“Alone, human beings can feel hunger. Alone, we can feel cold. Alone, we can feel pain. To feel poor, however, is something we do only in comparison to others” – Eric Greitens

Buenas Dias! My name is Joseph Kao and I was the El lider Del Dia for today’s emotional and eye-opening journey. I was extremely excited to be able to lead the lovely M2A delegation to a place that we don’t usually consider going to back in the states. First off, we woke up to the slim shady tune of “please wake up” and then ate a scrumptious breakfast celebrating the end of 1 $ a day. After that, we kicked off the day with a bus ride to Las Hormiguitas and learned about their organization. A brief description of  Las Hormiguitas is that they help out low income children who are trying to survive at the dump in subjects like math, English and Spanish. They work as a mobile school and provide food and drinks for the struggling families. It was really great to have been able to experience their lifestyle and it just put things into perspective. When you see trash flying everywhere and flies attached to the people’s bodies, it was hard not to compare it back to our lives at home. The message I took out of it was not to take anything for granted and to self reflect on the little things we can do to make a difference such as taking shorter showers or saving electricity.

As the morning came to a close, the afternoon was full of seminars. The first of the two seminars was the “Poverty Seminar” where we read about the rural poor in Nicaragua. We learned about how close to half (43 %) of the people in Nicaragua live in rural areas and two out of three of them (68%) struggle to survive on little more than US $1 per day. We also learned about the 5 P’s (place, people, politics, past, peace) and how these factors affect the amount of poverty in a given community.The second seminar was our CAP 2 Design Seminar where we finalized our plans of what we are going to do for Las Mujeres Del Plomo. As an entire group, we decided that their organization needed shelves, promotional signs and painting the most, so that is what we are going to contribute towards.

Lastly, we watched a documentary called Dreaming Nicaragua that depicted various families who had dreams for the future, but had to focus on supporting themselves rather than pursuing education and getting out of the cycle of poverty.

We are past the halfway point now and I have had such an amazing time and have made many new friends. It is a trip I will never forget 🙂

Signing off…

JKao

P.S. LOVE YOU FAM

VIVA MATAGALPA!!!