DAY 9 – Cultural exchange & Cheese farm day

MOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Today Kate and I (Asma) are the leaders del dia. We started our day off bright and early like usual. Today before breakfast many of us sat on the patio and chatted. Alexa, Kate and I started the day off with our 3 liter Coke-a-Cola which was refreshing. After we talked to Diego our great chef. He made us pancakes, eggs and fruit like usual. The fruit was by far the best part of the meal, like most. Todays fruit was mango and watermelon so fresh that you definitely cannot find it back in Chicago. After breakfast Kate and I lead a mental warm up consisting of food for thought mostly statistics about rural school and the food we eat. After our mental warm up we rushed to get everyone walking to the local Santa Rosa school. When arriving to the school we started with arts and crafts which was by far the best or I’m just biased cause that was my group. We had the third graders and we were drawing self portraits but it ended up being folding the papers into little noise makers that when you move your arm down they create a popping sound. The kids had a break in between and it consisted of going to the courtyard with every child in the school screaming six seven. Next the english group went teaching the kids english using balloons almost like a mad libs having them fill in the blanks. lastly at the school we had the sports group go and they stated playing soccer with the kids. After sports finished we began our walk back to the house, but ran into our hosts from our community day at the entrance of the school. They came to say goodbye to us and gave us little souvenir pencils. Once arriving to the house Alexa, Kate and I finished off the 3 liters bottle of Coke-a-Cola in a recorded breaking time of 10 hours between the 3 of us. Diego was there with lunch today, for lunch we had a chicken chick-pea soup with rice and our fruit juice.

Continuing on in the afternoon, we had a little bit of a rest period and got ready for our cheese farm tour at Finca La Flor. We all loaded onto the bus and arrived at the cheese farm. We were greeted by Karla, which is the owner of the farm. She started off the tour by giving us information about the type of food she feeds her cows, the benefits of the types of grass and plants, information about how she makes her cheese! We were directed to the barn where we saw all of her cows and 2 of our students got to milk the cows. After the tour we took the bus to the restaurant where we ate dinner at. All 20 of us sat down at the table and munched on some pizza after a long day. After dinner we got back on the bus and headed back to the house where everyone talked, played pool, or even played ping pong. We did the nightly meeting as usual. After the meeting everyone split up and went off to bed and Asma and I (Kate) headed downstairs to write the daily blog and all of a sudden the power went out! Thank goodness we had Nino here because he was able to go outside and walk to the main breaker and we were able to continue to finish the blog. Due to this being the last night of us staying in the house everyone has been recapping the trip and already laughing about things that happened a week ago, even though its crazy to think that this trip is almost at the end. This trip was able to give all of us a new perspective on life and how we can start applying the things that we learned here, to our lives at home.