Blog 4 Mexico

Last Blog from Yucatan, Merida, Mexico

February 22, 2016

Saludos Todos!  Greetings All!

This is our last week here volunteering with HST in Merida, and it’s a good time to write our final blog.

Here, everyone calls me Don Pedro.  Pedro, the Spanish for Peter, and Don, a respectful term for someone older.  I said older, not old!  Hahahaha.  And for Hinda, it is just Hinda, and you know she is younger than I am.

Our friend Margo visited us for about 10 days. She went to a Spanish language school for 5 days while we went to work, and then we spent the afternoons and evenings together.  She just left yesterday.  It was a nice visit for all of us.

Merida is a very safe place in Mexico.  We never felt unsafe for even a moment.  One of the jokes about why it is safe is that the families of the Narco’s live here, and so they don’t want any trouble here.  True or false?  Who knows?

Merida has a very nice folk art museum which we visited last weekend.  We bought two small very nice pieces.  One a maraca with a feather – a bit unusual, and a very nice hand painted gourd from the state of Guerera.  You will see it when you visit us again back at home.

Here in the tropics, there are so many wonderful fruits and vegetables.  It is so easy to grow things here.  One of the fruits we discovered is a cross between an orange and a lemon, very sweet, and not too juicy.  It is called a China Lima “cheena leema”.  Mmmmmm good.  The Cheena here is an orange good for juice and very sweet.  In fact, we squeeze fresh juice at home every morning.

Last Thursday, both of us with the Director of HST met with the Consul General of the United States here in Merida.  It was a fruitful and good meeting and he hosted us in his office for over an hour.  We talked about the things that HST is doing.  He has agreed to visit one of the Mayan villages for a full day in the next week or so, and his Public Affairs Aide will liaise with Susana who we work with in the office.  He has only been here for 6 months, and we think that we are one of the first local organizations to meet with him.  One of the things we talked about is linking the primary school his children go to with a primary school in one of the villages since each of them have garden projects.  We are hoping the relationship will grow.  It is good to have a friend in a US Consulate or Embassy.

A few more things from work: 

-       I have been mentoring Susana daily who among other things does some fundraising and she is taking it all in.  For me, it is one of the most important things I do wherever I volunteer,

-       Hinda spent a fair amount of time planning and conducting office staff meetings; writing policies and procedures; job descriptions; editing grant applications.

-       The vitamins we helped to arrange from Vitamin Angels arrived and Susana and I along with the HST Nutritionist arranged a distribution system.  The initial shipment is for children from 5 – 11 months to be followed by vitamins for pregnant and lactating mothers, deworming pills, and then older children.

-       Helped HST to apply to Microsoft for free software and licenses.

-       Trying to get a fabric supplier to donate fabric to HST for the

Village sewing workshops but don’t know if there will be enough time left to do it.  If not, they can do it on their own.  Hopefully less need for us now after these two months.

We spent this last weekend in Tulum, an archeological site and resort with white sandy beaches on the Caribbean, our first time swimming there.  The water was warm and the sun hot.  We got more tanned. The ruins at Tulum were interesting and situated on a cliff above the ocean.  We stayed in a small palapa just a couple of hundred feet from the beach.  Peter rose early every morning to photograph the sunrise.  Hinda stayed in bed as long as she could.

So, that’s it for now.  We leave here in 10 days and while we enjoyed being here, we always enjoy going back home to family and friends.

We will go to New York for a week in June and tentatively to Turkey, Israel, and Jordan in August, and for Peter, back to Kenya to finish his big project which he has been working on since 2009.

Hasta luego!

Don Pedro y Hinda