Cuyo

A few weeks back one of the host families offered a fellow student their beach house for the weekend. With no convincing at all, the five of us decided to pack up (I brought my disposible camera) and head to Cuyo, a quite beach town in the Carribean. Cuyo is mayan for cerro, or hill, as the town itself was built on a Mayan city. The pueblo originally had 60 people, but now is up to 2,000 - still few enough for a weekend getaway. The roads are solely sand and in the middle of town you can find local youth playing soccer. 

The view from the Ria Lagartos causeway - a red lagoon highly saturated with salt

so saturated that this is me sitting on a pile of salt!

http://www.elcuyoyucatan.net/Historia.htm   Espanol

http://www.elcuyoyucatan.com/    English

100 peso haircut, I love Mexico

100 pesos = less than $10. That is a wash, cut, and straightening. Yeah!

I was glancing at my blog the other day and realized that I had mainly highlighted my trips, my touristic outings throughout the country. While Mexico and Merida have offered me a lot of fun and entertainment, I have also been working alot with school and in the colonia Emiliano Zapata Sur, with some beautiful people. It is for this I am constantly busy, constantly tired, and lately unable to update my blog. Well, that and I am currently without my two cameras!

Initially in EZS I worked with women in a group of salud, which was created with the intention to talk about the mental illnesses that plague the community as well as nutrition and diseases. It turned into a physical health class with aerobics, dancing, and a lack of women. After others from my school in Chicago left things reshifted and I moved to the group of alimentacion, of food. This group began with some women, friends, who wanted to provide more economical food to the community. Currently the group works with the Food Bank of Merida, a NGO. 

Every Tuesday women collect money from the families that qualified for this program (a strenuous process of red tape) and go to the foodbank to gather food. This is the process:

The women arrive at the community development center in the colonia where the food is dispensed. First they pay for next week; next they are given a number, this number will be their number in line to collect the food.

From there everyone waits for the food to arrive.

When the food gets in the women form an assembly line to unload the truck and divide the food into the four groups that make the one large group. Each of the four groups is a different geographical area and responsible for a certain number of families.

The food is sorted into the packets for families to buy. The families purchase these packages for 35 pesos - a great deal. It is good food, but too aged to be sold in the stores.

This is what I want for Christmas. A tricycle!