Day 5: Fun Day!

As the Leaders of the Day, we started by waking everyone up at 7:30 in the morning to get ready for breakfast at 8:30! For breakfast, we had pancakes, eggs, a variety of fruit, cereal, and yogurt, and for beverages we had fruit punch and melon juice. Following that, we had our mental warm-up at 9 where we went over the quote, question of the day, our essentials to bring to the waterfall and discussed the words of the day such as caminata, catarata, and planeamiento. Once that was finished, we all gathered our things and got ready to depart to the waterfall. It was a 40-minute drive and a 25-30 minute hike to actually get to our destination.

The majority of us decided to get into the water, which was very cold; while others decided to just dip their toes in the very cold water. There was so much greenery and even bugs surrounding us during the hike and the waterfall itself. After our time at the waterfall, we hiked back up, which was very vigorous for us to climb since so many of the steps were steep. We saw cows and bunnies. Once we got back to our starting point, we all enjoyed some nice lunch and we all got different items.

We got back to our base house and it we had our downtime which consisted of swimming in the pool, playing pool, and watching The Conjuring. After enjoying some downtime, we headed back up and had our second CAP seminar. We started off by learning about Costa Rica’s 200-year anniversary La Anexión del Partido de Nicoya, which means that one of the states that was once part of Nicaragua became part of Costa Rica. After that quick lesson, we continued with our second CAP seminar and we got more input about the project that we are addressing in a couple of days. After the meeting, we enjoyed a nice dinner which was some delicious nachos. After the dinner, we headed back up to the have of nightly meeting about the recap of the day, and went over the question (What are the positive and negative impacts of tourism on local communities?) and the quote of the day (A hero is someone who understands the responsibilities that comes with his freedom) For the questions, a response was that positive impact was that because of tourist and the spendings from them, the locals get their profits from them and a negative impact is a lot of tourist will come to the country disrespectful to the culture and leave liter in the environment. For the quote, a response was that everybody has the right to be free, but it all depends on how we decide to use our freedom, such as being responsible. After the quick recap, we also discussed the plans we had the following day. Once that was finished, we passed the torch to the new LDDs for tomorrow, which were Arthur and Kevin. Once the meeting came to an end, we had the opportunity to call our loved ones for about 15 minutes; and that concludes day 5!

I miss you so much mommy, dad, minga, and my kuyas!  And my best friend Edith I miss my gur<3 – Mariah

Love and miss y’all! Can’t wait to be back and give y’all your gifts! – Estrella