Hello from Constanza! We are Tara and Valeria and we were Leaders of the Day (Líder del Día) on Working Like a Local/Global Business Day.

Today, we truly gained a unique perspective of life as a typical worker in the Dominican Republic. To start, we woke up our fellow Glimpsers with a combination of music and loud bangs on their doors. After a hearty breakfast and a short transition, we hopped on the bus and headed over to the greenhouses, which were owned by Alberto Quezada. Before we began our work, he described his background in agriculture and his perspective on the industry in general. While his knowledge was impactful, the hands-on experience was more so to our understanding of life as a local farmer. In the greenhouse, we divided into two separate stations: picking weeds and fertilizing the soil. Though the labor wasn’t particularly intense and we didn’t work for an excessive amount of time, we still got an idea of how hard people in this profession work. Even after 30 minutes of work, we longed for water and a snack break!

Upon returning back to the hotel, we had a short amount of time to rest and recover from the hard work we did in the greenhouses. In the afternoon, we headed over to the World Agromarketing Facility, which was a factory involved with the packaging of a variety of fruits and vegetables grown in the Dominican Republic, namely miniature cucumbers. This particular factory ships fruits and vegetables to New York and New Jersey. There, we met with Deyanira Cipriano, who gave us a thorough tour of the facility. We saw the entire packaging process, from the arrival of the cucumbers to the final product. We even had the chance to eat the ‘rejected’ cucumbers, which didn’t make the cut to be packaged and shipped. Even though they had defects, such as being too curved or too large, they were still delicious!

Right after the tour, we went straight to our English tutoring sessions. It was exciting to go back for a second time and hone our teaching skills further. At first, everybody found their classrooms in a state of chaos, for a significant amount of new students arrived. Some Glimpsers had over 30 students in their classes! Many more found their classrooms split in half to accommodate the influx of eager students. It was challenging, but on the whole, we all had a lot of fun!

Overall, today was definitely the busiest day of the trip so far. Despite the challenges the day threw at us, all the Glimpsers had a blast and enjoyed all the new experiences. We were so happy to be Leaders of the Day of such an exciting day!

We wish the next Leader of the Day the very best!

Goodnight,

Tara and Valeria