Hello from Matagalpa, Nicaragua!! Our names are Teddy Wong and Nick Goomer, and we are the leaders of the day. Today was day 2 of our Community Action Project and we all had a blast. Both of us were very excited to lead our fellow Glimpsers into this challenging and gratifyingly chaotic day. We started off the day by waking up at 7am, not too early, not too late. We then enjoyed a delicious breakfast of eggs and gallo pinto. Before the trip to the school , we had an energizer to wake everyone up! We played “who’s your daddy” where one person tries to guess the person who is leading the dance movement for the whole group. Everyone had so much energy to dance and the smiles really brightened up everyone’s day.

Then, we started walking to the school,  escuela de Gabriela Mistral, where we needed to finish our Community Action Project. Once we stepped into the school, we felt the warm-hearted welcoming from the students and teachers. Once we were all ready to start working, we made a single file line with most of the glimpsers and started to move rocks from one side of the courtyard to another. Whenever there is an recess from each class, the high school students are willing to help us and join our conversation while the kinder gardeners were playing hide-and-seek. Through this community project, Glimpsers and the students built a strong relationship with each other. We taught each other games and even had a dance battle! Everyone came out of their comfort zone and opened up. Even though there might be language or culture barriers, but they didn’t stop us from having fun!

As soon as Nick and Alex came back from buying materials half of the group built the fence, the other half worked on the cabinets. We were all sweating through our shirts but we believed that everything was worth it at the end of the day. Soon after we stopped for an amazing lunch, cooked by the generous cooks at the Casa Del Rey, and then got right back on it working non stop until 3 o clock. By the end of our time at the school we had finished with the general frame of the lockers and the general frame of the fence. We were almost done with the entire project. Soon after we headed back to the hostel to prepare for english tutoring at one of the local public school. We only have two classes left so most of us decided to spend the entirety of the hour and a half reviewing old material. It was awfully difficult given the lack of light, inability to enter the classrooms, and downpour of rain, but we made it work and most of us had a lot of fun doing so. By the time we got back to the hostel we were all completely exhausted so after a shortened nightly meeting, we all went to sleep.

Today was a true representation of the raw potential that humans have when they worked together. Unlike yesterday, everyone was much more organized and willing to work and we came together seamlessly to make very significant strides towards finishing our CAP. The progress we made in just one day was astounding. Just being a part of this amazing group of young men and women inspires me to work harder, with more drive and passion. Just this morning, we believed that there was no chance we would be able to finish the project by Thursday, but our minds were blown away when we saw people working with such vigor and determination. It was truly a breathtaking sight. I am so proud of each and every person in our delegation, and I could not even fathom a group as diligent and hard working as ours.

Being the leaders of this group on this particular day was a great experience and  we would not trade it for the world.