Hello family and friends back home! Today was a very interesting and intensely immersing experience. After waking up at a beautiful 4:30 am, we woke everyone up in preparation for the big day. Today would be the day where we’d out into the village of the impoverished community and spend the day with what would be our “host family.” What this ultimately entailed was the glimpsers separating into groups of two and being assigned a family where the glimpsers’ goal was to communicate as best as they could and help do the house/yard work for that day. This experience was amazing! Although we did not have the same house initially, our host families were closely related, making it easy for us to talk and communicate with each other throughout the day. Along with two other glimpsers, Matthew and Lindsay, we played with the young children of the two families—we engaged in an ‘intense’ game of soccer and we taught the two young boys, Eduardo and Robert, how to play “Monkey In the Middle.” We then went on to have lunch with our families, having brought multiple generous plates of Chinese Fried Rice cooked by Dona Francis at our hostel. Our families were amazing, generous, and incredibly nice. They taught us a lot of ways to be self- sufficient and they made it easy to get in where we fit in; they treated us as if we were really their family—although the children started off being really shy, by the end of the day they were very open and friendly with us. Eduardo from our family chased us around the woods with his fake gun trying to play cowboys and Indians. His laughter was so contagious; it was brought up in one of our conversations that laughter is universal as well as many other emotions. Almost everyone’s thorn of the day (the bad part of our day) was leaving our families. That was an priceless experience everyone should have the chance of doing. When we got back to the hostel we got to prepare for our first English class which was an experience in itself. A lot of the people were very enthusiastic while learning but there were many “class clowns” in every class. My favorite quote from one of the students was “I can speak English I just want to be better for me and my children.”  Many of the students felt as if it were necessary to speak English which made the classes run smoothly. Well in the words of Porky the Pig “That’s all folks”…. More to come tomorrow 🙂

 

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Catherine with her host brother

 

Pinata celebration

Pinata celebration

Styling & Sweeping a dirt walkway

Styling & Sweeping a dirt walkway

Team & Family unidos

Team & Family unidos