Weeks 90–95: Monday, May 12, 2025 – Sunday, June 22, 2025

Good afternoon, everyone,

I hope this newsletter finds you all well. 

I know it’s been a while since I’ve written to you all. And don’t worry, everything is going well. But for the last 5 months, I’ve written to you about trips, visits from family and friends, and the exciting adventures I’ve taken, here, there, and everywhere in Mexico and the US. Well, for the last month or so, I’ve been laying low and spending time in my community, and so it felt like there wasn’t much interesting to tell you about.

But despite not having notable adventures to write about, I thought I would give you a brief update about the happenings in Neblinas, my quick trip to Querétaro this past week, and the plans I have for the less-than-4 months that I have left in my service as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

Since arriving back in Neblinas in mid-May after my trip to the Yucatan, I have spent most of my time in Neblinas, working on a few small projects, enjoying the slow life and appreciating the start of the rainy season in Mexico.

My main focus right now is a project I have in the works for the casa de cultura (community culture house). The plan is to create a mural with bottle caps, an eco-bench, and a pollinator garden, with the goal of fostering a space where community members can sit and enjoy nature while perhaps reading a book from the community library and/or spending time with others.

The idea for this project came to me a few months back when I was thinking of ways to fill my time for the remainder of my service. Once I knew I wasn’t going to be able to accomplish the community-wide cistern project like I had hoped, due to funding for projects being put on pause and not finding other sources of funding, I got creative and started looking for new inspiration. I had thought for a while about the possibility of painting murals in the community, and as I was searching for design ideas, it occurred to me that I had seen other projects that used bottle caps to enhance the dimensionality of the murals and incorporate an element of recycling. 

So, I went to the director of the casa de cultura with my idea, and from there we starting thinking of other ideas that we could apply for in a grant and easily implement in a few months, and thus came about the ideas of the bottle-cap mural, pollinator garden, and eco-bench.

Coincidentally, around that time, the director of the high school invited me to work with her students every Tuesday and Wednesday for an hour each day. She didn’t have an exact idea of what she wanted me to do with the students, so I proposed that we feed two birds with one scone (do you like what I did there?) and have the students help me with the prep work for my project, meanwhile teaching them about creative ways to recycle plastic and other environmental techniques. 

Each week, I asked that each of the students bring at least 20 bottle caps with them so that we could reach our goal of collecting around 5,000 bottle caps to be able to create our bottle-cap mural. (And for those of you who are having trouble envisioning what a mural with bottle caps looks like, I've included some examples below). The nice thing is that many students had already started collecting bottle caps before I started the project, and with the many bottle caps that the students have turned in, we are already on track to reach our goal. If you think about the various types of plastic containers that we use on a daily basis, you can collect bottle caps of all different colors, shapes, and sizes. The diversity of caps will contribute to the intricacy of the mural that we can create.

The goal is that once we collect enough bottle caps and sort them by color, we can then design the mural and start painting and securing the bottle caps, hopefully by July. The eco-bench and pollinator gardens will also hopefully come together by July or August. And then after that, I’ll just have a couple of months of service to go. 

Last weekend, I took a trip to Querétaro, where I marched in the pride march and spent time with some good friends. 

Then, on Monday and Tuesday, the volunteers who applied to be a part of the Peer Support Network (PSN) participated in a training led by current PSN members, and I am happy to say that we have now welcomed five new volunteers as official members of the PSN.

It's hard to believe that it's been almost a year since I became a member of the PSN and now new members are joining. With new members joining, it means that my time as both a PSN member and as a volunteer is almost up.

So, in case you all were wondering, that's what I've been up to the last few months: continuing with service as usual, enjoying the time I have left in this chapter of my life, and thinking about what the future holds. 

Wishing you all the best. 

Until next time,
Ilana