Today we woke up everyone at a 7 AM sharp, followed by the terrifying banging of doors at the boy’s house (they were frightened) (it was Ciena) We then enjoyed a delicious breakfast of toast and eggs, which beautiful Margherita made us. After breakfast, we decided to switch things up… on the way to our CAP project, we arranged everyone into new seats using their designated numbers. This got some mixed reactions at first, but it got everyone to mingle with people they haven’t talked to much. When we first made it to CAP, things were slow to begin, but people found their groove once were given amazing Dominican coffee by Elena (the woman we’re making a house for) keeping us energized while mining (like Minecraft). One of the main highlights of this day was our very efficient assembly line. We gathered buckets of sand and passed them down a narrow hallway in a line formation, while Nacho beautifully screamed his heart out “buckets! buckets! buckets!” We then creatively made names for each of the buckets. To name a few, The Big Red Evil Bucket (really heavy) The Gangly Bucket (really gangly and holey) The Easter Basket (tiny & cute) Big Chungus (fat bucket) which devolved into The Evil Chungus. After the assembly line, we gathered all of the sand, and then added concrete powder into it, which is used as a way to save resources by the locals. We then added water, and added our concrete concoction into the foundations of the house. While we were hard at work, people began to grow tired, and the sun was blazing down upon us. While everyone was working, we launched operation Save The Cat which became a success. The mission entailed Liz buying a cat crate and food for the mama cat, and putting her babies in to act as a lure. The mom was quite feisty, but very stressed, so it was a hard battle. We eventually caught them with the help of local kids in the community, since we couldn’t touch them. After a couple hours of hard work, we headed back to the villa for lunch. We had scrumptious chicken & rice, with refreshing lemonade. After lunch, we had some free time before heading back to the CAP site. Some enjoyed playing card games in the dining area, while others (attempted) to paint each other’s nails, Vinny painted Jaden’s after he fell asleep on the couch due to all his hard work at the cap site.

After the nail polish fiasco, we loaded everyone back into the bus in group order to finish out the rest of our work. At the cap site, we grabbed a bunch of cinder blocks to line the perimeter of the house. Once we finished our foundation work, everyone was very tired, yet feeling very accomplished and grateful for our experience. We then headed back to the villa. We held a self-reflection as a group, reflecting on our time throughout this trip, and pairing up with people we hadn’t talked/connected to much during our trip. Following this, we had dinner, which was TACO TUESDAY!! After dinner everyone washed up to get ready for nightly meeting, and went over our schedule for the next day. We finished up quickly by ending our last night at the villa with a grand bonfire, where we roasted marshmallows & hot dogs, and shared our last big love’s with everyone, which lasted forever because people had a lot of love to share. We quickly headed to bed for an eventful & packed day tomorrow.

(Your favorites Caehla & Ciena)

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