Ilana in the Cloud Forest

Well folks, In just one week, I will have been living abroad in Mexico for exactly 6 months. Half a year. What a thought. That means I am just about 1/4 of the way through my service. Kind of incredible to think about.  This was a bit of a crazy week. What would have been a fairly normal week of activities ended up being one filled with a good bit of adventure and intrigue.  So let's get started.  On Monday, Rayanne and I were invited to pick oranges in the orange grove of a man named Elodio. We had tried the oranges the day before and they were delicious, so he invited us to stop by his grove on Monday to pick more.  But what neither of us were prepared for were the treacherous conditions in which the orange grove is located. In order to get to the grove, we had to follow a narrow tree-lined path down a steep decline with incredibly slick dirt. Add to the equation the wrong choice of shoes, and maybe you can see where this is going.  If not, I'll spell it out f...

Dearest family and friends, What's happened in the last couple of weeks? Well, after getting back from Tilaco two weeks ago, I came down with what they call la gripa , which is the word in Spanish for really anything from a cold to the flu, so I was out of commission for a good part of the week.  Although, despite not being 100% last week, Rayanne and I still managed to make quite a bit of progress on the projects we are looking to get funding for. We spent all day Tuesday and Wednesday of last week running around the community, talking to various individuals and families about their interest in participating in our community gardening project and our rainwater capture project. With a significant amount of interest, we hustled to gather all the names of people that wanted to enter the projects and measure the amount of land that is (hopefully) going to be occupied for the gardening project. But our hard work paid off, and last Thursday, Rayanne was able to accompany a couple of mem...