Oops!

Okay, so I am really bad at this blog thing, there are so many things I want (and have wanted to share), but by the end of my very full days of training my brain is complete mush and doesn't want to cooperate.  Thus, I will summarize a few things that have happened since my last entry.

Piedra Grande (October 15-26)
I left October 15th, along with the other environmental education (ee) folks, for a very small town in the state of Mexico called Piedra Grande for our almost 2-week practicum.  One of my main focuses as an ee volunteer will be to work with folks in the communities surrounding my park on understanding the purpose of ecotecnias (green technology) and helping them get them into their communities.  Some of the ecotecnias I helped build and took extensive notes about were a rain cistern, a more efficient wood-burning stove, solar (food) dehydrator, and a couple family gardens.  I now have a pretty good understanding of what is needed to build these things - in the case of the cistern lots of mixing of cement, sand, gravel and water - and in a couple cases think that with a little help I could actually be in charge of the building process.  So friends whenever you're ready for a large-scale, backyard food dehydrator, I am your woman.

Me inside the cistern watching the master at work

While we were there we also put on an ecoferia (eco-fair) at the local primary school.  This for me was even harder than the physical labor involved in building the cistern.  While I do have some experience teaching and working with kids I've never done that in Spanish.  Preparing to teach our short lesson on water (The Incredible Journey for all my ee friends in the states), was good in that I learned lots of new words in Spanish and realized that I needed to change my teaching style a bit to make things work.  That is I needed to do way less talking, ask short-answer questions, and make things very hands-on (and of course in the perfect world always have someone around who knows Spanish to help me).  I think that Greg (another trainee) and I did a great job leading and along the way adapting the activity and the kids really seemed to enjoy traveling the water cycle.  There are many things I took away from my experience in Piedra Grande such as talking to people doesn't have to be as scary or intimidating as it can sometime seem, building things for people is way more fun when they help and you get to interact with them, casual conversations can help you learn a lot about a community, and I want to continue working on my Spanish so I can have even more conversations and be an even better teacher.

Dia de Los Muertos (November 2)

Celebrating dia de los muertos or day of the dead in Mexico was both a beautiful and a slightly sad experience for me .  It was beautiful in that it is a time set aside for families to not only remember their loved ones who are no longer with them, but to actually get together, clean and decorate their loved ones graves, and reminisce.  Some of these gatherings were quite simple, while others included hiring large bands to play graveside.  The sad part for me were the forgotten graves, the graves of people who's families lived far away or they themselves were no longer around.  In fact, a group of us went to the cemetery to see what this was like and ended up cleaning one of those graves.  While we definitely got lots of stares (most likely due to our obvious gringa-ness), someone at a nearby grave let us borrow their brush so we could really clean the grave.  The other sad part for me is that I actually had someone to think about and mourn for because a wonderful woman - DEB TYMAN - who helped with my high school year group and went to the Presbyterian Church in Whiteville with my family, and who was just an all-around awesome lady passed away while I was in Piedra Grande.  So as I laid those flower petals on this unknown grave all I could think about was Deb and her beautiful smile and how lucky I was to have known her.