!Pura vida!

Hola! Today, Paris Higuera and Natalie Mendoza were the Leaders of the day. Today’s topic was Aid and Development. It was a very interesting topic to learn about, I am glad we got to learn about it!

Today we had the duty of waking up all of the cabins, I was nervous about not being able to wake up, but I did end up waking up at 6:10, I had to wake up everyone at 7:30, funny story….today my clock was set 10 minutes early so I accidentally woke everyone up 10 minutes earlier then I had to, so everyone literally woke up 10 minutes earlier, I think they were all confused why I woke them up so early, but hey they had a head start in the day! Haha!

After breakfast, we headed to do our morning warm-up where we’d review the quote of the day and question of the day to get everyone’s minds turning and start thinking about what the questions/quote may mean. Today’s quote of the day was “True development must be in harmony with the needs of the people and the rhythm of the natural world” – Suiak Sivaraksa. For me (Paris), after thinking about it and having it on mind throughout the day and hearing what my peers had to say about it, this quote meant that there may always be something going on that may need to be solved, that can be identified by any individual; but when that individual is trying to help solve this problem, they must take into consideration how what they are doing is impacting the needs of the people and making sure they are not destroying something that may take away from the people. On the other hand I, (Natalie) think my interpretation of the quote is fulfilling everyone’s basic needs, meaning equity for everyone to have a fair advantage, because we have to acknowledge that everyone comes from a different backgrounds and don’t all have the same opportunities that others may have.

Later in the day, we discussed the Community Action Project (CAP) we took part in for three days. A question that popped up in the discussion was “Why do you think we did the CAP through the end? “. This is a question that made everyone start truly thinking about why we did the CAP through the end of the trip, we all came to several conclusions: One of them being if we started our CAP project too soon we would not have been as prepared. We realized that each of our themed days heading into our project helped us to prepare. We also realized that our relationships had strengthened to the point that we trusted each other and were able to work together more fluidly. Community Day was also a motivator as meeting folx in the community helped to increase our motivation and our WHY! Lastly, we talked about how nice it was to see the students’ faces as they came to their “new” school!

We had a guest presenter teaching us about Aid and development, it was a very interesting topic to learn about. I was able to learn the steps on how to make an impact anywhere. Starting with Location, finding a place where you can make an impact, somewhere where you can change people’s lives for the better! Then identify a Problem in that area. And once you got that, you’d start Planning, to understand and solve the problem. Then we’d get into the Action where we’d all go out to achieve what we set ourselves to do! What I took out of his presentation is how to make a plan for these to happen you must find a community to work together because everyone is different, and everyone has unique skills that can be put into a project, to make a project happen, and to be able to change/ impact someone’s life, even if it’s in the tiniest way. Something small can be very powerful, just like how we were able to paint the elementary school; it may seem like something small, but what we truly did was create a positive environment for the children! By combining all of our individual strengths, we were able to achieve an amazing impactful project, just with teamwork.

Throughout our Aid and Development day, we all learned a lot about how you can make an impact in your community; there are problems everywhere you just have to pay attention and make sure you have a true intention in what to solve or take part in a problem. You are capable of anything you must believe in what you want to achieve and must always remember these actions can and will make an impact on someone’s life, hopefully in a good way. This is why we must always strive to make changes in our communities.

After the guest speaker, we split off to do several different things such as; going swimming and playing volleyball in the pool, others played UNO or card games. Meanwhile, we also had our 3rd phone call home and heard from our loved ones to keep them updated about what we learned during our trip. Overall today was a great day for everyone, at our nightly meeting we discussed our quote of the day again and what we enjoyed about this day!

Thank you for listening! Bye ✌️

Love Natalie and Paris