Day 6: Sustainable development Day

Hey, it’s Yusuf and Margaret, the Leaders of the Day! Today, our group woke up in our Sosua hotel and had a beautiful view of Playa Alicia during breakfast. We had a three hour bus ride with a bit of motion sickness and small games but made it back to Constanza safe, thanks to our bus driver Starlyn!

The group spent much of the day building community and planning our Community Action Project (CAP). In the afternoon, we learned more about each other through a Q&A game that enabled us to be more vulnerable with each other, with prompts like “I never expected to be…” and “I was raised to believe…” Later in the evening, we played two games that were fun for our group and involved lots of moving around and switching seats! Everyone got to know each other just a little better today.

We met and spoke with co-founder of Fundacion Alegria Inocente, Fernando, and asked him many questions about our upcoming project and a little bit of his passion and motivation in creating the organization. He told us about how he visited a community named Los Limoncitos and how the children’s parents were too poor to afford school supplies. He and his three other friends decided to bring them school supplies and they were repaid with a big meal that cost three times the amount of the school supplies. He then talked about their current work and the organization today, which now has fifty-seven workers, and their wish to try to help everyone despite the lack of resources.

Their most recent project has been working on a house for Dona Maria who is an eighty-five year old woman who is one of seven victims whose house burned down in a fire. The previous delegation started building the walls and it’s our job to help construct the roof, cement floors, paint, and then hopefully give the house to Dona Maria by Friday.

As leaders, we worked hard to keep everyone on time and on task through the day and making sure to engage our group, especially when we created our action plan for the CAP. There were several schedule changes in the afternoon, and even though they were stressful, we adapted and moved through with our mental warm-up and our visit to Fernando. We found it a little overstimulating when quieting the group but other then that, we did a good job at leading the group discussions. But being leaders was fun overall because we both took control!

Our next Leaders of the Day will see you tomorrow! Big love! – Yusuf & Magaret