Monday morning started off bright and early, the six-thirty breakfast wasn't very popular among some of us.....Jake. Now we were headed to a batey, to visit Gido's feeding program. Gido is Franklin's dad and works and hangs out around the ministry center. He's pretty cool. A batey is a village where the sugarcane farmers live, they are legit in the middle of the sugarcane fields, and I mean the middle. You are driving through fields and fields of sugarcane going for miles and miles. When we arrived, the kids welcomed us with singing and a few games. Then there was baseball, and some of us played volleyball. In the background the wagons of sugarcane were being loaded up onto the railcars. We helped serve food to the kids at lunch and ate some ourselves. Then Gido shared stories of when he worked in a batay, and gave us information on how much pay the workers get, what hours they work, and on the sugarcane itself. When we got back home, after a pretty long drive and dinner (Pizza, yay!), we actually got to try the sugarcane. You basically just bite a chunk of it off, chew it to get all the sweetness out, and spit the rest out. We finished off the day doing circle time and munching on our sugarcane.
Tuesday we were headed off yet again to do construction at the school we've been working at, Peña de Horeb. More concrete...yay. So we spent the day mixing, shoveling and pouring the concrete to pour the floors for the new bathrooms that they are constructing, as well as the walkway to those bathrooms. It was lots of hot, sweaty work, and more than usual since a number of people weren't feeling great and stayed home. At the end of the work day, we even took the time to write, 'I Block 2023' in the concrete we had helped pour. Who knows if the construction guys smoothed over it or let us keep our legacy there forever, I guess we'll see when we go there next. When we got home, there was a surprise waiting for us by way of a very annoying and very loud orange kitten who was dubbed Felix. Franklin's nephew had found it and offered it to us to take care of. And of course, since we already had two kittens before, Alice and Ava, our resident cat lovers, took it in. At dinner that night, somehow a debate started on whether curry was a sauce or a dish, or if pineapple belongs on pizza. It got surprisingly passionate, we have some headstrong people in the group. We also started this thing we do at the end of circle time that Henry likes to call 'pumping the tires'. It's basically a compliment circle, where we pick a name out of the hat and give compliments to the person that was picked. It was a good two days, we learned a lot, and had fun along the way.
Karissa Huizinga
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