Hello everyone! Today was a very successful day.

We started our Community Action Project (CAP) today at the children’s center Barriletes. Barriletes is a great, safe place for children to go, but they have many needs and not enough money or resources to satisfy all of them. Our group felt very passionate about helping them with as many things as we could. We only had 2.5 days, some donated resources from the community, and the amount of money that we donated to the project, but all of us had such a strong desire to do as much as we could despite the odds. We decided on three major projects to undertake: painting murals for both educational and aesthetic purposes, building a water fountain, and fixing a hazardous hole in the play area. For the first part of the day, we split into two groups- one to buy the painting supplies and one to buy the construction supplies. I was in the group buying the construction supplies, and got to take a cool ride back to the hostel once we were finished. A big reason as to why today was so successful was because we saved a ton of money! Parents of  the Barriletes’ children donated more than we expected, so we have extra money to buy Barriletes a new ladder- a need that we thought we wouldn’t be able to fill because of our budget. After lunch, we headed to Barriletes and got straight to work. The first thing we experienced upon arrival was a bunch of the cutest children swarming us and giving us all hugs. Personally, I had been feeling pretty tired and this one little girl brought my whole mood up. I was in a group that was breaking concrete and digging a trench to make space for a new pipe. I broke the concrete because everyone jokes around about me being really strong. We finished this in about 40 minutes, and the boys working on the hole got way further than they expected to. Every group surpassed the goals they had set for today’s amount of work. Since I was the leader, I was walking around and checking in on every group. Everyone was working so hard and was so concentrated on their task at hand. It was really awesome to see our ideas turn into action, and even get more results than we would have imagined. Now that we know our capabilities, everyone is excited to see how great these projects will turn out. I hope that our hard work will leave a lasting impact on Barriletes.