Who's the Fool?

April fools day is always something looked forward to at my house. My brother and I make secret plans to fool each other and our parents and we have come up with some great pranks in years past.
As April approached this year, I determined that this year should be no different than years past. I would find a victim - someone who was just asking to be pranked. That someone happened to be Kevin.
Kevin is my 9th grade student. He's pretty smart and always joking around and laughing at me. The only problem is that April fools isn't celebrated here and no one knows what it is. With careful planning, I casually told him about April fools a month in advanced then warned him that any prank was possible on that day to anyone. He squinted his eyes at me and told me he would be ready. I reminded him about it the day before April just in case he had forgotten but to my satisfaction, he had not and was looking forward to it. Good.
April 1st was on Sabbath and as it happened, it was my houses sabbath to be in the kitchen. Each house has a rotation where we have to make the food for that Sabbath. Everything is already precooked  the day before like the rice, beans and tortillas but the breakfast food, Mosley (which is like oatmeal mixed with soy milk and bits of fruit - it's what we have every sabbath) just needs to be mixed together and cooked. I guess we follow more closely the Israelite tradition of not cooking on the Sabbath but that's because it's a lot of work starting the fire and cooking everything.
Anyways,the volunteers in my house and I decided to pull a prank and dye the Mosley pink. However, it didn't really work out because everyone just thought we used leche de frutilla (strawberry milk) to flavor the Mosley so almost no one got the joke.
Although that joke was a bust, I had been scheming for a month on what joke I should pull on Kevin and had finally arrived at a simple solution: toothpaste in Oreos. The only mistake that I made was that I should not have removed all the cream inside but added the toothpaste on top of the cream. I didn't however and so the cookie was a little more squishy than normal. Kevin picked up on it right away when I offered him and Oreo and said he was going to split his Oreo with Jesús.
That's when I knew my joke was foiled and when he broke the cookie, he could clearly tell that there was toothpaste instead of cream inside. Bummer.
With that he rubbed the Oreo and toothpaste in my face then ran off laughing. By the time I came back after washing my face off, Jesús had given his broken part of the cookie to one of the girls and had convinced her to eat it which she did then quickly spit it out. So one person got pranked at least.
At that moment,one of the other boys came over, Jahel, and asked what the noise was so I offered him a cookie. He was suspicious too, looked inside, saw that it had toothpaste and began to happily eat it. Turns out, he's one of those kids who likes to eat toothpaste. Two of my girls will eat toothpaste so we have to keep it for them and only let them use a little each time they want to brush their teeth. So April fools had an interesting turn of events and while no prank was actually successful, it was still a fun day.

. . . . .

I haven't hit the "oh my word! I'm going to leave soon! I don't want to! Going away will be the worst!" Stage yet but I am starting to stay awake longer thinking about what I can do for these kids in the last 39 days that I have here.

Spring break, Semana Santa, was last week and I had half the week off with a group of people then the last part of the week, the other half of the volunteers had off. Almost everyone who had their time off the first part of the week went to La Paz but I stayed here and was content with going to town every so often to talk to my family. I arrived back on campus after being gone the whole day and was met by all my girls who didn't go home for spring break, running out to meet me and giving me hugs. It was like I had returned from a long vacation instead of just seven hours in town. I am starting to realize that I just might miss a little bit of everything when I leave.

It's been a while since I posted, I know. So many things have happened and taken place but through the ups and downs, the trails and the victories I can still say that God is faithful and constant. He loves us with a love beyond what we are able to imagine! And this adventure that God has brought me on in Bolivia has revealed to me more of His unfathomable love.