Muchucuxca Mexico with AJWS

The last leg of my Winter Break Extravaganza was a trip to Muchucuxca Mexico with American Jewish World Service as part of their Rabbinic Student Delegation Trip with 17 other Rabbinic Students from around the country.

I spent January 4-14 in the Yucatan, but not in the Yucatan most people think of or travel too. Hopefully, our work will help to change that. In Muchacuxca the 18 of us spent our mornings building a solidarity-eco-tourism site. We carried dirt, shoveled chickichitas, the Mayan for pebbles, and unearthed tunichob, rocks to create a walkable nature-reserve trail at the edge of the village which wound through a beautiful and rocky wood. The idea is we worked together with members of the village to help build this base for a sustainable tourist economy. Hombre Sobre La Terre, or HST, the NGO with whom we were working and which AJWS supports, provides training in marketable skills to this otherwise uneducated population. The villagers who have joined the HST collective are paid to host visiting groups much like our own when they come to town. We lived under thatch palapas with cement floors and electricity at the eco-tourism site. The hammocks or hamoccas we slept in were hand-woven by members of the collective. A small tag informed me that mine was made by Esteban Caamal. It took him a whole month of regular labor to produce the hammock. For a mere $60, I brought mine home with me.
Bringing a computer to rural Mexico would have been silly. So I brought a voice recorder instead. I audio blogged my whole experience in Mexico...and you can hear all about it here. And these are my photos. From my photo gallery on Picasa, you can see the photos from the other participants.

It was an incredible 10 days which left me with many questions about God, poverty, Judaism, pluralism, my role as a Rabbi and much much more. I used the audio blog to explain most of it. Additionally, I will be talking about this experience at my senior sermon which I will be delivering on Feb 2 at Hebrew Union College. After I deliver my words, I will post them here.