Hello Everyone! Carlos and Wilber here! Today we visited a small community an hour outside of Guaranda called Salinas. We visited a salt mine, cheese factory, and chocolate factory. In the past 40 years, Salinas has developed different businesses that have helped the community grow. These factories sell high-quality products to their surrounding community and all over Ecuador. When we arrived to the cheese factory, we saw families bringing milk (using their llamas and donkeys to transport the milk) from their cows to sell since they buy it for a higher price than other places. This business positively impacts the community by buying from the community and selling their many products straight to the consumers, without the middle man. There we met Luis, who took us on a tour of some of the entrepreneurship. We started at the cheese factory where we saw the milk being tested and how different cheeses were aged, and we got to taste and buy some cheese to bring home. After that, he took us to the salt mine where he explained how it was ceremonial to the indigenous people to collect the salt. Then we went to the chocolate factory and where we saw the process of how the different kinds of chocolates were made, all the way from crushing the cocoa beans, grinding it up into a powder, and then refrigerating the final product. We bought many types of delicious chocolates from the factory itself. Finally, we went to the textile factory where we shopped for clothes straight from the ladies who made it. For lunch, we ate a lot of pizza made from the local products of Salinas. After arriving back at the hotel, we wrote letters of appreciation to our sponsors for helping us have this experience. After we had a fun time dancing after dinner, the torch of Lider Del Dia was passed on to Carson who made all of us some hot chocolate.
