“Time flies whether you are having fun or not. The choice is yours“

My name is Mariah Tirado, I go to Brooklyn School For Collaborative Studies and I am 17 years old and today was my day to be “El Lider Del Dial”. Today the other glimpsers and I went to a beach called Palmar de Ocoa. This beach had really dark sand, the color was grayish. The water was crystal clear and unlike the other beach we went to in the beginning, this beach was packed with people from all over the Dominican Republic. Today in the beach my peers and I also met up with another delegation that was from California. That was pretty interesting and we got a chance to share experiences, because even though both delegations were located here in D.R. we were both in different areas. Because of the opportunity we got of meeting the other delegation, we learned a lot about them and their own experiences throughout the trip. One thing we learned was that the other delegation lived in different conditions than us. They lived more in a campo (campsite) and they didn’t always have running water and there were even insects. This made me feel as if we were a lucky delegation, and even when we thought that we were living in poor conditions there are much worse. What surprised me the most was that I thought that every delegation lived equally, I didn’t know that there were sometimes big differences between the groups’ experiences.

Today was just an amazing day and experience for everyone. One thing that I am proud of my peers for doing is trying to get the other delegation involved. For example, when everyone was in the water we tried to get the other delegation to play the games we were playing and when they actually got involved, it made the day even better. Another thing I am proud of is when they first came we welcomed them and even though we didn’t exactly get the response we were expecting, I was still proud of my fellow peers for being open and so welcoming to the other kids. One person that inspired me today was one of my fellow global glimpse leader Lauren. Lauren expected a group from New York to be coming not a group from California, so when she found out she was a little bummed because she knows some of the other leaders from New York. She inspired me because even though she was a little bummed she still attempted to try and talk and make friends with the other global glimpse leaders from California. This made me want to try and make an effort to get to know the other kids and so I did, making the time there even more memorable to take back home.

Today I was “El Lider Del Dia” and since it is towards the end, I guess you can say I learned from past leaders, which made my experience as a leader easier and just better for me. Being a leader is a lot of responsibility, more than I expected. It is like being responsible for every child there, anything they do you have to monitor their every move while making sure you are fulfilling your own responsibilities as a leader. My time as a leader, as I said before, was hard but easy at the same time. It was easy because as I am the second to last leader so everyone who was a leader before I watched and learned from. By watching all the leaders ahead of me, I learned what works and what does not work. Other than some minor things, being a leader was good. Something I learned about myself is that I am actually a good leader and I can apply this ability to my future job that I sometimes think about being. Sometimes when I think about what I want to be when I am older, I say I want to be a teacher. I know being a leader is a very big part of being a teacher because of the fact that you have to be a role model in order for the kids to listen and actually do what they have to do. Not only for them to be successful, but for myself. I’ve always known I had the ability to be a leader, but sometimes I just need a little boost to try because I have some flaws such as a lack of patience. I know I can just simply work on this but it’s hard so sometimes I choose to stand back. I will take what I learned here and apply it to my everyday life back home when I leave because I know it will come in handy.