CAP DAY #2

In a galaxy far far away, in a land called Panama, 20 brave students and 4 Adult leaders began their day at the lovely hotel Esperanza. Our j-pop dance stars and leaders of the day (Gin, Diggy, and Javi) began everyones days with a greeting of “Good morning sunshine 🙂 Don’t have a good day, have a great day!!” despite waking up to a pretty cloudy day. And that pretty much sums up how our day went.

For breakfast we got to eat Empanadas, stirfried carne, fried corn tortillas, and passionfruit juice. Our second job as LDDs is to announce what we’ll be having for breakfast after our daily healthcheck, where Javi struggled with the translations of what type of meat was in the stir fry.

” Is this pork?” Javi asked.

“It’s Carne!” They replied.

“It’s chicken!!” Javi announced.

“It’s Carne.” They corrected.

“Huh” he then replied.

Overall the breakfast was a hearty start to the day and gave us the nutrition we needed for our second day of the community action project. One of the group’s favorite recent developments is taking photos of whomever is unlucky enough to fall asleep on the bus ride which resulted in some people fighting off sleep so as to not fall victim to the snipe (Diggy has personally fallen victim many times). This morning’s bus ride to the project site was no exception and the unfortunate victims were Jacob and our LDD Gin. Once we arrived and started unloading the bus, we unexpctedly encountered a large grouping of cows. The wild cows quickly caught everyone’s attention as we watched a local rancher doing his best to quickly round them up while riding his horse. As interesting as that was, we quickly got straight to work!

The wet gloomy weather raised some problems as the lack of sun meant slower paint drying time for 3 out of the four groups and the bench team expressed great concerns as the water interfered with their tasks of mixing cement for the bench. However the team in charge of repainting the Casa Local made quick work of their task, and as seems to happen so often in Borola, someone came to the bench group’s rescue as a local organization MIAmbiente led by the great Adilio brought out a canopy, enabling them to be able to succesfully start the second part of their project.

After an hour of mixing cement, the group layered eco bricks they made the day before with the cement in a mold of the bench and unexpectedly used more eco bricks than predicted. LDD Diggy Juarez mentioned “The task was a lot harder than we expected. It was very much physically demanding but it was also really inspiring and interesting to see how we were able to reuse the trash and turn it into something valuable”. The group unfortunately had a later lunch than everyone else due to Adilio demonstrating how to use a tool the group was unfamiliar with to cut out the tiles that will be used for the surface of the bench. Due to the group being unfamiliar with the process, they reacted strongly to the smell of the burning rubber that the tool gave off, with Diggy saying “The smell smelt very rubbery. It was smokey, and had everybody around it making a face :(“. Once they wrapped up the molding proccess for the first bench, the group then boarded the bus and drove 5 minutes to the location of the second bench that was already premade by Aris to paint it.

The barrel group started the day off with a few setbacks such as struggling with the ombre/ gradient style and limited colors. However, we found that the setbacks we encountered along the way allowed the final product to turn out even better than we initially planned. The group also had a lot of laughs and we even turned the messiness of the process into some new souvenirs with Gin, Javier, and Sophie leaving the site with handmade designer painted pants and shirts filled with the group’s combined artistic skills. During the nightly meeting the group really connected the day back to today’s quote of the day where tennis player Naomi Scott said “In a perfect dream things would be set exactly the way you would want them. But I think it’s more interesting that in real life, things aren’t exactly the way you planned”.

The group started with a primarily empty base but ended with about 90% of the painting completed. Cycling through peak music such as Javi’s recommendations and listening to an assortment of favorites, we eventually landed on a primarily k-pop mix which shocked GL Gin. “Even though we’ve only been at it for two days a lot of us are discovering skills we didn’t know we had.”-Colin “Shoutout you (Javi), and Kris” -GL/LDD Gin. The group was also able to connect with some local kids as an impromptu soccer game with some local kids broke out at the barrel painting site, allowingJavi and Kris to utilize their Spanish skills to debate about “Messi or Ronaldo”.

