Mexico

A thousand apologies for not updating in so long... I've been in Mexico with a group of students from the college I work at. We took 12 students to a small town called Calnali, 7 hours by bus from Mexico City. It's up in the mountains. The students pour concrete floors and put up walls in a shanty town, and then they go to an indigenous village and give out shoes.

They shanty town is an acre of land that was donated by the government for a group of 10 homeless families to live on. The shacks are one room boxes with dirt floors and plastic wrapped around the sides to make walls. The students mixed the concrete by taking sand, gravel, a giant bag of concrete mix, and buckets of water from the river. They mix each batch by hand by turning the ingredients with shovels. The few walls they built were either cement block (if they were lucky) or cardboard painted with tar.

Before we left we did a shoe drive around town here in Bloomington, and collected about 400 pairs of shoes, mostly childrens. We were only able to take about 300, due to space. Each student checked a huge bag with nothing but shoes. At the village we gave away every pair of shoes in 2 hours. Many of the children didn't have shoes, and many of them that had shoes were wearing something that was in horrendous shape and not near the right size.

That's the synopsis. Later I'll post my report to the college.