The Juice.... Is Worth the Squeeze. And when the Fruit is out of Season?

It seems I am only driven to write when my heart and my head are all a mess. The lastr blog I wrote entitiled choque, occured shortly before a crash of love, life and romance. What happens when the "perfect" person prances into your already perfect life and makes eveything significantly more complicated. A crash.

That was in April. This is July. The seasons have changed. The cold has come to Bolivia. Remembering back to the state of my heart at the writing of the last post, it seems, that as the searons have changed, so have I.

I took some time to escape the Bolivian winter in the Heat of Summer in the North It was lovely.
I came back home to a whirwind of change. With the gush, this little leaf might finally have found where she was meant to fall.

Returning to Sucre has represented a change of house, of job discription, social circle. It has also marked a renewing of sense of direction and passion. They once called me Fire... maybe one day, I will be deserving of that name.


 I have speant the last several months slowly getting to know many of the niños trabajadores who work on the streets of Sucre. My first day back in the plaza with many new friends, I found myself eating lunch in the  market with nine street kids. I have learned their stories and learned thier dreams- many of which are satisfied by a successful day of shining the shoes of tourists and good Bolivan Catholics in the plaza outside the cathedral. What do you really want to do when you get older? Be in charge of the shoe shiners.

The kids on the street, like the kids in my private school in Khatalla call me profe. The same age as many of my students, I listen to them read and challenge them with math problems. SOmetimes we paint. Sometimes they fight. We always laugh. Their laughs are so similar to the kids in the school.... their lives, so very different. And there I am, challenging them to be better and to work top be more than shoe shiners, that life has more to offer than 5 Bolivianos.  Edgar, Juan, Wiler, Angél, Flora y Paolita.... are smart, talend kids.... but they will never have the opprotuinities that Carmen, Lizeth, David, Obed y Carla will have. The few services that exist to help niños trtabajadores are not working to take them off the street. They are not working to teach them real skills. Why is it that the church´s answer is always another Horita Feliz? 

Committed to a school that these kids may never enter, My heart is burdened by the question, what will my answer be?  The Fruit is in the squeezer-....