End of Mexico!

So surprise! I'm done with Mexico two weeks early, but I'll get in to that later.

Let's see, Cabo ended up being a pretty interesting city. I was the City Runner in that city, (meaning I ran the morning and closing meetings) with Eriko from Japan. However, the cast was split up between Cabo San Lucas and Cabo San Jose so we were split up too.

I already mentioned our Regional Learning day and how I felt about that, so I'll move on to our Community Impact Days. I did 3 CI days in Cabo. The first two were painting the baseball stadium for our concert with a group of youth from Cabo San Jose. The first day though the paint was so late that we ended up not really painting at all. The second day we painted all day with little interaction with the youth because we were so behind from the day before, so that was a bit frustrating but it's all part of the differences in culture and learning to be flexible. My last CI day was spent working with the founders of Mobilize Mankind, a group that provides wheelchairs to those that need them free of cost. We spent the afternoon unloading crates of wheelchair parts, putting the chairs together and touring the facility. It was especially fun because Stewart, a student with Cerebral Palsy, was there helping out too. During lunch a bunch of us challenged Stewart to power chair races and that was a blast.

The next city we went to was Tepic, Mexico. My roommate Fenna from Germany and I didn't get picked up by our host father, so we got to go home and stay the week with the host family of Angela from the US and Neele from Germany. It was amazing! They were a wonderful family with a beautiful home. Fenna's friends from Germany came to visit so we ended up with 6 of us staying there. We did a really interesting Community Impact/Regional Learning at a Sea Turtle habitat. We got to play with the baby turtles while cleaning up the beach to allow the baby turtles to reach the sea easily. I didn't get to do alot of Community Impact in Tepic because...here's the surprise...I got chosen to go on Advance Work! I spent this week in training because I got sent to Sahuarita, Arizona to help the Field Managers prepare the city. The rest of Tepic was all kind of a blur because I was gone so much for training. The concert was amazing! We finally got the encore we were hoping for. On host family day my host family took us to some old ruins and unfortunately a ditch was not marked properly so of course I fell into it and landed on my camera. So my camera is caput. But no worries, I bought a new one today so there will no lack of pictures from my time on Advance Work.

I arrived in Sahuarita two days ago with my partner Cindi from Singapore. We spent yesterday going out to lunch with one of the sponsors and an alumni and then met at one of the Field Manager Renee's house to be debriefed. Today we attended two faculty meetings to talk to the teachers and I worked with Renee on the Host Family database. So far it's alot of meetings and office work, but tomorrow Sarah, the other FM, and I are visiting one of the Community Impact sites. Everything is going so well and I'm really excited to continue with the rest of the two weeks.