Hey y’all! Its Natasha and Benjamin coming at you with our daily blog post!

We were Lider del Dia (Leaders of the Day) for our day themed Working Like a Local. This was a day where is Glimpsers had the chance to work like local here in Jarabacoa and take a peak at a day in the life.

The day started at 5:15 am with the beautiful sound of a spoon banging on a plate (our wake up call to the group)! We played a song (loudly) to get the group going and we were banging on doors to get our team up. Trust us, they loved it! We had an awesome breakfast thanks to our wonderful providers Genesis, Rafael, and Ramirez. At 6:35 am we headed to Flores de Jarabacoa, a local produce and flower farm, to start our Working Like a Local and Global Business Day. While there, we divided into groups and picked and planted crops, and packaged and labeled vegetables to get them ready for shipment. After a hard day’s work we were exhausted. We ate lunch at the farm with some of the workers, then we toured the packaging area. From there we went back to our hotel to take a nice cool shower ( so good!).

During our time at the farm I (Natasha) met wonderful women who work with their own children ages 19-35. Between the gossip and the laughter a thought kept weighing on my mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about how hard everyone here works for only six US dollars A DAY. Not an hour. A day. To think about how happy, humble, grateful, and hard working these workers are made all of us rethink about what we complain about or consider to be hardship back home.

We taught our first English classes today, and though many struggled with our Spanish, we pushed through and did our best. We thought preparing an English lesson would be easy but we couldn’t have been more wrong! It was so much more difficult than we could have imagined, but to see our students’ eyes light up when they understood something, and seeing them working so hard to learn our language was an incredibly rewarding experience. We had a huge range of ages and abilities on our classes; some of us had nearly fluent teens, some intermediate children, and some of us had adults who were practically brand new! What a unique experience we had! We had the chance to give people from the community something that could enrich their lives and give them more opportunities for the future.

This was only our third day, and we have a feeling the rest of this trip is going to be hard work but incredibly fulfilling!