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Hola!

Today’s focus was Aid and Development and it was a day filled with tons of fun and learning! Wake up call was at 8:00 followed by a delicious breakfast of toast, eggs, fruit, and juice courtesy of our wonderful food providers, Onaney. After breakfast we were joined by guest speakers from the Peace Corps, Oscar Palma and Jose Nunez Ruiz. We had a two hour seminar filled with a lot of super interesting information about understanding, respecting, and communicating about culture. They elaborated on their own personal experiences working in the DR as well as the general process of joining the Peace Corps. At 12:00 the speakers joined us for yet another amazing meal consisting of chicken, pasta, and rice. After saying a quick thank you and goodbye to the speakers, we had 2 hours of free time in which we all showered, talked, played games, and took naps. In order to boost morale following free time, we all played a quick game of “human knot.” Things got quite intense and competitive, but it was super fun nevertheless! We then joined Kimberly and Andrea to discuss and decide ideas for our upcoming CAP project, which you all will learn more about later! After finally agreeing on a few ideas we split off into three groups to plan our presentations for the panel tomorrow. After finalizing our posters we joined at the dinner table to have a self reflection in which we all shared significant items that we brought on the trip and what they mean to us. Things got a little bit emotional, but it was really nice to connect with each other on a much deeper level :). We then had some really good pizza and juice for dinner, it was super delicious!! After dinner we had our “living like a local” seminar, which was filled with tons of shocking statistics and facts about poverty in the DR and all around the world as well as a debrief of the rules we will need to follow for the next 24 hours. Finally, we had our nightly meeting where we reviewed our day, talked about our roses and thorns, and passed the sash to the next Lideres del Dia (LDD/Leaders of the Day), Cindy and Aydya!!

Thank you all for keeping up with our trip, we read some blog comments last night and we all really enjoyed hearing some loving words from home!! SJ1B sends lots of love!!

See you all soon!!