The struggles of the DPL

Show us a city, buy food for everybody. Or maybe plan a bike tour. All that and more are tasks of the Daily Project Leaders (DPL).

But what even is the DPL?

In Panama and Cuba, everyday two to three of us students had to plan one day. On Cuba, the first few days, they had to plan the bike tour and organize our food. After the tour, the next DPLs had to organize the schooldays in the Friedrichs-Engels-School and the last DPLs had to show us a museum in Havana or plan activities for the afternoon.

Sometimes, you’re lucky and you get an easy day, but sometimes, you get a really long day, with lots of work to do.

Even though all that sounds pretty hard and exhausting, most of the time you don’t have to plan the whole day. Some activities/events were planned way ahead of time and the DPLs only need to tell the group and organize smaller part of the day.

Without being mean, the most annoying part of being DPL are the questions of the other students. They sometimes think, you work for them. They forget how to do things on their own. For one of us, I even had to ask if there’s a second round of dinner. The most asked question is: „Why are we waiting?“. The problem is that time management in the Caribbean is way different, when lunch should start at 12:00 it could also start at 13:00. The DPLs don’t know, why we are waiting and then, at least three people ask them why we are waiting, but most of the time, they don’t have any idea.

And when the other students don’t ask questions, they don’t listen to you. On the bike tour, for safety reasons, nobody could drive in front of the DPL. But the first few days, nobody really cared. It took about two days until KUSis realized: They shouldn’t do that. Later, it got better, and we started to understand the struggles of the DPL, so with the time, it started to get easier for them.

Although, all that sounds really exhausting, in the end, I think the DPL is a very important experience for all of us students. We greatly improve our Spanish skills by talking to local people, we learn how to plan events and how to organize a big group, but the most important skill we learn is how to take responsibility.