Guest Blog: A Mission to Remember Post 2

Our group continued doing this same routine for the first three days. The only thing that changed was in the afternoon we took a group of kids on a field trip. These kids rarely leave the dump, let alone the city, so it was awesome to see these kids in awe of the simple things that we take for granted like tall buildings and fast food buildings. The first day we took the second graders to a lookout with a breath taking view of a volcano! We let the kids take a horseback ride down the mountain which cost us about 25 cents each kid!


One of the little girls in the second grade named Alix heard the live music playing not too far away and asked if she could go dance. I of course said yes, so I walked her over and watched her dance for a minute. I quickly noticed what dance she was doing. The Meringue! I then asked her if I could dance with her, and she said yes. That was really something to dance with this beautiful girl from the dump!

The second day we took the third graders on a field trip to Granada. This was the furthest we took any of the groups. It was just under a two hour BUMPY bus ride away! But, again, the kids enjoyed getting out of the dump for a few hours. In Granada we took the kids on an hour boat tour around the 200 islands that formed from the volcano many years ago. The sights on that tour were breath taking. We came up to one island to get a closer look at the monkeys that were on the island. Little did I know that “closer look” meant that we hold food out for these monkeys and they come onto the boat! It was very neat and the kids loved the monos (monkeys)! On the third day, we took the fourth grade class to the zoo. Now, this was no zoo like you might be imagining. This zoo had a cage for squirrels and a cage for a raccoon! It was amusing to see some of our everyday animals on display, but they also had lions and tigers (and bears oh my)! Before we were let loose with the kids, we were instructed to keep the kids close to us because they could get bit. I didn’t quite know what they meant by this because I assumed these animals weren’t just roaming the place. I assumed they were in cages…big mistake! Many of the animals run wild through the “zoo.” So I would call it more of a walk through the jungle with a few animals in some cages! And, the animals that were in cages were within arm’s reach. I could easily have touched a lion right on the nose! Luckily, no kids, or college students, got hurt!