Friday, June 7, 2013

Community Impact: El Salitre

On Thursday in Queretaro, I was a part of the group who went to a place called El Salitre to work in an impoverished neighborhood to help clean up and beautify a park area. We had quite a long bus ride because we had to drop off other Community Impact groups, but we eventually pulled up to the community and unloaded. We started by painting over a wall covered in graffiti so that we would have a clean slate to start our project. 
 As we were working, we unearthed a TEENY TINY little bunny! So sweet!! He was so terrified, though, because of all the work going on around him!
 We spent the morning painting a "Tree of Hope" on the wall in preparation for the little hands of kiddos in the community. Before we knew it, tons of community members were out and about helping with the project, and we had tons of little ones ready to have their hands painted! I had so much fun painting "manos" of all the kids and holding them up so they could add "leaves" to the tree! Everyone was SO eager to help out and contribute!
Community members helped out by painting, too, and they were INCREDIBLE artists! Just check out what they whipped up!
We added our Viva la Gente logo to the wall, in addition to various sponsor logos and "Haz un Cambia" which means "Make a Change" in Spanish.
We had some downtime, so some of us played games with the kids!
We waited around for the Governor's wife to join the site and help out a bit. We'd interacted with her a bit on Monday when we arrived in Queretaro, so it was nice to see her again. She helped plant a tree and placed her hand on our tree as a gesture towards the community.
It was an INCREDIBLE day and definitely my favorite CI of the entire semester. It was amazing to work with community members and really feel like we made an impact. Painting with the kiddos and playing games were definitely the highlight of my day!

No comments: