First weekend in Tuxtla

Friday was a really fun day for us. First, at Casa Telmex, we did four very good activities. The first is called “The Human Knot” and it is a challenge for the mind and for our communication abilities too. We had two groups of people: the kids with us from MIT and the other was the facilitators. In the groups, each person had to grab the hand of two other people and then try to form a circle with everyone in the group. The interesting thing is that the group of facilitators was much slower! We think that it was because in our group, we had a rule that only the kids could talk. For this reason, there weren’t many people fighting and it was easier to untie ourselves. The second activity is called “Gift” and it was an activity with the goal to improve our skills to listen actively to others. There were pairs of people that spoke for ten minutes to get to know each other and after, each person had to introduce the other and say what gift they would give the other person if there was no limit of money or anything. The next activity was “Where are the leaders”, and it was a discussion about where we find leaders in our societies and our lives. The conclusion was that there are leaders in the government, businesses, schools, families, and many other very common places. To finish, the last activity was the blog about the leaders that there are in our lives.

After we finished with the program and discussed a little bit about how it all went, we left early, at one, bought our lunch at Gorditos and went to Chiapas del Corzo to see the Cañón Sumidero. It was very beautiful. We went on a boat through the canyon and we saw the beautiful mountains, interesting vegetation, many birds, and a crocodile! We spent a few hours exploring the town and we ate a delicious dinner at an Italian restaurant. After dinner, we heard a parade in the street and we followed them until we arrived at a place where there was a multitude of people that were yelling and dancing. We walked a little more and then we returned to Tuxtla to sleep.

Saturday, we woke up early and caught a 9am bus to San Cristóbal de las Casas. San Cristóbal is a very beautiful town. We spent some time walking and buying things, then we had a lunch of comida corrida. The most interesting thing that we did Saturday was to explore a cavern that is close to the town. The cavern was big, dark, and with very beautiful rock formations. We spent the afternoon walking through the town and buying things, and we ate a dinner of tortas (very salty) before we returned to Tuxtla.

When we returned, the girls didn’t feel well. Taylor had to sleep, but the other 4 of us went out to a club to meet some of the facilitators of Casa Telmex to celebrate Pedro’s birthday. It was really fun to go out at night for the first time in México and also to spend time with the facilitators outside of Casa Telmex.

Tortilla Count:

Kyle: 36

Dave: 33

YeSeul: 29

Lauren: 29

Taylor: 23