Today was our first CAP (Community Action Project) delivery day. We woke up at 7 am and after breakfast we took a bus to Rio Grande arriving at 9:30. Our idea originally was to pave cement for a new basketball court, but when we started mixing the cement plans changed. Instead of paving the court for basketball the hoop was moved to the opposite side of the road for the kids to play on. Now the pavement is going to be a mini park for the kids to play and socialize. Everyone collectively put in a lot of hard work across multiple challenging tasks. First, we had to carry the cement bags from the school to the park. We dug out weeds, rocks, and dirt in order to level everything in the area out. After that, the majority of the day was spent making more of the existing cement by adding water, rocks, and nearby sand to the mix while others paved it. We had to get the water from a nearby stream and we formed a line of glimpsers to pass the buckets all the way from the stream to the work area. Kids from the community were running around and were very eager to help us shovel and get things done. One of them, Miguel, loved hanging out on the tops of everybody’s shoulders. He ran up to Maddy so she picked him up and he gave her the biggest hug ever. It was a very heartfelt moment because he stayed like that for 10 minutes and needed some comfort. We planned to head back to our hotel for free time at 3:30 but ended up staying to finish the cementing until 5. When we finally got to the hotel, we had about an hour and a half of explore time, where we got to walk around the neighborhood to spend our money.

Malachi speaking here. Personally I had a different view of what the park was to look like in comparison to what we are building. I’m used to parks having things like swings, and slides. What we are building is basically a concrete area with concrete benches.
Our question of the day was “How does it feel helping others? Can one person make a difference?” When we discussed it in our nightly meeting, most people believed that helping others makes them feel reassured and proud. Our fellow Glimpser Azhani’s perspective about it was that one person has the potential to make enough of a difference to cause others to make a bigger difference in a domino effect.
Mrs. Dodge wants to apologize for the missing photos in these blogs. Internet is challenging and it takes a longer time to post a photo than to copy and paste a blog to the site. She will continue to try and get those pictures to you.

Maddy and Malachi