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Location: La Carpio & Los Piedades
Today was a day full of activity and physical exhaustion at La Carpio. Since today would be our last day working a project at La Carpio for the entire summer season, we decided to work extra fast to get as much of our final project done as possible. As we expected, the project involved lots of heavy lifting and cement mixing. Because we had done this several times before, we were all extremely efficient. By the second hour, everyone had gotten into such a good work rhythm that we decided to have lunch a bit later and grabbed a snack so we could continue working. Everybody split up and went straight to the jobs that they knew they could do best. Isis and William went inside to help scoop up buckets of sand while Cass and Xavier worked on filling up buckets of rocks for Max and Jules to take to our giant pile.
Meanwhile, Anna, Morgan, and I stayed in a central location to continue mixing our dry but soon-to-be cement pile of rocks and sand to make the process move even quicker. By the end of the project, we had manually mixed nearly 50 buckets worth of cement in just under 3 hours! I think I can speak for Anna and myself when I say that all nine of us put in 110% today and we’re all happy to have done so much work in such a short period. We will likely be sore tomorrow. After a job well done, we all headed back to La Fundacion to eat our well-deserved lunches. Another group was using the eating area, so we decided to eat in the daycare room where the children of La Carpio were taking their afternoon naps. Most of the kids were so excited to see us that they had a hard time napping. We finished lunch early, so we had a bit of a break before moving to our next activity. Everybody greatly appreciated that little extra time to recuperate. Our final activity of the day involved getting up on a “dance floor” to learn some new Merengue, Salsa, and Bachata moves. As we tried our best to hear the dance instructor’s instructions over the crazy loud Spanish music, we all had a ton of fun. All seven students (and the guides!) got up to dance at least once, so it was a success 🙂 Tomorrow, we have a day in La Finca (The Farm), and we’ll be packing up later on for our next long trip to, the west coast!