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Hello! I am Jonelle Pascual from Andrew Hill high school. Today was an unusual day from the start, but it got even more out of the ordinary when we began to fall a good couple of hours behind schedule. Luckily, everyone on this trip was flexible with working around the scheduling issue, and the crisis was averted. Everyone started out the day with waking up to my morning calls at 7am. I personally went to each bed and woke up each individual under the impression that the previous leaders did the same thing, which was apparently untrue. An hour after the wake up call, we headed down to the usual place (La Favorita) for a nice, fruity breakfast that was mounted with oats and yogurt and paired with some sweet toasted bread. Before moving onto the group seminar, we decided on doing an energizer called something along the lines of “Honey if You Love Me, Please Smile”. In this energizer, we tried making the chosen one laugh after delivering the title as our line, to which a good majority of us were replied to with, “Honey, I love you, but I just can’t smile.” Our group seminar involved writing our donor letter drafts that told the recipients a little bit about ourselves, this trip’s impact on our futures, our most memorable moments on this trip, and much more! Once we finished the letters, we waited around for a little bit at the diner until we decided to do the waiting at the bus. Once the waiting was over, we made a trip to the hardware store to pick up some supplies for our CAP project, with the intentions of building benches and a roof over the bathroom for the school in Las Prusias. While waiting in the bus, yet again, for the supplies to be ready, Erin, our health coach, came up with the idea of playing a game called “Hot Seat”. We learned a lot more about each other (maybe too much information about each other), and had our laughs. We continued this game until we managed to arrive at the school in Las Prusias at noon, when we were scheduled to arrive at around 10:40am. Lunch was scheduled to be at noon, so we all decided to have our packed lunches (this included chicken in rice, salad, and bread) in the bus before getting to work on the benches. Upon filling our tummies, we began executing the plan of choosing the desks that were in perfect condition for upcycling into benches, had certain parts that weren’t necessary for the bench sawed off by Santos, a handyman from Las Prusias, sanded them down, and painted them a solid black.

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After completing today’s goal for the benches, a few of our Glimpsers (Hannah, Ulices, and Jeremy) took it upon themselves to carry the swing set that was no longer of any use into the school’s backyard, to no success. A couple more Glimpsers (including, but not limited to Alex, Mimi, Stella, and Kathy) decided to try and get the concrete base attached to the swing set up off of the dirt ground while the chaos with transferring the first swing set was still in progress. About 40 minutes after the scheduled time of leaving Las Prusias, everyone decided to leave the headache of transferring the swing set to the backyard to tomorrow. We then went on our way to head back to the hostel and arrived 20 minutes later, with about 10 minutes to grab everything we needed and prepare for the class we each were tutoring before heading out again to walk to the tutoring place. A short 20 minutes later (the distance gets easier with each passing day), we arrived at our destination and got right to tutoring. This lasted for about 2 hours, and then we made our way to Las Prusias for dinner, which was right around the corner (thankfully) to fill our empty tummies. Dinner first included colossal hot dogs and a choice of ketchup, mayonnaise, and relish and paired with some iced tea. Dinner then unexpectedly and THANKFULLY involved a second course meal of gallo pinto with some really salty cheese, salad, and bread after everyone still needed to quench their hunger (the hot dogs were not as filling as we thought they would be). Everyone is really grateful for the staff at Las Prusias for kindly dishing out more than enough gallo pinto to go around for everyone on the spot. After becoming satisfied with our filled tummies, we made our way back to the hostel, wrapped up with our nightly meeting, and are now preparing to face tomorrow’s challenges!

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