Parade= Children's Riot

Sorry I haven’t posted in a long time! I have been nauseous basically all weekend. But here’s my next adventure!

On Friday we were told we would be having a parade with the whole school. The children had been preparing their outfits/get up in arts and crafts all week. I pictured the kids going class by class around the schoolyard or something. No. We definitely took 170+ kids and teachers down the small dirt road, onto the main street of the city (basically the equivalent of Douglas Boulevard), and across the street to the beach. It was insane. The camp director kept saying that it was safe because we had a police escort. That’s fine and dandy but when you have 150 children one cop car at the front doesn’t do much. It’s dangerous enough everyday for me walking home from school because they have no sidewalks, the streets themselves are not very wide, and motorcycles dart around the cars all the time.

So we started walking with the kids and I quickly realized I had to take on more of a crowd control role. The kids were all chanting their class mascot’s name and theme song as they danced/pranced along. I walked in the middle of the street and urged them to stay closer to the sidewalk. The small dirt road was bad enough but then we got to the main street. Motorcycles were zipping past and cars were backed up completely as we turned the street into a one lane road. I think people were pretty angry at us! One car started driving right in front of our parade and started playing Reggaeton music. I thought I had been zapped into an MTV music video or some nasty night club. Even the youngest kids could seriously shake it. It was impressive but a little disturbing. Then we completely stopped traffic as we crossed the road to the beach. We waited for 30 minutes with the kids because the ice cream shop in town had forgotten that they agreed to donate ice cream for all the kids. We finally got the ice cream and marched in little groups back to the camp. It was a pretty insane ordeal. At any moment one of the children could have been struck by a car or motorcycle fairly easily. It’s crazy what you can do at a summer camp when you know none of the kids’ parents can sue you!