So today Saturday was our first Free Day for our
delegation. We were able to get a later
start than usual waking up at 8 AM and we had breakfast at 9 AM. The interesting fact about today is that
both are DR leads had the day off, so it was just the 2 GG leaders ready to
hold down the fort with 18 juniors. Our
first field trip of the day was to the supermarket, of course. All the students wanted to buy snacks and
whatnot to keep in their hostel rooms. I
too, was craving some stuff and bought quite a bit, for what I paid for less
than $15.00, it was totally worth it. We
then went back to city hall where we were given Merengue dance lessons from Don
Cristian it totally appeared that the students were having a blast. I had fun watching some of them struggle, but
also watching them dance like pros.
After our one hour dance lesson it was evident that the students did not
want to go, but we had to get ready to drop off our food items and head to
lunch at our normal restaurant.
As we walked to the restaurant we chatted about how much fun
the dance classes were that at their next off day they were willing to take
dance lessons and learn how to dance Bachata.
We had a nice pleasant lunch and we brainstormed and got the logistics
down as to what we were going to do the rest of the day. After we got the logistics down we walked
back to the hostel to take a break before we split into two groups. One group ended up going to a little league
baseball game here in the DR, while the other group walked around the city and
made numerous stops. As luck would have
it I lead the group that had the numerous stops along the way. I had to manage 12 students and before we
left we had a battle plan: find kettle, eat ice cream, go to pollo rey, go to
the plaza, go to the bakery and find a pizza joint. Yeah, we had a laundry list of things to do
and we only had 3 hours to do it…LOL! At the end of our excursion we were able
to complete everyone’s wish…it seriously was a nice time to talk to more of the
students on a smaller scale since most of them are not from Andrew Hill, so I
got to know a little bit more about them.
After we made it to the hotel I had a 10 minute downtime
before we had to get ready to go to dinner.
During that brief break I ended up playing a couple of games of speed
which totally brought back memories of my middle school and high school days. As time ticked away and 6:30 was getting near
you could hear the students rushing to make it to the common area before we
headed out. As we did our head count and
head out the door towards the restaurant it started to sprinkle and in turn
made us walk faster to get to our destination.
By the time we got there we were about 5 minutes early for our 7PM
dinner, only to realize that the owners told us upon our arrival that we were
35 minutes early, since they had the dinner was going to be at 7:30 PM. So in return we stayed there and played
games…I even got to teach a couple of the students and the other teacher “Burro
emparejas,” we were able to play four games and I only ended up losing 1. The 30 minutes flew by because shortly
thereafter we were able to get in line for dinner and were on our way, 45
minutes later back to the hostel for our nightly meeting.
The nightly meeting went as usual but after the nightly
meeting we had a couple of kids complain to us about their health. Two in particular have had prolong fevers so
we called the ISOS and they suggested that we continue our regimen of
Tylenol/ibu, but that it continues that we had to take them to a clinic for
further evaluation. To make this whole
thing even more suspenseful the cell phone that was given to us, ran out of
minutes while we were on the phone and had to use a students phone to make the
call…we were thankful, but at the same time a bit peeved that he was making
phone calls which requires internet access which the students were not to have
access to.
Oh well…live and learn.
Hope things go better for us.
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