Uruguay Mid-Term Report

Volunteers, community partners, and Project Staff are now knee-deep in the project’s core work. Two full weeks under our belts, with two ahead, AMIGOS in Uruguay is alive with accomplishments and goals.

Volunteers have successfully begun their communities’ construction projects, and visits to their towns show a range of project goings-on: dug-up dirt, stacked bricks, sand piled high, measuring tape stretched out, and fresh paint drying on community walls. The project’s physical work has set minds into motion, as volunteers and their youth counterparts plan and hold educational workshops in their time apart from the manual labor. AMIGOS Volunteers and partners in the department of San Jose of Uruguay enjoyed two training sessions during the project’s first week that prepared them to work with youth on topics such as transit safety and entrepreneurship. Volunteers and youth coordinators in the department of Montevideo will get together at a local high school this Saturday for a full day of educational workshop training, and special theatre and dance performances by the high school students and teachers.

Communities across both departments look forward to an AMIGOS Youth Fair next weekend, where Volunteers and their partners will present their communities’ educational, construction, and intercultural exchange work via photos, speeches, and an optional talent exhibition.  During this event, we will hold a mass project evaluation, Round Robin style, and enjoy potluck cuisine, listen to local music groups, and have the chance to souvenir shop from an informal artisan market set up by our partnering craftsmen.

The busier we get, the more we understand the brevity of a five-week project. Though the time seems to pass quickly through our hands, AMIGOS in Uruguay is hard at work to make each prideful, exciting, and ever-accumulating moment count.