The Bridge

I met Jane yesterday afternoon. She is a very good friend of Gisèle, the owner of the house we are renting, and she dropped by to introduce herself. She is a vibrant woman, a retired early childhood teacher, and she is actively involved with the school library program here in Xcalak. She is also starting and ESL program at the school next week. She is from Minnesota, and spends six months here every year with her husband. Their house is about 2km down the road and she invited us to snorkel there as she has a nice shallow reef in front of her house - perfect for the kids. She will also take me and the kids to her ESL class on December 7, she said that it is a must for the kids to see what a classroom looks like here (they barely have a piece of chalk...). Looking forward to the experience.

She also told us how the bridge that used to link the beach road to Majahual went down. It appears that two Mexicans had a huge argument one night, and they burned it. There you go! I guess their affairs are settled now! She said that it's not a bad thing, since Majahual is the bigger town on this part of the coast and Xcalak is much more quiet and safe since the beach access has been... well...burned down (okay then...).

School work still going well - although for some reason we were not able to Skype with Leo's teacher this week. The session was postponed to Tuesday and while we waited for him to connect, we did the home work and after a half hour, he was still not there so we signed out. When the home work is completed I take a photo of each page and email it to his teacher. Today I tried to do this with my camera instead of my iPhone, but the resolution was too high and the filed were too big - so this will be done with the iPhone from now on.

We all went snorkeling a little farther yesterday, Leo's first time on a reef. I partnered with him and was holding his hand and the entire time he kept pointing at each fish (big blue, and yellow and purple ones) and I could hear him exclaiming his joy and surprise through his snorkel - what a pleasure to share this with him!

Time to prepare to go to town, I will put the final touch on my lesson plan and we will hit the road to Majahual. The last time we were there in March 2008, was 6 months after the town was completely wiped out by hurricane Dean and they were very busy re-building. It will be great to see the new town, the boys remember the way it was so they will appreciate the difference. We'll do some shopping too, I wonder if our list in realistic... the 'big' store there might not be exactly our idea of 'big'. We"ll see!