image (14) image (16) image (15) image (17)Hola everyone! My name is Timothy Takazo Suen but most people call me Tim. I am 16 years old and I am a student at Abraham Lincoln High School. Today I had the pleasure of being the leader of the day for the last day of our CAP project. Today we woke up at 6:30am and had breakfast at Don Carlos’ restaurant at 7:00am. Following a quick energizer where I had the pleasure of watching Keaton sitting on Noe’s lap for an extended period of time we got on the bus to go to the Las Prusias school. We arrived at around 8:30 and immediately got to work. We had one team of people working on attaching locks on the new doors and installing the last door. Another team was assigned to paint the insides of the last two bathrooms. The final team was tasked with installing the last two faucets on a large concrete sink outside one of the classrooms. I had the pleasure of working on this team doing tasks like digging ditches as well as putting pieces of PVC pipe together to install the new faucets. I know my dad will proud of me working on the plumbing projects but I also know that he will tell me about all the things he would have done differently when I tell him about the details. As we approached the end of the school day we decided to have a little party with the school kids to celebrate the progress we had made. We brought three piñatas for the children to play with and beat relentlessly with a stick we picked up off the ground and shaved some of the bark off of. We had minion, Mario, and clown piñatas. It was fun to see the students pushing and fighting over every piece of candy that fell out of the piñatas. A memorable moment of the day happened when one of the students hit the piñata candy flew towards where I along with some of the other glimpsers and I were standing. I heard a thud and I looked over and I saw Mayeann holding the side of her head. I was very concerned at first but after a few tears I saw her smiling from ear to ear as she said “I saw a lollipop flying at me so I turned my head.” Luckily she was completely fine and we were able to share a few laughs over it. Moments like these show me how positive we are as group as we find the humor and positives of every situation. After the piñata party we continued to work on our project and one by one our main tasks were completed until we did our last job of putting our handprints and initials on the side of the bathrooms. After completing our project we listened to many emotional speeches by the members of the community talking about how much they appreciated our help and how they wanted something like this project to happen for years but they just did not have the materials and people who were willing to put in the effort and hard work to make this happen. After many hard goodbyes to the members of the community who we worked and played with over the past three days we left the school and headed back to the hostel. Once at the hostel we were given free time to rest or do whatever we wanted. After a couple hours of free time we headed to the school where we have our English tutoring classes. We taught our English classes for the next two hours and after that we had a little surprise. Instead of going to Don Carlos’ diner for dinner we went to a pizza restaurant called TelePizza. It was definitely the highlight of many people’s days because many of us are beginning to miss the food back home in California. After enjoying our pizza we decided to go to the Guadalupe Church to do the “Running Man” Challenge. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the “Running Man” Challenge it is a popular social media trend where groups of people do the running man dance as a group and post their video to social media like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. We all had a great time and I loved that we were able to bond even further over something as silly as this. Hopefully Thao will be able to share the video with you all when we come home. After doing the “Running Man” Challenge we returned to the hostel and had our nightly meeting which was followed by a long period of reflection about the CAP project and how it has impacted us. For me personally while working on this project I have had opportunities to be a leader and lead by example by doing everything possible to contribute to this project. I have also had the chance to help build four new faucets and pipelines which has shown me how much I have taken clean tap water for granted. Today I saw a little boy smiling when he turned the handle on one the faucets and saw clean water coming out of it. I smiled as I imagined myself thinking about him every time I use water straight from the faucet at home and remembering how lucky I am to have a good supply of clean running water. As I write this blog post the time is approaching 1:00 in the morning on June 23, 2016 and I realize we are just two days away from leaving. While I am excited to return home it makes me sad to think about leaving the people on this trip I have lived with and spent almost every minute of every day with. While we started out as strangers I can confidently that we’ve grown to love each other as a family that supports one another through the best and the worst times. It’s always hard to let your family go and I assume our departure will be no easier. This was our last hard day here in Granada and I’m glad I had the pleasure of being the El Lider Del Dia to lead our group through this last challenge before we leave. Thank you for taking the time to read this essay of a blog post and thank you all for the supportive comments on the previous posts.

-Tim