Learning center update!

Here are some pictures from the finished project at the Learning Center!

Day 9

Last day before we leave. Tonight we met as a large group and shared some of the key memories from the trip. Tomorrow will be a long travel day, and a return home to our normal lives, but some memories will stay with us for longer. 

Here is some reflection from Raili:

"The time I spent in Nicaragua was among one of the most inspiring, wonderful, and interesting weeks of my life. During the past nine days I learned a lot about myself, the world, and the people who inhabit it. Although I have been fortunate to have traveled a bunch prior to this trip, I have a hard time trying to compare my experience in Nicaragua to any prior experiences in other vastly different parts of the world. I had only small amounts of knowledge about Nicaragua prior to our arrival, and of course was aware of the extreme poverty that a majority of the country faces.  However, on the bus ride from the airport to the hostel I was struck by just how little money the Nicaraguans really had. There were small children in the streets with hardly any clothing, there were ill looking stray animals all over the place, trash nearly everywhere you looked, houses with no roofs, dogs and even one or two people picking food out of garbage cans, and people who appeared to not have eaten a substantial meal or showered in weeks. It seems crazy to me that in a world where there are people who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a week, there are also people who are forced to survive on less than ten. Regardless of what the people down there do or don't own, it seemed to me that a majority of them were happier than a lot of people I know back in the U.S. It's really beautiful and fascinating to me that people who have close to nothing can be so genuinely happy purely because they appreciate their lives and everything single thing they have. Moving forward I intend to be much more appreciative of what I have, to focus more of my energy on my schoolwork and to be more aware of how lucky I am to have an education, and to try to give back as much as I possibly can to people in need."

The last sunset was the best one. 

At sunrise we like into the bus to go to the airport.