Hola Familia y Amigos, my name is Emigdia and I was el lider del dia. We all started the day at 6:00 am in the morning because we had a day ahead full of fun and emotions. Today was one of the hardest days that we faced so far because it was a continuation of yesterday’s theme, which was Poverty. To start the day off we traveled to Las Hormigitas which is an organization that helps street kids by giving them access to education. We had Sandra, the head of the organization, speak to us about the purpose of the organization as well as what they do to help street kids like making sure they could focus on school instead of work. In order for them to reach out to the community they use mobile education, which is a cart that is easy to transport, with six slide walls varying different topics for example math including multiplication, division tables, games that teach the 5 senses, alphabets, numbers, and so on.

After learning about Las Hormigitas organization we took our knowledge into action. We took a trip to Las Hormigitas Venedero (dump) and we all took precautions because safety comes first. We cover up wearing long pats, long sleeves, sturdy and thick sole shoes.  We met up with the same teachers and student volunteers from Las Hormigitas at the dump and right away all the glimpsers joined the mobile school team. All of us started playing with the kids at the dump, we talk to the people that work at the dump they were really friendly and some told us about their story to which lead them to be working in the dump. The experience we had can not compare to anything we saw before. We saw kids, adults, young people looking for things in the trash that they can use for example cloth, food, scrap metals, bottle so they can recycle and get money for it.  We stay there for about an hour. On our ride back we were in silence just reflecting what we saw.

When we came to the hostel we had a group discussion about how we felt when we got there, what we felt at the end and how  would our lives be different after being at the dump. Al0na said that we think about the wrong things when talking about poor people that they are just sad but what we saw was totally opposite people treated the dump as a job and they would rather do that than rob. They want to work hard rather than get things easily. The glimpser’s response about what they would change in their life were as following- “I am going to stop trying to be impressed all the time”, “take education 100% seriously”, “live..accept..appreciate EVERYTHING”,” become more family oriented because here family really does come first”, and “we distract ourselves from happiness with materialistic things and forget that real happiness comes from family and human connection”. I wish the parents could see what their kids would take home and take action into their daily lives. However no pictures were taken today at the dump because as Jose said during the group discussion, “What we saw could not be conveyed through images.” Some moments are meant to be experienced rather than documented.

Afterwards, we were introduced to the 3D model of planning so that our vision and action come together. The 3D’s were Discovery -figuring out what the community needs, Design- planning our project and finally Develop- putting our idea into action. We finished our night by watching a documentary Dreaming Nicaragua. It complemented what we saw and made the experience resonate.

 

Movie Night

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