Question of the day: What have you learned from working with the community? Who is one person you will miss seeing?

Quote of the day: “A lot of little people, doing little things in little places, can change the world.”

Hi families and friends! It’s the leaders of the day, Leilani and Adam. This morning we started off the day with some disappointing news. Due to rainy weather and strong climate, we could not participate in Community Action Project

Day 3: To make up for it, our Program Coordinators decided that it would be nice to invite the community leaders to our hotel for a final goodbye and thank you. When they arrived to the hotel, Steph, Adam, and I spoke a few words to voice our gratitude. A few tears were shed but the community leaders brought us corn and we spent our final moments together giving hugs, eating, and taking pictures.

Yesterday was our last bus ride with Andrea, but without knowing, we weren’t able to say our final goodbye. To make up for it, Steph invited her to the hotel so all of us could share our thanks. We took a group photo and shared some laughs. This whole trip would not have been possible without her amazing driving and savvy tunes.

Camilo told the group we were going to fill the time we would have been working on the Community Action Project by watching a TED Talk he had mentioned earlier in the trip. We all gathered around the TV in the meeting room, and to our surprise, the video went to static. It then changed to a birthday video for Amie which was a compilation of the GG group wishing her a happy birthday. While the video played we were all laughing and Amie seemed to be very overwhelmed by everyone’s positivity. After the video, we finished the celebration by eating chocolate cake and singing happy birthday.

The rest of our day was time for all of us to just lay back and enjoy some free time. Some people stayed back at the hotel and played cards, others went out into town to take in some final moments of Guaranda. It’s going to be hard to say goodbye to this beautiful city that has been our home for the past two weeks.

We now pass the torch to the next leaders of the day, Colton and Juan