Greetings Family and Friends,
Today was CAP (Community Action Project) Day 2. For those who don’t know, we’re working on a baseball field for a local Dominican team, Cristo Del Rey. Today we woke up at 7:00am, left the hotel at 9:00am, and arrived at the field at 9:15am. The construction workers met us at the park and instantly began to install the metal doors and weld the fences to fix the bends and broken fence. Before noon, we finished painting the dugouts with the Dominican flag colors, and outlined/painted “Home” and “Visitor” in Spanish. Also, during this time the artist of the group finished sketching the Baseball Union logo and started to paint. Next to this after seeing the design, we began to sketch the team logo, due to extra time.
At noon, we ate lunch with the community. Our food caterers graciously brought our meals to the Baseball Field. This was a great way to take a break and meet new people within the community. Thankfully, we have a multitude of translators; therefore, communicating with Spanish speakers is fairly easy. Also, a few of us were able to interact with the local children, by playing baseball, painting, and running around/playing. Despite the heat they had an extravagant amount of energy to keep us active throughout the day. In the nick of time, the ice cream man came to the field with his cart and sold us vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate ice cream bars.
After a long day of hard work, we returned to the hotel for quiet time where some people took naps, showers, and played card games. After an hour or two we had dinner and surprised one of our glimpsers Mason Simpkins with a birthday cake and song.
In conclusion, during our nightly meeting when answering the question of the day “What have you learned from working with the community? ”and “Who is one person you will miss seeing?”, they responded with everyone has a story no matter whether if it’s big or small and you can always learn from others. By conversing with the community workers you began to learn more about their life and how they see/experience things. The people that the group will miss the most is one of our local Youth Ambassadors, Darling, and the children we taught in our English tutoring classes.
Love, Naomi Evans and Alexis Jackson