Mexico Day 3

Day 3

Doug was still sick and unable to be with us again that day.  Doug and Darla have some friends in Paamul, Bill and Sandra, who are from Canada and their son and daughter-in-law just happened to be  visiting there too.  They have been supporting another small Mayan village called Santa Clara in the Yucatan.  They were planning on going to take gasoline for the village generators.  The generator is for their well and they often do not have gas or any way to go and get it.  They asked us to go out with them that day.

Our first stop was to what would probably be like our downtown city building, in Chemax.  

 Darla was going to help talk with the officials about getting electricity run out in the village.  It is actually already there, they just need to tie into it.  While they were inside, we walked around the small town square and went to look at this church.

 These bikes are everywhere and are almost the only transportation in the villages.

We got out to Santa Clara and were immediately met by an old woman, who hugged us and kissed us.  That is something I will forever remember.  This village is made up of seventeen families.  They have a large holding tank where they have fish to eat.  They have about 100 chickens, that Bill and Sandra gave them.  They also make their own honey.  

I was surprised that this small village had two school rooms.  One for the smaller children and one for the older children.  The teachers actually leave school/college to go and teach somewhere - that is part of their schooling. They live there in the village while they are teaching.  Both teachers looked very young.   This was the older class.

 He had hopscotch on the floor with math problems and wherever their wadded up ball of paper landed, they had to skip that problem  while jumping and then answer it.  

 El bano looked a little scary.

 This was the younger class and they were all enjoying the suckers we had just passed out.  We pretty much disrupted their learning for a couple of hours.

 That is the older woman who greeted us as soon as we got there.  She is letting that little puppy bite on her toes.  All of the older women wore those dresses.  I loved them.

 Another women wanted to show us her garden.  We didn't know they could grow anything because of the rocky soil.  She had fenced off a large area for a garden, but because of the lack of rain, it wasn't doing well.  She also had a lemon tree (they are green, not yellow) and she gave us some of them.  They were delicious.

 Another view of her backyard.

This village had a small church (I can't believe I didn't take a picture of it), that we think may have been pentecostal.  They had also been given stoves to cook on, but were poorly built and most of them had fallen apart and had been taken out of their homes.  Darla told some of the women about our stoves and we scheduled another day to bring one out to them.  

While we were looking at this woman's garden, Bill and Sandra's daughter-in-law, who is a nurse, was checking out a 7 month old baby boy.  He was born with a cleft palate and had a tracheotomy and feeding tube.  She determined he was pretty congested and needed to get to the hospital.  Bill, Sandra, the baby, his mom and her mom all piled in the car and headed to Valladolid to see the doctor.  Before heading out, a villager invited us into his home because he has made some empanadas for us.  We all were nice and ate one and he had even made some sort of red onion salsa that was very good.  Again, I was a little leery of eating something I didn't know what was inside.  

From Santa Clara, we headed back to Chan Chen, because Darla holds an English class at the church each week.  I was looking forward to hearing how their English was, but sadly that day, no one showed up so we headed back home.

Each night we did a devotion with our group and I volunteered to do mine that night before dinner.  When we got back to our rooms, we realized there was about a billion (I'm not exaggerating) black ants running underneath mine and The Sevenski's palapas.  It was then, they accidentally shut their room door with the key inside.   We decided to go ahead with the devotion until the guards came to unlock it.  So, I started but was almost immediately interrupted by the guards.  Then we showed them the ants, which had started consuming the outside of the huts.  The guards then went back to see what to do.  So, we picked up the devotion again….only to be interrupted with the guard again.  They decided to move the Sevenski's to another room, but not me.  He just kept saying, "Dos minutos" while waving his hand around like he was spraying something.  I took that to mean he was going to come back and spray bug spray in my room.  I packed up my stuff to move into their room so it wouldn't be infested with ants.  We decided the devotion was a no go for the night and headed down to Doug and Darla's for dinner.  When we got here, she informed us that they are just army ants and aren't like our ants here.  They move though, eating dead things and keep right on going.  She was right.  When we got back, they were all gone.  I was afraid of being attacked by ants the rest of the night though.  

The next morning we learned that the baby boy from the village received some antibiotics and was doing much better.