Day 4: sustainable development

Brenden and Jonas today as the Liders del dia.

Today we took a drive to a nearby town called Padasi, which is the location of the organization we will be working with for the next few days called Pro Eco Azuero. We then got a thought provoking and conception subverting seminar about the general principles of aid. We learned how the common approuch to aid is often largly negative, setting restrictions on and harming the local economy and people, rather than establishing the health of the community and it’s surronding enviroment as mutual.

Many other organizations dont involve themselves within the communities that they are trying to help. And so, often give inaccurate misdirection on a issue. Typically in the form of blind charity, rather than actually empowering locals and their communities. Pro Eco Azuero instead revolves around educating and empowering locals to take a more proactive role that benefit themselves and their environment. Now well informed we created a step by step plan on what we are going to do to kickstart the course of action for the remainder of the trip.

some of the other activitiess we participated in today are we fought through the Panamanian humidity and took a trip to a local bakery/cafe. it turns out to be quite the spot for long conversations shared over velvet cake.

We then returned to the hotel, where learning from the days experiance, we outlined the course of action we will be taking over the coming days. Organizing who will be completeing what tasks and when. We all realized that we had no need to reinvent the wheel, instead just opting to listen to locals to get as clear a image as possible of how to pursue affective support.

Winding down the day we engaged in numerous social activities, including highly competitive and passionate card games, and passing leadership on to tomarows Liders del Dia, Adelynn Le and and Gabriellle.