Hello Families! Today we had an extraordinary day. This day was extremely impactful to many glimpsers. We started the day off at Maguana Tropical, a global business that grows tomatoes and exports to the United States. We learned about not only the business aspect, but the agricultural aspect of this company. Because of the low wages in developing countries, companies can take advantage of cheap labor. The average pay for working at Maguana Tropical is seven dollars a day. This may seem outrageous but in reality this amount per day is the minimum wage set forth by the Dominican government. Maguana Tropical’s positive impact on the community is that it creates jobs for locals and provides benefits for workers. Reflecting on this, we realized that although it is legal to be able to pay at extremely low wages, businesses isolate workers into the vicious cycle of poverty.

After learning about global businesses we drove to the San Juan dump. As we drove by the trash on our way up to the site where our guest speakers, workers at the dump, spoke, it wasn’t just trash that we saw, there was livestock such as cows, donkeys, and there were stray dogs roaming around. Once we got to the site we received a greeting from the bold and persevering workers. They gave us insight and a new perspective of reality by revealing their stories and wisdom. Even though the work they do is vital to the environment, they are rejected from not only society but the government. A quote by one of the workers was, “When I ask for food, all anyone ever see’s is a dirty man.”The hope for their futures was a huge inspiration taking into account that they have to put in five times the amount of work that those who are lucky enough to live in a developed country do.

After these two activities we had a silent reflection and wrote about our opinion on global issues such as the injustice against the recyclers and underpaid tomato farmers. We separated into groups and expressed our insight on the topics. Similar feelings were present during our group meeting as well as coming to a conclusion of using education as a key to breaking the cycle of poverty.

Thank you for reading the ”daily” updates, see you in a few days!

We apologize for the shortage of photos, we did not use our cameras out of respect for the speakers.