I woke up this morning at 5:16 am. I promptly fell back asleep and woke up at 5:30, which would probably be the best decision I made that morning. The shower was cold, and time was of the essence since I had to wake everybody up and get into nice clothes for our first day of English tutoring.

Breakfast was amazing, simply a plate of yogurt and fruit, bread with butter and jelly, and a plate of eggs. Meals like that come close to the cooking done at home. Everybody then got prepared for the bus to the high school we would be teaching at.

We were all assigned classes and my partner, Riya, and I got set up for the children to sit in. Teaching them went exactly as I expected; I was teaching children. You could tell they wanted to learn. I know curiosity in somebody’s eyes when I see it, but since they were young, their attention spans were limited. All of the kids tried their best to speak in English, they were even helping each other out when they were asked to give sentences to the front. My partner wasn’t as confident that it went well, but I thought it was probably better than a lot of people’s first day of teaching.

And it was, every group had a story about how their class went horribly wrong. It was awesome to hear people complain about their first day, and as we planned our lessons for the next day, the delegation learned that they should probably keep things simple. We realized we should probably be at our best while teaching because there were a lot of groups that went through a paradigm shift. The new reality to most was that they realized how hard being a teacher really was, and how we often take them for granted.

We visited a farm after getting out of our business casual clothes, and that farm is where we will execute our Community Action Project. The farm had a variety of native plants, and they even had guinea pigs they raise there. It is small, but there were a lot of things that Mauricio, the man who runs the farm, said needed to be done.

We came back to the hostel to choose the projects that we thought were feasible in the next four days. After that, it was only half an hour of lesson planning and a long wait for dinner. It was nice though, as we played random games in the soccer field the hostel had, like Sharks and Minnows, and a favorite among most of the group, Mafia. The PC’s, Paco and Jonathan, even joined and that made the games a lot more interesting since it’s usually just us kids playing the games.

We ate dinner, which was grilled chicken and curry rice. I have to say it, it’s a thought that’s been prominent this whole trip, the grilled chicken here is the best grilled chicken I have ever had. It’s so flavorful, that with every bite it’s almost as if some new flavor was present. It was juicy, meaty, and above all delicious.

We then had the nightly meeting where I got to pass off the torch to the leaders of the next day. And now, I’m happy to say that I’ve had the time of my life.