Friday, January 7TH

Buenos dias!  The morning started early with a wonderful breakfast of a type of El Salvadorian pancake and platinos.  The weather was, yet again, in the high 80´s but with a wonderful breeze in the sombra (shade).
 
The Capstone group left right away for Concepcion Batres, the community that they will be designing a project for next semester.  This group consisted of Bryan, Colin, Flory, and Karissa.  They said that the day was very productive and they got to experience and see another community in El Salvador.  They came back in the night, and along with them came David and Nancy Slinde our group´s West Bend Rotary contacts.
 
The other students divided up to accomplish items on their sub-group to-do list.  Nikki and Erin went to the local wastewater treatment plant to collect samples, and did their solids testing back at Los Ranchos (our hostel), and that group is very close to accomplishing everything they had set for the trip.  Ian also was productive and went to a few hardware stores to look for possible items the group could use to construct the water conservation sinks to be implemented in the future. Andy and Missy started the microbial testing, and had quite an audience of small children wondering what they were doing.  Samples from two sites were collected and the kids learned a lot about bacteria!  Jen and Chris were interested in looking for the potable water connections that the group might run into during construction, but did a great job mapping the location of these for future reference.  Eli and Jim could be found darting all over the community translating for students and helping the community members prepare for construction next week.  The community members are so eager to start work that they even started to hand dig in places that might cause the machine some problems!  Their work ethic is outstanding!
 
In the night, we had a wonderful meal of rice and a vegetable and meat mix.  Dessert was flan and chocbanas! Some students went to the Polideportivo (the local sports complex) to play soccer and frisbee with one of our contacts from the alcaldia (or mayor´s office) and his son.  Others played cards and hung out around Los Ranchos. 
 
Everyone is excited for the weekend and to start work in the communities on Monday.
 
Hasta luego! We hope all is well back in the States!