Pajama Party!

One of the last things that we did with Sayuri while she was here was host a Pajama Party for all the girls in Chichos. Back in January we were going to take them on a field-trip of sorts to a Hacienda up the mountain for the day. We were going to do crafts, play some games, and just enjoy some girl time. It never happened due to Chicho canceling at the last min. and never being available to reschedule. The problem with this is that we had already promised the girls this paseo, but obviously couldn’t do it if Chicho would never give us a day. So we decided instead to do an all-nighter. Fun in general, but hard on the body. These poor girls were going to have worked a 12-hour day, come to our Pajama Party and stay up all night doing fun things, and then go right back to work another 12-hour day. It wasn’t ideal, but at this point it was really our only option. So we planned it for last Sunday night, and spent all week promoting it to the girls. Sayuri and I even made up invitations and passed them out. Everyone seemed super excited about it and said that they were going to come.
Well, “everyone” turned out to be four girls and a baby. We were disappointed that not more girls showed up, but in the end, it was nice to have just a small number. Nancy, Sara, Jenny, Elly and her baby showed up around 11:30 and we started by eating homemade pizza and soda. After that we made Valentine’s for each other using a bunch of scrapbooking supplies sent by people from E-Free in Lincoln. Thanks for the loot family! The girls really enjoyed this, and I’m not sure if they had ever done anything like it before. After that Meredith gave a little talk on love, and what real love looks like – both in the romantic sense and the spiritual sense. After this we played a few games, made cutout cookies and finally ended with a movie: Little Women! We all finally went to bed about 5:00am and then woke up at 7:00 so that we could make the girls French Toast for breakfast before sending them back off to work at 8:30. I did not envy the day ahead of them, but they assured us that they had a lot of fun and were glad that they came. So in that sense the evening was a success even though we were small in number.
The negative side of the evening knocked on our door about 11:00 the next morning. The mother of one of the girls came to ask if her daughter Jackie had been at the pajama party the night before. Jackie, who did not come to the party, told her mother she was here and even called her at midnight to say she was having such a good time with us. The mother was deeply worried because Jackie showed up at home at 8:00am that morning telling her mom that she had so much fun. Obviously the mother was worried about whether or not we were legitimate and if the sleepover had even taken place. Elsa and I spent 15min. explaining to the mother who we were and what we were doing here in Tarma, and how pained we were to learn that her daughter had used our event to cover up her lie to her mother. Needless to say, we will be addressing the issue at our devotional time at Chichos this Monday, and explain to the girls that if they are going to use our events in this way, we will no longer be able to host fun things for them. It is unfortunate that the actions of a few can ruin things for so many. After being so encouraged about how the night went, we were a bit discouraged to learn that this had happened. We were also discouraged to have to defend our name due to the lies of others. We’ll see what happens on Monday, but unfortunately we are going to have to proceed more carefully here on out than we ever thought we would have to.