Meeting Day

I still haven't managed to get a good night's sleep but I seem to be functioning somehow. The hotel provides a light breakfast and I was the first one in the dinning area at 7:30 am. MMMM? Maybe this group doesn't have any early risers. After breakfast, we gathered in the lobby/living rom area for our first meeting. There are 19 volunteers on this team. Five are from one family: a grandmother, son and wife and two daughters. The youngest daughter is a freshman in high school and the other daughter has one more year of college. Another family has four members: husband & wife and two children. The one son is in college and the daughter is a sophomore in hi school. Then there is a mother and 16 year old son, and a father with his 13 year old son. This is the most family groups I have seen on any Global Volunteer team that I have been involved in. All of these families will be working in the PPA, which is an orphanage about 15 minutes from the hostel.

I and four others will be volunteering at La Molina Language center of University Agararia. I will be team teaching conversational English with another volunteer from San Francisco. We also will be helping the students with some English writing. I will have a better idea how this works once we get through the first day.


The first day is always a meeting filled with establishing team goals,
introductions, and Q & A's. We did also walk around the neighborhood. There is one very nice grocery store not far from here. Today, we all ate a a very nice local restaurant. Potatoes are a common farm product, with over 400 varieties, so at the restaurant I was served french fries and a great roasted chicken. I also had a local drink made from purple corn called "chichi morass" . It was very sweet so I think they had sugar too.







Last night, most of us went to the "Parkque de la Resseva". This is a huge park that has lots of different water fountains. The fountains are the kind that spray out water in different ways to make some sort of artistic display. In One fountain, you could see different figures in the water that were set to music. It must have been computer generated but I don't know how. Hordes of local people were there watching it with us. I did something like this in Xi'an, China too.

The weather today is another gray and gloomy sky. It has been the same for the last two days. According to locals, this time of year, the weather is like this. The temperature is about 64 degrees F. for a high and 50 something at night, so maybe a little on the cool side, but very tolerable.




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