We are leaving for Puerto Rico tomorrow, and we cannot wait for what is to come! It has been 8 weeks of working, learning, and preparing for this trip to meet all of Caras con Casa and put faces and experiences to all the things we have learned and read about. The client we are going to be working with in Puerto Rico is Caras con Casa, and it was initially founded in 2004 by a group of university students. It was initially founded to help other Latin American countries like Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Haiti. However, seeing the struggle in Puerto Rico they shifted their focus and wanted to start local initiatives. Now they are present in communities in Catańo and Northern Guaynabo with plans to continue expanding to help as many people as possible across Puerto Rico. The Executive Director and one of the founders is Michael Fernández Frey. He has worked tirelessly over the last 20 years to help Caras and the communities it supports to receive funding from the government along with building back areas that do not receive the proper attention and respect they deserve. Whether that be the community, ecology, or education system, Caras tries to cover all the bases and Michael along with the rest of the Caras staff are truly doing remarkable things for the world. Caras’ mission statement is, “Promote community development through education, the environment and the economy together with the communities of Catańo and Guaynabo.” They are doing this by having programs in place with the community, ecology, and education system. Their community programs include elderly support, such as delivering food for the elderly or helping out around the house with tasks that they may not able to do anymore, after school programs for kids to come to if they have nowhere else to go or need extra help studying/learning, volunteerism across the communities as a whole, and also cleaning up the community by collectively giving back through tasks like repainting old buildings. Their ecology program focuses on sustainability and conservation. The projects they have to support ecology is reforestation in the local nature reserves, nurseries to help grow endangered plants along with teaching students and the community about the plants, and also LabCom which is a community laboratory used to do research that incorporates local schools with field experiences for students to learn more about the nature reserves and apply what they learn in class while the data the students collect help studies that are being conducted. LabCom is what our group is focusing on, and our goal is to get other universities like Pitt to have their students use Caras’ LabCom to learn more about the Puerto Rican environment and so the students who visit can learn and use these experiences in their future jobs. Caras hopes to use LabCom not only as a learning tool for their own students, but also as a revenue driver by getting other students to come visit so that they can use this money to continue to fund all the amazing projects they have going. Focusing on the environment is something that Caras wants to do because Puerto Rico has had a deforestation problem over the last couple hundred years due to cutting down trees for agriculture and industry which has had ripple effects into the environment because trees that were once there to soak up the water and keep the soil sedimentary aren’t, so now water gets contaminated along with causing marshier lands.  One last thing I want to touch on about Caras is that because the Puerto Rican schooling system is so underfunded and many schools were destroyed by hurricanes, Caras decided to start their own school. As of April 2024, Caras’ public alliance school had 529 enrollments and 94% of their graduates planned to pursue higher education. Caras also provides students tutoring centers, a university access program to help students go on to post-secondary schooling, and STEM experiences such as a robotics program through LEGO. As you can see Caras does a little bit of everything for the community and from an outside perspective it seems like Caras is the community or at least the glue that keeps it together. That is why I feel they are so important as they do not focus on one specific goal or task, but rather the goal of making the areas of Catańo and Guaynabo better as a whole by helping in any and every way possible.

In Puerto Rico, we hope to accomplish learning more about Caras in person and seeing with our own eyes everything they do. Obviously, a week won’t do 20 years of hard work and dedication justice, however, it is better than a zoom call. We hope to take videos of LabCom and learn more about Puerto Ricos environment and communities to help better sell to other Universities that traveling to Caras can not only help students learn more through hands on learning and experiments in LabCom but also pair that with the community-based learning aspect that Caras clearly also offers. We hope to show that Caras can help bridge the gap between in class learning and hands on learning, while also building students civic responsibility making education more meaningful and relevant. Through our videos and learning we want to create our own video that we can send to other Universities to get more people seeing Caras and hopefully start the process of another school building a lasting relationship with them.

The biggest cultural norm challenge will be language for me. I speak very little Spanish, but we have Barb going on our trip and she can act as our own personal translator which is very nice. Some things may not be translated perfectly, and communication is the biggest factor in any relationship, so that will be the biggest challenge in my eyes. There are obviously different cultural norms in Puerto Rico such as less personal space and more emotions, but I don’t see any other cultural norms being a problem or messing up business. As long as we go there and try our best to adapt to their style of living, I really don’t think there will be any problems conducting our business we set out to do.

I would say the conversations with Bibi and Adriana have been the most impactful because it gives the non-profits are more real life feel, and you can see how much they genuinely care about what they do, and I think seeing their energy rubbed off on me more and I’m sure I will have that feeling even more actually being in person. Adriana talking about how America has negatively affected Puerto Rico and why there may be some bad tastes in Puerto Ricans mouths about the US put a lot of things into perspective for me and I also learned a lot about the US and PR relationship that day. Yesterday, Rick also showed us a video of Vietnam, Puerto Rico and it was showing how the government was forcing people out of homes and destroying buildings for big companies to move in and that really stuck out to me as well. The video included people of the community talking about the mayor and his actions along with how they feel about the situation as a whole and it was something I never heard about and showed me more about the communities that we are going to be visiting while in Puerto Rico.