Today we woke up at 7:00 am and had a delicious breakfast cooked by Diego. After breakfast, we headed off to the school of Aquiares where we started our Community Action Project (CAP). For our CAP we are building a small kitchen, a changing room, and a bathroom for fundraising activities at the school.

When we got to the school, we were introduced to Omar who is going to be our boss for the next three days. Before we started working, we all made sure to apply lots of sunscreen and drink water. After we did that, Omar and Memo split us into a few different groups to work on various projects. Steph, Caroline, and Kailee worked on installing outlets and light switches.

In another project, we had Anna and Grace paint over the areas were Omar had welded metals together with black paint to prevent rusting.

Another one of our main activities was building the back wall of the kitchen area. Omar had a few of the teams drill the metal pieces together to complete the wall.

As most of you might know, environmental conservation plays a big role in the Costa Rican life and culture, which is why one of our teams was working on covering the current compost hole and making a new one. Compost holes are used to store left over food which is later used for fertilizer.

A big project that the rest of our group was working on was making a canal. This project took a lot of hands and hard work. It is extremely vital for us to remain hydrated and to work together because without the amazing hard work that everyone put into this project we wouldn’t have been able to get as much progress as we did today.

After a long, hard day of work, we all went back to the accommodation and some of us decided to cool off in the pool and play red light green light and volleyball. At 6:00 we all ate dinner, which was rice with meat, salad, and beans. After dinner, we had our nightly meeting where we passed the torch to our next leaders of the day, Anna and Fayah. Our nightly meeting consisted of LOTS of big love for each other because we were all so proud of each other for all of our hard work.

¡Pura vida!