Hello friends and family, this is Viet-Hai Huynh and Alexa Sass writing to you from San Juan de la Maguana! Today we were lucky enough to be Leaders of the Day for our second Free Day, which was an exciting opportunity for all of us. We were all pretty juiced to go explore the city to its extent after a long week, which will soon culminate with the end of our trip.

After spending more time in the city and getting to know more about the atmosphere and people here, we finally had the opportunity to spend some time away from the structure of schedules and just have fun. Even more, because it was a free day, we had the ability to contact our loved ones and catch up with everyone’s lives back home (including the birth of Beyoncé’s twins). In the morning, we woke up at 8 o’clock, one of the latest wake up calls that we’ve had. After having an amazing breakfast at Onaney, we were free to explore the city in ways that we weren’t capable of before. While some of us went to the nearby cathedral, others decided to find souvenir shops to get gifts for our loved ones back home, visited a local milkshake shop called Rubia’s, and used some of our leftover pesos to stock up on snacks.

After lunch, we went out to go shopping specifically for our CAP (Community Action Project), gathering supplies to make the most out of our service tomorrow. Tomorrow we will be returning to the community of Arroyo Loro to provide service and fix the school where all of their children learn. For our CAP project, we’re fixing a roof, beautifying the school campus, and creating a safer environment for the kids by putting up a new fence and paving the basketball court. Our delegation hopes that with our assistance, the children can be in a better learning environment which would allow the students to receive the education they deserve to have. After shopping for the CAP, we returned to our English tutoring classes at a nearby campus and furthered the education of both ourselves, and those who attended. Because today was our last full day of English tutoring, we took a moment after our classes to appreciate the time and effort that our ambassadors have put in to make our tutoring sessions a success.

Overall, today was a great learning experience as we worked together to safely navigate our way through the city, make our visions a reality for the Arroyo Loro community’s school, and enjoy some of our last moments working with our ambassadors and English classes. At the end of the day, we’re hoping that the rest of our visit is just as exciting as the last ten days have been here in San Juan!

For Alexa’s family: Hi family! I miss you all very much!!!!!!! I’m excited to see you guys soon. Tell Nati that I miss her a ton por favor. Thank you for allowing me to be here and experience all these amazing things. I love you all *especially Nick ;)* and I’ll see you later. *purple heartssssss*

For anyone reading this blog for VH: don’t get too lit without me