The next day, we come to little AHOPE and find that more of the kids are sick. They are feverish, tired and clearly miserable. We’re not sure what’s up or what it is, but the poor guys are not doing too well. The nannies are in the process of clearing out the nursery to use as a quarantine room, which I don’t think is such a great sign.

Kate has the day off from work, so she, M and I go over to big AHOPE to paint the classroom. We buy the paint and accoutrements at Home Depot, and pop in a shared taxi to go down the road. When we get to big AHOPE, kids start to appear out of the woodwork. First two, then three, then about eight. We pile all the furniture in the middle of the room and start trying to paint the walls. Of course, the kids all want to help, so we let them. This is perhaps not our best idea. They put the rollers down on their desks, spray paint all over their clothes and the floor, and let paint drip down the windows. Eventually, I hand over my roller so that I can follow behind them and clean up.

When we’re finished, the room is a Caribbean turquoise and it looks infinitely better than the scummy white walls we painted over. We clear the kids out of the room, and they all cluster around the classroom, listening to M’s iPod and playing Avril Lavigne over and over. Kate is horrified by the state of the floor, and she kneels down on the floor to scrub the paint away, even though the floor is completely filthy. She scrubs madly until we drag her away, kicking and screaming and crying, “I missed the corner!”.

The kids are so delighted by the new walls and the furniture that we sorted through that they volunteer to clean up. Sneaky leads the kids in sorting through the crap on the bookshelves, as I separate the broken desks from the working ones, and M and Kate re-hang the maps and blackboards. Without being asked, the kids sort through the papers, their little foreheads wrinkled with concentration, until it’s all done. The room looks beautiful, and I want to hug all the kids for trying so hard to make the room nice.

Afterwards, we go home and bathe and relax for a little while before program. We walk back to big AHOPE, thinking we’re getting there just in time for the Good Friday festivities. Instead, we bust in just in time for the program to end. We’re given cokes and candy like all the kids, and we sit for a few minutes as they finish the singing and praying. Then we all check out the classroom and admire our handiwork. I give my tape recorder to the kids, and they all run around talking into it (usually yelling about how I am crazy, and they are not, and singing songs. On the way home, a bunch of the kids are in the van with us, so that they can take a tour of the city at night. We all cram in and they sing songs into the tape recorder until we get out and the van takes off into the night, full of children climbing all over the seats.