Hello to family and loved ones back home!

Today we stayed at the base house all day, but still had plenty of activities keeping us busy. We woke the group up today by spraying them with water guns while knocking on the door to the song “4K” by El Alfa! Once everyone calmed down we had a nice breakfast of pinto, eggs, bread, fruit, and cereal.

We then had our mental warm up which led right up to our CAP Seminars #1 + #2. This seminar helped us start to prepare for our big Community Action Project that was started by previous delegations here in Costa Rica. For our second seminar, we divided into groups to make a plan for the 3 main tasks of our project at the Santa Rosa School. One group will be finishing painting 2 classrooms that weren’t able to be finished by the previous delegations. The second group will focus on painting a mural on a wall at the school. The final group will begin painting a new classroom from scratch.

We then had a nice lunch of carne asada with papas y chuleta. After lunch, we began to prepare for our guest speaker by watching a video about how gentrification and tourism have impacted the local communities in Costa Rica. Then our guest speaker arrived.

Our guest speaker, Andres, or “Fofo”, came and talked to us about environmental justice and the importance of sustainability in the country. Fofo then split us into 3 groups, with one group representing the local community, one group representing the government, and one group representing a big company trying to build a 5-star resort in the local community. After a short discussion with our groups, we got into a heated debate with the government as the jury with the local community ending up coming on top!

We then had some downtime and some of us joined a yoga session with one of our GGLs, Thomas. Afterward, most of us jumped into the pool and relaxed until it was time for dinner.

For dinner, we had some delicious Pastel Con Yuca along with some salad. Afterward, we had our nightly meeting introducing our next Leaders of The Day!!

Don’t forget that you can see more photos from our trip at this link:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/U6VvxuNvmyM2fjC67