Día de servicio en la escuela en las montañas (Day of service at the school in the mountains)

Today started off slow with a morning of rest while listening to students show up to their last day of school. A cute graduation sign in the grass by the basketball court along with kids and teachers alike, helped to celebrate the end to a good year.  Once all the festivities, food, and celebrating were over, our day began.

We started by meeting in the small cafeteria, where the nice ladies prepared us a school lunch. In their own Puerto Rican way, school lunch was much of the same type of meal you could find in a United States school. We were given a heaping pile of rice, a patty, veggies, and juice. Once we were all done, we went to find Carmen, the janitor. Once we found her, she put us to work. She found us a bunch of extra brooms, gave us some trash bags, and we divided and conquered. As there are several different buildings across campus, we all picked our groups and got to work sweeping, cleaning desks, whiteboards, and taking the trash out. What we thought was going to be around 4 hours of work was really an hour and a half. Carmen was supposed to be working until 5 o’clock today. Her job was to do all of the rooms by herself, but by 2 o’clock she said she had nothing left for us to do. We had finished cleaning two hours early and even got to take some leftover snacks from the festivities. We then had time to relax, read, do laundry, and journal before meeting for our last time of the day.

At our last meeting of the day, we reflected on the service we performed and what service means to us. As the discussion flowed, we found that it’s important to not be boastful about service/helping and to listen to those you’re helping. Service is to help wherever you’re needed and where we were needed today was cleaning the rooms after the last day of school. And finally came dinner. We’ve been so spoiled and grateful to have Eileen and Rosita helping prepare us meals, and they didn’t disappoint tonight. Our food was salad, rice, pork, and cupcakes. To have these wonderful people preparing us food during our stay at the school has been a blessing. And during dinner we also got to watch it rain for the first time since our arrival in Puerto Rico. The girls went running back up the steps to the “casita” to take their drying laundry off the clothes line while everyone laughed and enjoyed the sudden drop in temperature. Tomorrow we will get to take a walk up to the chicken farm across the road, and later meet our host families.

-Kiana Oelling