WOOOHOO ! Our first community action project a.k.a CAP day has finally arrived, and we can’t even put into words about how proud we are of our group. What is CAP exactly you may ask? Well, it’s a big project where the glimpsers join as one to help improve and rehabilitate the community. In our case it would be to revitalize the school of CECAINI which serves the children and their families that work at the local dump (vertedero). We have a total of four projects going on which are to provide safe drinking water, paint a mural devoted to recycling, re-paint the basketball court and plant trees around the school.

Corina: Since there were four different projects going on we each had different community members in our groups helping us, I worked with the existing gardener at CECAINI, Ramon, who gave us AMAZING tips on how to plant a tree. He told us that the trees had to be a certain distance apart from each other to be able to grow big and strong. Ramon was a big inspiration to me because he showed us that hard work does go a long way. This project also made me realize that you can’t just put something in the ground and call it community service. You have to involve the community and incorporate their needs and agree on something that can be useful and feasible for everyone involved.

Jocelyn: My group’s CAP project was to re-paint the basketball court. At first there were a few complications at the beginning because we had to wait for special paint that could withstand the wear-and-tear of ball games to arrive. Once when the paint came, we only had about 30 minutes of work time which was much less than the other groups.  However, we prevailed and painted a third of the court beautifully in that time.  Our group worked, Ken, the same painter that painted the original court three years ago.  He taught me how to paint more efficiently and gave good advice on how not to “paint outside the lines”. With our progress thus far, we could already see the dilapidated court transform into a beautiful masterpiece with clean and vibrant colors.  It is amazing that a simple splash of paint could instantly brighten the campus.  It warms my heart knowing that the next time the students enroll in school, they will see a beautiful basketball court which is just one more incentive to stay in school and continue their education.

 

We really understood the meaning of teamwork today- there were so many hiccups but we made progress and are all still friends!  🙂  We have only just begun our journey to beautify CECAINI but we already feel the satisfaction of putting hard work in alongside the community to help our future generations.  We cannot wait to show you the final products!