the weekend before Halloween weekend. So of course, our visit was Halloween themed. One of the dudes organized a bunch of Halloween games for the kids to play and a couple of us brought things like stickers. Oh man. So many stickers.

Eventually, I will get my album of this up. The kids were really really really cute. And wow. So much energy. If that's what teaching at elementary/preschool is like, I don't think I would have the energy for that. I think we spent a good hour minimum running around. Actually, we probably spent more time on that since the first hour we were there we pretty much played several games of tag with the kids (all independent of each other. It was more like, a kid or group of kids chose you to be 'it' and you chased them). At first, a bunch of us were super shy (others dove straight in) but eventually, I think everyone was involved in at least one game of tag. And seriously. I haven't played tag since like... middle school at least, and quite possibly elementary school. I forgot how much continuous running tag requires too. I was tired after several rounds.

We also played variations of tag, including "stuck in the mud" which was hilarious simply because there were us huge adult people and these tiny kids, and it required you to dive through people's legs to unfreeze them...

Some of the larger dudes made a tunnel. I kind of shied away from unfreezing anyone lol, cause I was like, ummmmm no not happening. There was this really adorable little kid who was sitting on the sidelines and would run out and unfreeze people. Super duper cute. :)

What else did we do... let's see...

There was a game that, I swear, was exactly like sharks and minnows except for not in the pool. That was fun. So much running. So much confusion at first lol.

We played 'telephone' or 'chinese whispers' with halloween too. The second round we got all tangled up in our section, but, as we discovered, it became hard to pass on. But man. It was funny. I might have deliberately "misheard" whatever the kid sitting next to me said, especially since I knew what the word was supposed to be...

The game we ended on (and when we finally got to pass out all 209348235 stickers we had brought) was with Heads Up 7 Up. It had a different name, but I forgot what that was. I had a small girl sitting in my lap. X) I was like YAY when that happened. It felt so... maternal lol. Even though I have no sense when it comes to taking care of or really, what to do with kids. I am not a good babysitter cause I have no idea a) how to hold babies b) how to get kids to stop crying and c) what to do with crying kids. Eventually, at the end we just started handing out stickers left and right. Some kids were *literally* covered in stickers. One kid's arm was covered in stickers. It was one of the cutest things I've ever seen.

The other fun thing about the visit is I got to see a whole different side to a bunch of other people that I usually don't get to see, since whenever we hang out, generally it's not work related (or even if it is, it's not teaching). It was a more playful side to everyone, because well, most of the kids were really young (like elementary age I think; I'm bad at recognizing what age people are or what level in school they are if they're younger than high school).

That day might have been raining, but it rocked kinda hard. Like those kids are fantastic. There weren't many older kids, but there were a whoooole lot of younger, crazy, high energy, super genki little ones. It made me kind of wish I taught younger kids too. It seemed like they had fun. We had fun. I've never run that much in my life for that long hahaha.

I will most definitely be going back on the next trip.