Youth Voices: Day-to-Day at EARTH University
Saturday: Work Experience Day, or morning (mañana). Every Saturday and Wednesday morning, at 6:30 AM, most EARTH students bike to different farms and fields to work for experience in their desired areas. Fio goes to work with animals (specifically buffalos), but other students work in the food processing center, on the banana plantation, in the genetics lab, etc. At the moment, I do not participate in this program, so I pretty much had the campus to myself this first Saturday morning.
The first thing I did was laundry. I did not want to be seen not knowing how to do laundry in Spanish. But when I went, there was another person there. As I loaded my dark clothes into the washer and attempted to read the knobs, he eyed me. “Do you need help?” I nodded with an embarrassed expression. I asked him what the labels meant and he instructed me on which knobs to turn, but I’m still pretty lost. I also don’t have laundry detergent. He lent me some soap for my first load, but I was on my own for my second...[CONTINUE READING]