El fin de semana

It is the end of our second week of classes. I cannot believe it. Time flies here. A typical day for me goes like this. Get up, eat homeade granola and maybe some organic peanut butter and local jam on 'Casa del Pan' bread or tortillas. Go to school at 9:30 - during our break at 11:00 I go to Casa del Pan for a snack, either cookies, muffins, pizza, empanadas, or brownies. :) Go back to class. Class ends at noon. Then we decide where we are going to 'study'. We usually go to either Casa del Pan, Tierra Verde, the cacao house (if it's Wed. - Fri.), Kinoki (after 5:30), TierrAdentro, or home. We eat, we research, we organize meetings with local NGO's and community groups. Heather does the calling and talking because she speaks Spanish well. Depending on the day we may have no meetings with people or 4 meetings. So far we have met many amazing people who have given us information that will help us greatly with our final paper. My topic is Mayan medicine. My research question is how westernization is affecting Mayan medicine practices. My hypothese are that it is affecting it negatively because more people are using Western medicine when sick, or positively because indigenous people are using Mayan medicine as a form of resistance against western culture, or it's both positive and negative because collaboration is happening. When I finish my paper I will post it for all you keeners. I apologize for not writing every day....technically I should, but the days seem to go by so fast because we have so much to accomplish in a short period of time. Yesterday I tried to post some pictures but it didn't works so well. I will try again today so hopefully you get to see some of my trip that you read about ages ago.

I may have mentioned that we live on flag street. We no longer live there, or rather we do, but they removed the flags much to our disappointment. It was how we found our way home!!! haha. I have been learning alot. It is amazing what your environment can do for the amount of knowledge you can soak up. Before coming here I knew nothing about Latin American politics. Now, you could ask me about most of the countries in Latin America and I could tell you their president, what he stands for, and what different people think of him! I also could tell you about most of the organic food initiatives in thsi town, the corn problem, the coffee issue, the poverty statistics and injustices, where to get really good italian, indian, vegetarian, lebanese, or thai food, where to find salsa dancing, yoga, midwives, carpentarias, organic handmade tortillas, gifts, good fruit and leather products. The great thing about being with a group our size is everyone has found something and it adds to our collective knowledge of all the things San Cristobal has to offer. James has called San C. hippy Disneyland. not sure where the Disneyland comes from but there are a lot of hippies here, which is the main reason there are so many cool initiatives happening. Anyways I am going to have to leave for class now. I'll try to come on later and tell another story from the past week. hasta luego!