day 4: Community Day

Hola!

Today’s leaders are Aaliyah, Sammy, and Olive. We started our day meeting Eliza, the CEO of Global Glimpse, and her family, along with Marcela, who is the Vice President of Development. We spent most of our day in the community of Rio Grande where we were seperated into groups and spent time with a host family. In the host families we helped with chores such as cooking, cleaning, and gardening. Those who helped their family cook were the ones who made our lunch!

After our chores we had lunch with the community and spent the rest of the time doing various activities with the kids in the community like playing volleyball, basketball, cards and tag. While spending time with the kids, we learned that while our environments look very different, our lives aren’t really as different as we thought. After a long day of sports and chores we took a quick trip to the supermarket where we got fun souvenirs and snacks, then began preparing for the next day’s activities.

Today we learned how to deepen connections with those around us and create new ones with people we have never met. In learning to build connection with each other we were able to apply the same techniques to the people we met today, even with a language barrier.

To close out the day, we began a discussion about immigration in the Dominican Republic, which led to our discovery that the political state of the DR is not all that different from the political perspectives on immigration in the US.

Adios!

– Sammy, Olive, & Aaliyah