We had the option on Thursday morning of taking a break, so I decided to recharge my batteries a bit and purchase the thing I’d wanted since I arrived – ¡Spanish board games!

Alex and Hunter were originally planning to join the rest of the team for the school visit that morning, but they started breakfast a bit too late. The rest of the team left to check out the new school location to see if they had the prerequisites we look for: a room with tables, a lock on the door, and an engaged community.

After breakfast, Alex, Hunter, and I went on a walk and visited the Huajaupan version of Walmart. I bought a box of 12 traditional games and a two decks of Spanish cards. The deck is interesting because it lacks 8’s and 9’s, Aces are 1’s, the suits are a bit different, and there is no Queen.

As an organization, our biggest challenge is maintaining the labs after we leave. It’s often a year or more before we come back so it becomes quite important to teach the teachers how to use the machines and how to troubleshoot problems. An excellent way to tackle the problem is to partner with local volunteer and university students. We set up several meetings at Universidad Tecnológica de la Mixteca in hopes of creating a sustainable model we can use in other regions.

We started with a tour of the campus from Thomas, who used to teach at the school.

We talked with several school officials to flesh out what a partnership might look like.

Sometime during the last meeting, I realized I lost my new Andorid phone and started searching around campus (in the pouring rain). I think the phone was left in the taxi – quite a bummer!

After the meetings, we followed the CS teacher to watch sumo robots! Love that the winning team had a lady on it!

That evening we grabbed a late dinner and all stayed close to the hotel and played cards.