Staying Awake.

A rule of thumb one might find useful, if you are planning a volunteer trip across the world: Whenever possible schedule the arrival to your destination as close to early evening as possible.

The benefit of this is two-fold. First, you and your group of volunteers do not have to struggle to stay awake all day and secondly, I do not have to spend all day monitoring the length of your nap, orchestrating mindless walking tours (you will not remember 90% of what you see and hear during this time) and other distractions around town in an effort to keep you and your team awake!

I feel bad when a team arrives at 09:00 in the morning, a whole day before their project starts. It is tough to have a free day where the only thing on the brain is sleep. This happened on Sunday ... the team arrived at 08:40, cleared customs, exchange money, ate lunch and settled into their accommodations for the next twenty hours all before noon. I let them have a nap and then I shuffled them onto public transportation and around town in an effort to keep them awake. Trust me, this is easier said than done! It always gets to a point in the early evening that I start talking about random, stupid things just to keep them talking; because if I am lucky talking keeps them awake.

Thankfully, after some ice cream (about 18:30) we ran across these break dancers. The team managed to watch the guys dance for almost an hour.
Once it got to the point that the dancing was no longer enough of a distraction to sleep, I loaded them back onto public and headed back. We stopped for some drinks on the way and managed to make it back right about 20:30. Just in time for them to clean up and head to bed!

I, of course, went home just as exhausted. It is hard work keeping up with ten tired Americans, as they wander in and out of consciousness as well as traffic.