At the beginning of this project, we thought that the most important part of COFO was the grade, but then we realized it really involved so much more.  It was about giving something in return to our community through a site that would benefit from our support.  The labor work we completed helped us meet new people, some of which had disabilities that we were not accustomed to dealing with. For example, one of the workers that helped us build the facility was deaf.  We have also learned a lot about the society that we live in.  At the beginning of this project, it’s almost as if we were wearing a mask.  This mask blinded us from all of the pain and suffering in the world.  COFO has given us the opportunity to remove that mask and confront the reality that stands before us because there are definitely several people that could use our help.

     After working with the kids of the site for several months we have developed a feeling towards them. We have developed care towards these children; we care about what they say, and what they do. After all, we have realized that COFO is also about learning to care about others.

     Woo Joo, a new student to the FDR community, thought that this project was the first step into becoming part of FDR. We learned that we must all work together to accomplish our goals. By missing one teammate, we wouldn’t have completed all of the work that we are proud of. During COFO, everybody tried to fully participate in the work and contribute in their own way.  This is a project in which the strengths of each member needs to be used. It was an incredible experience to work together and we will never forget all of the memories that we have shared. 

     In general, we believe that we have done a good job in our COFO project.  However, in order to be fair, we must evaluate our performance throughout the Design Cycle. In the investigate stage, we did well because we completed a thorough research on our problem, literacy. We also interviewed our site official, Ruth Alvarez.  In the next stage, the deign/plan one, we could have probably done better.  Even though we had a list of the necessary resources and a diagram of how our library would look, we didn’t plan our time well.  We think that by doing better in this stage, we would have probably been able to have an even better final product.  Finally, after months of organizing and planning the project, we were finally able to begin the creation stage.  This was the most hectic stage because there was a lot of work that needed to be done in a short period of time.  We built the library, completed the activities and even managed to fix a few other aspects of the site.  We finished this part of the cycle by having the inauguration for our library/ play area. 

     In conclusion, this project has helped us realize that we live in our own little bubble and that there are other people in need of help that aren't as lucky as we are.  Although there are several aspects of this project that could have been improved, we are proud of the work we have completed for this project. 

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