Hello, this is Victoria and Alana; and this is our day!! Fun fact, we are birthday twins and we were able to be leaders of the day together. The first thing we did was wake up everyone with high spirits to get the day started on the right track. For breakfast, we had French toast, eggs, fruit, and juices. After the break, we had a warm-up reflecting on our perspectives on the impact of tourism and how the way we see the land affects our view on how we can love and respect it. After the warm-up, we got straight into our CAP Seminar (Community Act Project) and talked about how Feasibility+Need+Personal Passion+Community Engagement=Sustainability. After the little downtime, we had lunch; containing rice, beans, plantain, pork, or chicken. After downtime, we led a game where we were able to test the students to see if they knew each other’s names then after we had our guest speaker, Fofo, who talked about environmental justice, which is a legal framework. During the session, after learning about gentrification and how it impacts Costa Rica. We did a debate; three different groups, two against each other and one judging group. After that, we had some time to reflect and be able to have downtime. After downtime, we had dinner, which was burgers! We had our nightly meeting after that and we passed the torch to the next day’s leaders.

From Victoria: “We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity, belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” That was our quote of the day. My response to it was, “When we abuse the land and use it as a resource, we tend to not think about giving it back, and we hurt the land, but when you see it as a community, you think about it as an equal and want to give back or even more. Something that I learned today that really stuck with me would be Fofo and his presentation. He talked about how when a tourist comes to Costa Rica, they come and gentrify the land and just ruin it. This really stuck out to me because as someone who is considered a tourist, I don´t want to be seen as someone who wants to hurt the land that I come to visit. I really want to make a positive impact while I’m here and do good. Victoria signing off 🙂

From Alana: The day we were able to choose to be a leader of the day, I knew I wanted to lead Conservation & Environmental Justice. I´ve always believed that the things we do on earth have a domino effect either positively or negatively and these effects have an impact on people as well as the environment around us. This leads to the important word for me which is gentrification or in Spanish gentrificación. During the lesson that Fofo gave, about our theme today, we learned that gentrification happens in Costa Rica which affects the community and environment. After, we had a debate and my team was the community and we had to persuade the government group why we don´t need a 5-star luxury hotel in our community. I knew from personal experiences back home that gentrification is very big in my area so I wanted to carry that compassion and emotion while talking to the government about this problem. At the end of the debate, our team won but one thing I took away is that this might seem like an activity that was given to do but this is a real-life problem wherever you go so it´s important to be mindful and just be open to learning on how we can show awareness to this topic.