Monday, February 22, 2016
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!
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