The fourth and final day was spent at . This was by far my favorite day of service. The first part of the day was a cultural exchange among the Bonner Leaders, students in the advanced English course, and members of the Red Cross Youth Council. The day began on a very comic note. Eliane Ortero, the president of the youth council of the Red Cross Youth Council introduced what we would be doing in Spanish and I translated her speech to English. She said “Hola, me llamo Eliane Ortero” and I responded with “Hi, my name is Eliane Ortero”, a direct translation, but obviously not my name. After the laughter died down, the cultural exchange began. Among other things, we compared universities in Puerto Rico with those in the states. Eliane told me that she really wanted to pursue a field in pharmaceuticals, but needed to go to the states for that. One thing that I learned from this open interaction is that, like in Spain, the Puerto Rican students were very shy about speaking English, especially when they discovered that I spoke Spanish. For example, I kept on trying to get Eliane to speak a little English, but after about thirty seconds of it, she would revert back to Spanish. After the cultural exchange, the members of the Red Cross Youth Council took us on a tour of the school. Along the way, we came across a very inspirational poster, which stated"
"Un hombre no envejece cuando se le arruga la piel, sino cuando se arrugan los suenos y esperanzas"
"A man does not grow old when his skin wrinkles, but when his hopes and dreams wrinkle."
Finally, we proceeded to our final task of the day: painting the music room. Although the music instructor did not speak very good English and the room was quite large, we managed to finish painting the majority of the room in only a few hours. After that, we had to say good-bye to our Puerto Rican friends, but hopefully not forever. Minerva's trying to coordinate a NY trip for the members of the Red Cross Youth Council so I keep my fingers crossed.
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