Christmas shopping for 19 kids -- Only one week before Christmas

I haven't blogged much lately, but today was truly a blogworthy experience. 

We have a family of 5 here that wanted to do something different for Christmas this year, so they are here bringing a little Christmas joy to the people of Honduras, especially the kids at CdE.  My dad has planned to go skiing this week with my brother for much longer than this family had planned on coming this week.  Therefore, Matt is running things.  This week is pretty light:  shopping today, feeding center tomorrow, build Tuesday, dump Wednesday, CdE Thursday.

Malls are all the same internationally on the last full shopping weekend before Christmas.  My dad and Karen decided a while back that this year would be the year of no toys for Christmas, only things they could actually use.  I promise you toys would have been much easier.  We decided that each kid would get shoes, jeans, and a shirt.

Now imagine 8 gringos and 3 Hondurans going into the most crowded store in the mall to shop for 19 kids.  I thought it would be easy, but I thought wrong.  For shoes, I only had a traced cutout of each child's foot, and for clothes, I only had my best guess.  More shoes than not seemed to not have the size we wanted.  After the clerks bringing us at least 75 different shoes saying, "This is the biggest size we have," we only left the Carrion store 5 pairs of shoes short of what we hoped for.

Here we are not allowed to carry the shoes with us until we buy them.  They must wait with the cashier until we are ready for checkout.  We got someone to carry the shoes downstairs so that we could purchase everything all at once.  My main job was to make sure each child ended up with right sizes and sending each person off to pick things out.  I think I said some thing like this:  3 tens, 1 twelve, 2 eights, 3 six, oh i'm forgetting someone.  I counted and recounted to make sure that we ended up with the right number pants and shirts.  I sure hope we did.  We are still short one pair of shoes.  Brayan really wants cowboy boots, and the only ones we saw were really expensive. 

Tomorrow, my mission is to find wrapping paper (more difficult than you could imagine here), bows, stuff to make cookies and gingerbread houses.  While I hated being with everyone else that lives in Tegucigalpa this afternoon, I am thrilled to be able to see the excitement on each person's face when they get to open their gifts.