Skip to main content

Here’s the Buzz!

Bienvenidos to our BEEautiful blog! 

This morning we split our forces between landscaping at the Pio Decimo lot and painting at the John Valenzuela Youth Center (JVYC). The landscapers continued working on weeding the Pio Decimo apartments, while the other force painted murals in various locations around the JVYC.  

The group reconvened for lunch, and today we experienced Sonoran hot dogs and authentic tacos from local food trucks. 

After lunch, we received a tour of the JVYC. John Valenzuela was a law enforcement officer who gave his life in the service of young people. The youth center was founded in his honor to actualize his dream of a better life for local kids. They just recently planted a pollinator garden, so our paintings were “bee-themed”.

Once the children got out of school, we were able to assist with the after school program. A little girl named Penelope took a quick liking to Rachel and stuck with her until she was picked up by a parent. Beth, Clara, and Sherin helped lead Team 1 to victory in the competitive game portion of the afternoon. Other activities included arts and crafts, Just Dance, and outside play time. Outside activities included basketball, football, tag, and tackling Franklin. 

The team headed for dinner at the Tucson Tamale Company thanks to a generous gift card donation. From the restaurant, we were able to witness yet another beautiful Arizona sunset! 

After a thought-provoking reflection, we are looking forward to another action filled day tomorrow :)

XOXO,
AZ Border ABST





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Guac and Talk

Hello everyone! Welcome to Day 3 of our Arizona Border ABST trip.  We started off the day with donuts and headed to Casa Alitas, a migrant center in Tucson. We were greeted by Sara who explained to us what Casa Alitas strives to accomplish. Casa Alitas is a center that helps migrants who have recently crossed the US-Mexico border. They provide many important resources including shelter, food, transportation set-up, and can help migrants connect to sponsors if they have lost their original sponsor along the process. We gained insight into some of the political policy behind recent changes in immigration, in addition to the history of Casa Alitas, which essentially started overnight. In fact, the house that we are currently residing in is where the program first started and it has since grown into a huge center that is able to take in up to 180 guests at one time.  After getting some background information and going on a quick tour, we started our volunteer work for the day which
Post a Comment
Read more

20 Hours Later

We departed Gannon on a yellow school bus at 2:25am headed for Pittsburgh International Airport. It was cold, bitter cold in the early morning; however, the smiles of the teams (both AZ Border and Navajo) warmed up our hearts. Our ride south on I-79 was cold inside the bus as many of us had our eyes closed trying to sleep and never falling asleep. We were blessed with a safe trip as our bus driver did a wonderful job. Our flight was in the early morning out of Pittsburgh. As we flew west we were riding away from the eastern sunrise. In time the sun caught up to us and the Midwest was covered in a beautiful blanket of frost. The arrival into Phoenix thawed us out of the cold of Erie. It was sunny, very warm, and beautiful blue skies. We had a 40 minute delay to get off the flight which only enhanced the anticipation of beginning our ABST trip! As we exited the Phoenix airport we waited in line in a busing terminal for a bus to take us to a rental garage for our van. In the term
Post a Comment
Read more