Week 9: Monday, October 23 – Sunday, October 29, 2023

Good evening, wonderful friends, and family,

Today was a great day. I took a day trip with two of my fellow volunteers — Patricia, and Georgette — to a town about an hour and a half drive away from Querétaro called Amealco. Amealco is a Pueblo Mágico (a specific designation given to a number of small touristic towns in Mexico) and is home to the Lele doll (pictures below).

It’s also home (kind of) to one of our fellow Peace Corps Volunteers, Ransom, from last year’s cohort. I say kind of because the town was originally Ransom’s site, but after about 6 months he decided to move to a smaller pueblo in the municipality of Amealco, but not in the municipal city, where we were today.

Ransom so generously showed us around Amealco, taking us to cute restaurants, the mercado, the Lele museum, a pulquería, and just serving as a wonderful tour guide. Ransom has also been a great resource for us new volunteers and I was grateful to him taking time outside of his day to show us around. We had a great time eating, drinking, and getting a closer look at Peace Corps service.

As for the rest of the week, Monday through Wednesday were mostly spent in preparation of our final field-based training day, which took place on Thursday.

On Thursday, we arrived in Charape de La Joya and delivered our final field-based training day with the Charape community. We started the day off at our respective families’ homes, preparing food for our grand celebration that evening. My group elected to make enchiladas, which we had purchased ingredients for that week. But funny enough, I don’t think our family used more than a quarter of the ingredients we brought them. Nevertheless, we had a great morning of peeling potatoes, chopping carrots, grating cheese, and cooking the enchiladas in preparation for the evening. Well, the cooking part wasn’t actually done by us. The families mostly took care of that part, given the open flame stove and the grease fires that are apparently a necessary part of making traditional enchiladas Querétanas. But it was certainly a great experience watching the women cook in this traditional (and, I’d say, dangerous) manner.

After spending the morning with our families, we spent the afternoon presenting our workshops to the community. My team created a workshop on pollinator gardens and the importance pollinators have in our lives, which I gave a good amount of detail about in last week’s newsletter. The other groups’ presentations focused on topics ranging from snake identification to water conservation, composting, and other practical environmental themes.

The day ended with a feast. And when I say feast, I mean a true feast. With each family having prepared a dish or two in the morning, we ended up with two different types of enchiladas (I think ours were the clear winners), three pasta dishes, a beautiful salad with lettuce from the eco farm we had visited the previous week, burritos, desserts, drinks — everything necessary to fill us up to the max. The food ended up being delicious and both community members and Peace Corps Volunteers alike enjoyed themselves.

At the end of the evening, we said our goodbyes. It was a bittersweet moment after spending such a wonderful 3 days with the community over the course of this past month. And we are all so thankful to the Charape community for their generosity and for inviting us into their lives. To quote our amazing trainer Benita, “If the children of the Charape people came to our homes, we would invite them into our homes, too.” I know I certainly would. We left the Charape community with heavy hearts and full stomachs and headed back to Querétaro.

On Friday night, my friends Luis, Grace, Ella, and I went to a listening party for Taylor Swift’s version of her 1989 album. The party was in a beautiful building with multiple cafes and shops that used to be someone’s home. While I’m not a self-proclaimed Swiftie, I couldn’t help but to sing and dance my heart out with my Swiftie friends. After our “workout” (you’d be surprised how much energy it takes to sing and dance for three straight hours), we treated ourselves to delicious crepes and made our way home.

Saturday was a chill day. I woke up for my Spanish language proficiency indicator (LPI) test at 9am (my Spanish has gotten significantly better, by the way) and spent time afterwards chatting with my host over a breakfast of scrambled eggs with tortillas and papaya with yogurt.

Given that Día de Muertos is right around the corner, my host put up her altar with pictures of her family members who have passed. We got to talking about her grandmother — of whom she has a beautiful photo on her altar — and her amazing story.

At the age of 17, my host’s grandmother was married off to a man twice her age (who happened to be her boss at the factory she worked in) after rumors spread that she was having an affair with him. Not only was she forced to marry him, but he also already had a wife and 7 children. The catch, however, was that he was married to his wife religiously, and so he married my host’s grandmother civilly — another scandal in the community. My host’s grandparents had two children together (one of which was my host’s mother). But after some time, my host’s grandfather (or rather the man married to her grandmother — he is not included on the altar for reasons I’m about to share) had 5 children with another woman. In an unfortunate turn of events, after giving birth to her 5th child, the woman died, and my host’s grandmother adopted all 5 children and raised them as her own. My host’s grandmother also went on to become independently wealthy — renting out rooms in her home to people outside of her family to earn herself some money. A beautiful story of resilience and generosity.

That’s all for this week. I know I say something to the same effect each week, but I truly can’t believe how quickly training is coming to a close. Last week was our last full week of training — this week we have Thursday off for Día de Muertos, and our final week is also abbreviated
— and before we know it, we will all be at our new sites, adjusting to our new lives.

Ojála que ustedes esten bien (I hope you are all doing well).

Love, 

Ilana