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Day 3 of the Cuba Brigade
Saturday on 2025-04-26
CIJAM, Cuba (GMT-4)

4:57
I just woke up, before my alarm (at 5:00) even. Not sure why, but I appreciate it, now I can use the showers and everything before the others wake up.

06:21
The showers were good, water and power worked! I brought an extension cord with multiple outlets, so I could use my one adapter to charge multiple devices. My camera's battery, my phone(s), my power bank(s).

Waking up so early was on purpose, as me and a friend wanted to take a walk before everything starts! We went deep into Cuban nature (30 minutes down a road lol) and it was magnificent. We witnessed the beginnings of a sunrise, saw the half moon (which was huge) and realized the stars in the night sky had pretty similar patterns to what we are used to.

7:29
The breakfast was great, just bread with eggs. I needed two portions as I was pretty hungry. Afterwards I was told I couldn't eat two portions, yet it was our guide Marcos who got me the second one. I'm very confused, yet will refrain from getting a second portion again!

We just finished doing sports at the central place. It was a mixture of army training and Tai Chi. A friend lost a screw in her glasses, so we spent like 15 minutes walking around trying to find it, as it was tiny, it was like finding a needle in a haystack. We obviously didn't find it, she fixed her glasses with tape.

11:36
We just came home from the field work. We sat, cramped in a van with 40 people, drove there, and after three hours we drove back again. We were walked through the farm and shown our place of work. It was a pile of dirt that needed to be turned soft and then put into plastic bags with saplings of a tree the farm had a plantation of.

We made about 2000 small bags and 1000 large ones, which was valued at about 8700 Cuban pesos with our united work force in the three hours we worked there. It's laughably low, but the plants we planted and the fields we worked on help the local economy and rebuild from the damaged of hurricane Katrina. It's mainly supposed to be symbolic to show us what life in Cuba is really like, but it's also good because the workers who usually work here can have a free day!

I'm done, probably have a sunburn (despite showering in level 50+ sunscreen, wearing a Kufiya around my neck, long sleeve shirt AND a hat) and my face looks like I've been stuck in the mines for a decade. What a time, and the day has just started!

13:48
The lunch was good (cooked aubergine with rice, black beans, and potatoes, as well as a pudding jam hybrid as dessert). I'm so tired from work, considered going to sleep “shortly”, but then I realized that representatives from the student organization would come soon!