We're almost there!

Well I had a great weekend – Friday night I had a meeting with the rest of the Centre interns and our coordinator. After that I went with Arturo and Maria to their friends’ house for dinner at like 9:00. It was pretty neat because some of their old friends who now live in Canada were there so it was a very cross-cultural experience. The food was great too!

Maria told me I could sleep in on Saturday for as long as I wanted – so I did. I didn’t get up until about 11:00 and it was fantastic! I went to Wal-Mart with Maria to buy some groceries and hung around the house until Arturo and I went to mass at CEMADE. It was... interesting. The mass was right after the kids’ CCD classes, so it was basically all little kids who were at the mass. They were not paying any attention and were rather restless.

Sunday I went to Uxmal (pronounced “oosh-mall”) with Hannah, one of the other Centre interns who I went to Chitchen Itza with last week. Uxmal is so much better than Chitchen because there is so much more to see there. The pyramids aren’t as big, but you can climb them at Uxmal and there are a lot more different structures to explore. The architecture is more ornate and there are fewer tourists. I put 250 pictures online. You can click here to see them: http://picasaweb.google.com/mdraley/UxmalJanuary18. It was a really great day because we were had more time than last Sunday, so we really got to take everything in instead of rushing. We decided to pay for a tour guide at Uxmal, which turned out to be worth it. He told us that we could catch a bus at 1:30 to go down the road to another ruins site called Kabah, so we did! It was pretty neat too because the whole front of one building was covered in the mask motif that we’ve seen all over the Yucatan. We stayed there for a little while and then went back to Uxmal to see the rest of the ruins that we didn’t have time to see earlier. The park closed at 5:00 and the bus was supposed to come at 5:30. It was late, of course, and when it finally came it was standing room only. So we got to pay 41 pesos to stand for an hour and a half until we got back to Merida. Oh well. We ate at a restaurant in el Centro and then I went to the place where I always catch my bus home. The buses stop running at about 9:00 or 9:30 and it was about 9:20 at the time, so I was anxious to get on any bus that would get me within walking distance of home. A bus was waiting there that I thought could get me home, but I was wrong. So I ended up taking an hour-long tour around the more upper-class part of the city. When the bus finally returned to el Centro, I got on a bus that goes to my neighborhood and got home around 11:00. Long day, but still a good one!

Monday, Tuesday, and today Arturo and I have been supervising the maintenance men’s work at la casita. Things are finally almost done! All the plumbing is in, nearly all of the concrete work is done, the windows are replaced, the tanks are ready, and they’ve installed a big tub to sanitize bottles in. The only thing left is a little bit of electrical work, which the men are going to finish in the morning. And I finally got to get my hands dirty today! I love to play with PVC and I finally got my chance. One of the maintenance men had started on the manifold between the two tanks and I finished it. This is a super-fancy set-up. Besides having a water softener and two tanks, we’ve also installed a hose for pressurized, softened water and another hose for purified water that the women will use to sanitize the bottles the people bring to get filled with water. Click here to see more pictures of the advances we’ve made in the installation: http://picasaweb.google.com/mdraley/AlmostDoneJanuary2021.

We haven’t been able to test everything to make sure there are no leaks, but tomorrow is the day! I am scheduled to begin teaching the women how to use the purifier tomorrow at 8:00 a.m. and I’ll train them some more on Friday and Saturday. I’m so excited to finally see all this come together!

I’m also organizing a side project with some help from three of the other Centre interns here in Merida. They are going to teach the children of the women I am training about why we need to purify the water, how to keep the water from getting re-contaminated, and how the water project is going to improve their health and their families’ financial situation. Thursday and Friday afternoon, one intern is going to come for an hour to talk to the teenagers and on Saturday, all three are going to come for three hours to talk to the teenagers as well as the younger kids.

I’ll update again tomorrow – I hope to have lots of good news!