Hello everybody. So this morning I (Javier) woke everyone up at 7 sharp so they could gather themselves up after a long day yesterday to get to breakfast at 8:15. We ate some delicious pancakes! We all had missed food like that so of course we devoured every last one of them. We also had a huge discussion about whether pancakes or waffles were better and whose mom cooked them the best! After that we played rock, paper, scissors championship to loosen everyone up after a yummy breakfast and get started with the academic seminar. Todays academic seminar was Aid and Development. Tony and Coach Troy did a good job at teaching us about what type of aid is helpful and when its not. They then split us up and gave us a side to debate. We ended up having a very powerful debate that carried unto an interesting discussion.

At 10 am, we took our first field trip of the day to Santa Cruz, and no not the one in California! So we ended up going to this school in Santa Cruz that was to be the organization we would work with for our project on this trip. We got to ask a couple questions about what they wanted us to do, who this was going to impact, and why we would do this. The principal was very nice and she gave us a tour of the school and was telling us that they really needed to work on the bookshelves because they were falling apart and for the moment they had to put them on the floor. She also was wondering if we could paint the side of the school that showed to the street that was getting bleached and cracked by time. As a group we decided to also paint lines on the huge basketball court they had and to repair the basketball hoops so the kids could have more fun. All this has to be done in only 3 days! But of course, you parents know that we don’t give up, and we will donate our money to be able to buy the supplies needed to help these kids have a better education. Once we had finished inspecting the school and deciding what we needed, we took the bus back to the hotel to eat some lunch. After lunch was over the GG leaders had a talk with Justene who will be the leader of the day tomorrow and went over what she would need to know in order to do that.

After all of that 2 o’clock came around and it was time for another field trip! This one was to Las Mujeres Ambientalistas who where a group of women that had turned a community dump into a beautiful mural covered house that recycled waste and turned it into paper. This paper is used for cards, notebooks, posters, bookmarks, and arts and crafts. These women were all single mothers and wanted to do this to find a way to provide for their families. After this, we came back to some delicious tacos. We all chowed down and got ready to go to our next activity. We then went to the school nearby to begin our first of many English tutoring classes. We were all assigned different age groups from 5-50 and had to make lesson plans accordingly. It was a very memorable experience for all of us because we had never been put into the teachers’ shoes. All of us had a great time and look forward to doing this again every night till we leave. We then came back home and had our nightly meeting where we discussed what went good and bad in our day and gave big love shoutouts to each other. Then the torch was passed on from Javier to Justene. We then wrapped it up and went to sleep in our “really” comfortable beds.

 

Hope to hear about what you guys think in the comments. More blogs coming daily by the new leader of the day!

 

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