CAP day 1 is complete!! As project manager of our delegation’s community action project and leader of the day today, I can happily declare the group’s aspirations are being realized.

We awoke eagerly at 6:00 (I at 5:30) this morning after a good night’s rest and readied our backpacks for a day full of hard work under the beating sun. Many of us brought two water bottles which only further corroborated the heat wave anticipations. At 7, we ate a savory breakfast of fresh eggs, gourmet gallo pinto, and hand-crafted tortilla chips. Once finished, we rallied back at the hostel for an hour of ‘CAP Delivery’ time, which we allotted previously as buffer time to resolve any last-minute complications (such as roles needing clarification, plans requiring refining, and materials or tools which had yet to be purchased). Even so, many of our desired resources were unavailable due to our stingy budget and our partner organization – UCA  Miraflor – being out on holiday until the following morning.

Consequentially, those who I delegated to working on the chain-link fence for the day, under the leadership of Sammy Sheldon, were only able to prepare the holes for the fence posts, which we will hopefully fasten in concrete tomorrow (once UCA Miraflor brings it). As for the other two projects, painting is nearing completion while the bathrooms are just being graduated from the conceptual phase. Sara’s crew of crafty painters coated nearly all of the walls on the inside and outside of the casita (the preschool building) in a single day through sheer will and determination, while Sara herself busted out most of the outline for the mural – which looks masterfully designed, might I add. Across the schoolyard, Sam R.’s  team of structural engineers blueprinted the method of attack for the bathrooms, which look more like torture chambers in their current state than public facilities.

All in all, the CAP Execution period of our day was far more productive than most of us had anticipated, and we finished with two and a half hours to spare. This left time for yet another, although twice as long, CAP preparation interval. Utilizing our earlier notations of necessities we were lacking (more than one tape measure and an additional 13 steel fence posts), our resource retrieval team partitioned into three squads: the painters, the fencers, and the latrine-housing engineers. The latter two ended up merging (becoming the conglomerate I was part of) and consuming the majority of the time searching for money-changers, thus materials were purchased for pickup tomorrow instead of being carried directly back to the hostal. Sara’s team of elite, as it happens, did not have that problem and returned with every item they set out for.

As the day weaned into dinner and our bodies began to feel the dedication of earlier, we enjoyed a comforting dinner of rice, pinto beans, tacos, and another mysterious yet refreshingly exotic juice. Hiccups aside, we Glimpsers are in good shape to take the reins of the day tomorrow and make our contribution to Robledalian society a reality.