Hello!

My name is Spencer Ault, and I am one of the fifteen Global Glimpsers on this trip. Today was my day to be Leader of the Day, and so, as part of the responsibilities of the position, I am writing today’s blog post.

Today was CAP III day, which was made up of the final preparatory stages of our Community Action Project. Our day started off at 7 am, which was almost a late start for us. Everyone did a pretty good job of getting up quickly, and we had no problems in getting out the door and down to the comedor by 8:00. We came back to the comedor at 8:45, and began our preparation for the CAP III presentation.

We broke into four groups for the prep: the tree group, the desk group, the mural group, and the soccer field group. Those four groups represent the four different projects we will be taking on for our CAP at Escuela Divino Niños. The next 45 minutes were spent working on our project presentations. We drew up posters and worked out how to say everything we needed to say in Spanish. The representative from the school arrived at around 9:45, and we all took turns presenting our respective projects to him.

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Needless to say, we all did a very good job with our presentations, and the representative had very few questions, comments or concerns after we were done. One of his only pieces of input was that the name of the school was actually Escuela Salinas Grandes, not Escuela Divino Ninos. Not sure how we got that mixed up. He approved all of our projects and headed back to the school at around 10:30, giving our group an hour to determine the logistics of the project. During that hour, we debated what materials each project needed, and how many of each one of those materials we needed. We also went over how much money would be needed for all the shopping, and who would be doing what shopping. In the end, we came up with a complete list of necessary materials, and we created four groups to go shop for those materials.

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The largest of those groups was the one that went to the hardware store and the market, which is the group I was in. Another group went to the paint store, another went to the tree store, and one last group went to the supermarket. Each group had a budget for buying the supplies, carved out of the money we donated to the project last week.

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As I mentioned, I was in the hardware store group, so that’s the only group I can really speak for. There were eight of us – me, Chris, Casey, Kwing, Devin, Ryan, Steven, and Judith – and we all crammed into one taxi that had four available seats. We sat in two layers, and it was uncomfortable for everyone, whether you were on the bottom or the top.

Everyone spent the next hour or so shopping for the materials they were assigned. Those of us at the hardware store picked up a whole laundry list of items, including a shovel and some paint rollers, and we also picked up two 100-pound bags of fertilizer from the agricultural store in the market next to the store. We got two cabs for the ride back to the hostel, thankfully, and met up with the rest of the group there at 4:30 or so.

We had half-an-hour of free time until dinner, so we just hung out at the hostel or went to the bakery and café. At 5, we headed down to Deja Vu, and after a dinner of fried cheese tacos, we walked down to our English tutoring. That pretty much wrapped our day up, although the torch passing ceremony from me to Chris and Steven was very entertaining.

Sorry I wrote so much, hope you all got some good information from it. Thanks for reading, and please leave some comments below! Thanks!

Spencer