Day 7: CAP DAY 1

Hello everyone, it’s your leaders of the day! We are Raylen, Francesca, and Kennedy.

Today, we visited our Community Action Project (CAP) site to begin working on a house for Doña Maria. Through five and a half hours of work, we finished putting up the walls and most of the roof. Working in the heat was definitely a struggle, especially while wearing long pants. That exhaustion was definitely worth it in the end to see our ideas transform into reality as the house began to take form.

As leaders, we also made it our goal to keep spirits and energy high. Our wake up call included playing music through a speaker through the halls to start the day off on an upbeat note. We also asked group questions during every meal to foster unity and merge every side conversation into one. We ended with games and cookies during our nightly meeting to end on a good note as well.

Today especially, we all gained a stronger understanding of how the community joins together to help each another in a time of need. We also took the time to understand each other, as well as talk to other people that we haven’t talked to regularly. While not all of our plans for the Project were executed exactly as we envisioned them to be, there was a bigger level of understanding about how we can make our next day better. Today did not go the way we envisioned it. There were certain problems along the way with grouping and making sure everyone had something to do. Occaisionally, it was hard to know what to do next, we wish that we could have thought of different ways to help more and make a bigger impact on what could have gotten done. Unfortunately the weather had different plans for us.

Since CAP day one is over all we can do is use the experience of today and strive to be better tomorrow.

We’ll talk to you later for CAP Day 2, and we hope you all have a good night!

Big Love!

-Raylen, Francesca, and Kennedy