On July 9th, we got to experience what it was like for people who lived on a single dollar a day. We woke up to have an 8:00 breakfast of only gallo pinto (rice and beans) which definitely was not satisfying for most of us. After breakfast, we took about an hour bus ride to Nuevo Amanecer, an impoverished community. Once there, we had a guest speaker tell us about the history of Nuevo Amanecer and her personal experience with it. She was one of the first inhabitants there and she told us about what it was like starting the community and the outside help they had gotten in doing so from an organization called Friends of Students for 60,00
0. She also told us how few visitors they had, mak
ing it so exciting for them to have students like us come in and live a day in their shoes. The kids were especially excited to meet all of us. We were then divided into groups of two or three among eight households. We each got to personally talk to a member of the community and learn about what life was like before Nuevo Amanecer for these people. Although they were still struggling in many ways, all of them only had positive things to say about Nuevo Amanecer and none of them complained about the lives they were living, which was quite admirable. Some of us also got to help with chores around the house, such as sweeping and cleaning. It felt great to know that we were helping these people, even if it was in a very small way. We had taken lunches of paella and bread with us for ourselves along with each of the members of the families and we got to sit and eat with them there. After lunch, many of us decided to play with the children, who had been so excited to have us there. It was definitely a lot of fun for all of us who played and for the children as well. We took lots of pictures with them saying “queso” and we mean LOTS. Sadly, it was soon time to leave and we would have to say that most of us were really depressed about doing so. We had felt at home with those people and it sucked to leave. Once we got back to the hostel, we quickly planned our CAP presentation for Amalia, the woman in charge of Las Chavaladas. Although the planning was quite rushed, the presentation went well and she loved all of the ideas we had for improving the facility, from redoing the murals to building soccer goals for the boys who lived there. After the presentation, we had a short amount of free time during which all of us rested and then we moved on to planning for our English tutoring classes. At 5:00, we had dinner of *surprise surprise* gallo pinto again. After dinner, from 6:00 to 8:00, we had our English tutoring classes as usual. By this time, we had grown quite familiar with our students and classes had begun to be fun for all of us. We then had our nightly meeting during which we passed the hat to Natalie which ended our day.