Ilana in the Cloud Forest

Happy Sunday, everyone! After 3 weeks of traveling here, there, and everywhere, I finally returned to Neblinas this past Thursday.  What an adventure it has been. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I started my journey in late February in Rio Blanco, visiting my friend Sean at his site and proceeding to travel together to Querétaro for our 10 days of training. Training took us to the Peace Corps office in Querétaro but also to an organic farm in San Miguel de Allende, and back to Querétaro for our counterpart workshop. After the counterpart workshop, I went to Mexico City (henceforth CDMX) and Puebla with my parents before taking the long journey back to Neblinas. When I last wrote, I believe our counterparts were just about to arrive in Querétaro, so let me pick up there. __________ On Monday morning, the climate change volunteers from my cohort made our way to the Peace Corps office to continue our training and prepare for the arrival of our institutional and community counterpart...

Happy Sunday! I'm about half way through my time away from my community, and I have lots of fun updates to share with you.  I'll warn you now, it's a long one, so prepare yourself. The week I left Neblinas was a busy one. Rayanne and I taught classes Monday through Thursday in the middle school and elementary school, teaching our 9th grade students about composting, our elementary schoolers about water pollution, and starting our middle schoolers on group projects that we hope will be finished in time for our Earth Day celebration in April. It was great to see the students really get into the work, particularly with the compost.  Before giving the compost class, we asked the students to come prepared with bags of food scraps from their homes to start their compost with. We weren't 100% sure if they were going to come prepared, but we were pleasantly surprised when we found that more than half of the class had brought in bags full of food scraps with egg shells and peels...