At the same time, the bus stop mural group excelled at their task and it looked better and better each passing hour as shadings and details were added. Music really played a big part in keeping everyone’s energy up as we worked, but some of the speakers unfortunately malfunctioned throughout the day. However the bus stop mural group pushed through this set back with group karaoke. PC Mateo gave big love to the group for that: ” In these times where you easily have access to music, you forget the little fun things like singing so it was really nice to see such a heartwarming natural moment when all of you sung ‘Let It Go’.”

During lunch we ate fried rice, grilled chicken, and a scoop of mashed beets and potatoes paired with a juice. “Yummy yummy in my tummy!! :)” – Gin & Diggy . (The food was a big hit for everyone. Especially the mashed beets!!). While some people finished eating their meals, the PCS (Mateo, and Mauricio) brought out volleyballs and soccer balls for our Glipmsers to play with. Our Aura God Nonchalant Mauricio destroyed everyone in volleyball despite his opponents Eze, Celia, Lina, Kyra, and Jacob being seasoned players. Big love to our hotel staffers Ashley, Janet, Lauris for making the 45 minute drive to Borola to provide us our lunch!! We apprieciate you!! Post lunch, our Peacecorp partner Aris held a small meeting where she gave feedback to the Glimpsers, mentioning how proud she was that the painting groups made a lot of progress despite the rain increasing the paint’s drying time due to the lack of sunlight.

As the Casa Local group were able to finish their project earlier than expected today, they were able to add more details per Aris’ suggestion of the sign ” Casa Local” painted at the front of the building. Once they got started with that, the team also selflessly sent out some of their work force to aid the other groups, like Stephanie helping out the team in charge of decorating the garbage bins.

On the ride back, we had a couple more of our Glimpsers falling victim to the sleeping snipes but we also had a little Mandarin tutoring session with Laoshi Lina. Javier and Diana made some…attempts at memorizing and pronouncing the numbers 1-10. Diana being the fast learner she is, was able to master it pretty quickly while Javier struggled through how to say 10 (shi) by switching through a couple of tones. Also calling out our PC Mauricio for cutting into our freetime by making our bus driver drive backwards on the road back to the site because he forgot his phone haha.

Once everyone unloaded the bus Eze selfessly volunteered to take everyone’s paint stained laundry (big love my goat) and most of us went out to the local Dairy Queen for some well-earned treats. It was most of the students first time trying it and we were all amazed and entertained by how they were able to flip the ice cream without it dropping. It was a moment worth remembering as it was ironic we tried an American chain for the first time in Panama and not the United States. For dinner we had fried chicken and wild rice, which Eze exclaimed to akrem “OH MY GOSH!! WE WERE JUST TALKING ABOUT KFC!!!”.

Ending the day with our daily nightly meeting where we passed the torch, tomorrow’s LDDs: Kyra, Isabella, and Eze demonstrated us an incredibly show of strength by lifting Eze up high into the air creating a human chair by interlocking Kyra and Isabella’s arms! As everyone is enjoying their freetime out in the balcony laughing about silly things and getting heated over card games, the LDDs are updating you about today! We’ll try to join them now (which we can’t since we ran out of time sorry Javi & Diggy my editing took a while). Big Love to my goat Brandon for keeping us company as we finish up!

Singing out! Cya tomorrow sunshines!! Don’t have a goodnight, have a great night!!

“Forever is composed of nows.” Henry David Thoreau.

Sincrely your Ruby Chan (Diggy), Ayumi Chan( Javier), and Shiki Chan( Gin)!!

Remember, “real g’s move in silence like lasagna”.

“I comfort myself by saying if I believe in dinosaurs, then somewhere, they must be believing in me. And if they believe in me, then I can believe in me.” Javi

Link to the photo blog for all photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/7gVcTFJD32xvygtG7