We all say hello to everyone back home, and a Happy Father’s Day to all! My name is Genean Wrisley and I go to Analy High School in Sebastopol, California. So far this trip has been an eye opening experience and we have all learned about another culture and way of life. 

Today, after a wonderful breakfast at Alfreditos, the restaurant down the street, we began to prepare our English tutoring lessons for the next three classes. This means different things for everyone, whether it is a new song, vocabulary, or complex grammar lessons each group has to work hard to find interesting and informative lessons for their students. This whole experience has taught us the difficulties of being a teacher, planning lesson plans, and dealing with students at different levels. It has been eye opening to work with the locals and help them improve their English. 

Teaching Basic Level English Classes

After tutoring we began to finalize the details of our CAP (Community Action Project) and prepare a presentation for Sonanti (a local environmental organization that we will be working with). After much discussion and debate we have decided to make a mural out of recycled materials. The mural will be made out of mostly bottle caps and tiles. The message will be along the lines of “Keep the environment beautiful, throw away your trash.” This message will be in Spanish and the two phrases will be separated by a tiled tree. The mural will be on a wall in a school called Santa Cruz. The Global Glimpse students will also be organizing a school wide clean up to promote awareness about the amount of liter that is currently on the campus. 

Today the design team came up with two different nature scenes and decided on one with a tree in the middle, flowers on the ground, a few butterflies, and a bird throwing a plastic bottle in the trash. The budget team worked long and hard to try to make sure that we could buy all the materials needed without exceeding our budget. The feasibility team made sure that our plans were within reach, and our presenters planned out what they would say to Sonati. 

When Sonati arrived the Global Glimpse team dressed in their best and lead a wonderful presentation about our plans to promote environmental awareness in the school, Santa Cruz. After the presentation we made additional changes to our budget and design that Sonati suggested, and worked to sort bottle caps into different colors for the mural. 

After we finished working on the CAP project we were allowed free time to sleep, play board games, or walk in the rain. While many of us took advantage of this time, some were rudely awakened by flying bugs attempting to find shelter from the rain. This upset some of the girls and screams and giggles were easily heard as bugs were squashed or taken outside. 

Today was a relaxed day, so being leader of the day was not too taxing. However, I learned that staying on top of the time and making sure that everyone is on task is very important, and not always easy. I found out that at times it takes a lot of energy to be in charge of a group and make sure that everyone is where they are supposed to be when they are supposed to be there. Being the leader of the day has opened my eyes to yet another new experiance on this trip and I am grateful that I was able to have this experiance along with others.