I didn't take many pictures of Mexico myself but I have finally taken some from others who went with me... so here are some of my favorites. I'll try to give a brief description of each.
This is Sra. Estella Manchaca, the lady who hosted me in her wonderful home for the
duration of my stay, and Gina my lovely roommate who made the whole Mexico experience so much fun and completely unforgettable.
Below are pictures of the UDEM campus and some sights along the way. Notice the amazing mountains! I could not get enough of them! -of course, Gina thought
that was pretty amazing because she lives in Idaho right next to the Rockies. :).
The international program at UDEM offered a service project - so, of course I signed up! But it wasn't quite what I expected. In previous years it had been something done in the afternoons during the week. However, this year they decided to take us to a couple of villages up on the top of some mountains (5 hours away!) on the weekends. All we did was play with the children there - and beg for the ladies to cook us food when we got hungry! It was hard for us to understand how it was service, but they assured us that the villagers enjoyed it and so that's all that matters.
To the left is the small town of Zaragoza at the foot of the mountains where our villages were.
And below are pictures of El Refugio, the village where I stayed.
So much for the places I stayed in Mexico. This has taken much longer than I thought it would and it's getting late so I'll write again soon to post some pictures of more people I was with and some of our activities.
Both of the villages we visited welcomed us with a presentation by their children. The children in the first village danced for us, and the wild children in the second supposedly sang for us (why they are in crepe paper costumes I'm not really sure). The dancing was so cute! The singing, well, we got to know that that group of kids liked to be very loud. The school is where we slept - on a blanket on concrete floors. There were no showers. We played lots of soccer and they taught us some new games. The game where we are holding hands in a circle is a really fun game - kind of like duck duck goose with partners. The other is where a kid repeats a rhyme and gets people out when she lands on them. I didn't catch the meaning of it all but at least one rhyme had something to do with sending people to either China or Japan. The little girl I'm sitting down with (I'm afraid I don't remember her name) had a few conversations with me - if you could call them that. She would say something, I would respond and she would look at me like I'm crazy. But we did finally learn how to communicate properly on the soccer field - she is quite a good little player. I'm not sure you can see, but there is one picture inside of one of the kitchens. The homes of these villages are made up of many buildings. One for the kitchen and usually a couple more separate one-room buildings for sleeping (i.e. one for the children, one for the parents, and one for the grandparents). I have a picture of one of the smoky kitchens where we would take our food supplies to be turned into supper (or breakfast, or lunch). And the last few pictures are of the ride home. We got up and left before sunrise - there we are loading the truck getting ready to leave. And then there is a beautiful picture of a mountain as we were driving down the mountain (which takes an hour). And the last waterfall is a park where we stopped to make lunch on our way back to Monterrey.
