Hola to friends and family in the US! Today we, the co-leaders of the day, were in charge of leading our fellow glimpsers in “Working like a local” day. The day started with a 6am wakeup call. We all had a very humbling experience working on a coffee plantation alongside a few Haitian workers, where they taught us how to plant coffee seedlings. The process involved filling little bags with rich Dominican soil, then planting the germinated coffee seeds in the bags. We were working on the plantations for about two hours and heard zero complaints from our fellow glimpsers. After we returned to the hostel, we had an amazing guest speaker, Marco, talk to us about environmentalism in the DR. Marco took us on a walk around our hostel and showed us beautiful types of fruit trees. After lunch, we had a privilege walk activity, and many glimpsers had a difficult time with this activity, because we all experienced an intense feeling of emotional vulnerability. After the privilege walk, we had some free time to explore the busy town of San Victor. We then had dinner and ended the day with our nightly meeting. It was a very busy day and we all shared an amazing experience.

Our Question of the Day (QOTD) today was “How does the economy depend on workers’ manual labor?” We reminded our fellow glimpsers about the QOTD as we were working on the coffee plantation. We decided that the economy could not exist without manual labor. Workers’ manual labor is the building block to a strong economy.

Today was a rollercoaster for all of us. We woke up super early, and put in hard work at a coffee plantation. Most of us were tired throughout the day, but we all pulled through and kept complaints to a minimum. The privilege walk was the hardest part of the day for almost all of us. We shared a lot about ourselves and many of us were very uncomfortable. But in the end, the privilege walk helped us realize each other’s needs and become a more tightknit group.