Dear friends and family,

Hello everyone! Today we started our day in Riobamba at 8:00 am. Soon after, we once again returned to Roma Santa for a delicious breakfast. We ate beef, greek yogurt, grapes, watermelon, and potatoes. Once we departed from Roma Santa, we drove to the Carlos Garbay facilities and farm. At the Carlos Garbay facilities and farm we took a tour of the grounds and learned about the care that they provide to kids there. The farm and facilities provide physical therapy, language therapy, and psychological therapy to kids with these kinds of disabilities. When touring, we were constantly approached by kids who were full of love, always wanting to give you a hug. We also had learned about our Community Action Project (CAP) on the Carlos Garbay Farm. We learned that we are going to help build a new roof, table, and improve the chairs for the gazebo of the farm. After learning about our CAP, we headed back to Roma Santa for another delicious meal. Before our meal, we had an authentic Ecuadorian performance by two astonishing local musicians. We ate fried fish, potato soup, rice, Ecuadorian beans, vanilla ice cream, and plantains.

After eating, we took a walk back down to the hotel where we had free time from 1:45 pm until 3:00 pm. During our free time, we played many rounds of intense UNO. Once free time was over we had our second CAP project seminar where we discussed how we will be accomplishing the needs of the Carlos Garbay Farm. Within that meeting we had 3 ideas in front of us with the most promising idea being to restore the gazebo, followed by a redesign of the guinea pig den roof, and to repaint the brick walls of the farm. Once the meeting was over at 4:30 pm, we were greeted with a generous amount of free time which ended at 5:45 pm when we walked to Roma Santa for dinner. Dinner was a blast of mixed emotions, first we had an amazing and intense rock, paper, scissors match to decide who eats first. To make everyone feel more like a community we rearranged the tables to more of a family-like setting. For dinner we had American-style hamburgers accompanied with home-made fries, Coca-Cola, and tea. After dinner we went back to the hotel where we had our nightly meeting and passed on the positions of the Leaders of the Day to Jackson, Jeremiah, and Ben. During the meeting, they informed us about tomorrow’s schedule. We learned that we will be interacting with kids who live and work on the streets, many of whom were neglected at an early age in their lives. The way we will interact with them is by talking, playing games, and eating lunch with them. After the nightly meeting, we had some more free time and are now getting ready for another exciting and adventurous day tomorrow!

Thank you to everyone who read our blog today!!! We are hoping that you are all doing well and we can’t wait to see you all again when we return in the near future. We’ve loved reading the comments every night, keep posting!

Wishing for the best, Brennen Norman and Paris Morgain