Day 4

Today we started the day early with a two hour journey to the town of Tinum. We were heading to visit a cenote which is a type of underground lake where the limestone caved in exposing the water to the surface. Ik Kil (the cenote we visited) was absolutely beautiful and our group had so much fun swimming and jumping into the water. We went with David, a Gannon alum, and Jose who designated themselves our photographers.

For lunch we ate a traditional Yucatán lunch called puchero which is a bone broth soup with noodle, potato, carrots, squash, cabbage, plantains and sour orange radishes with Jamaica. At lunch, we met Padre Felix who is the pastor of 13 communities consisting of 40,000 people! He is one of the sweetest people ever and was very excited to have visitors again after 2 years.

After lunch, we headed to Uayma for our overnight stay. The church we stayed in is almost 400 years old! It used to be a convent. We explored the church and Jose even took us up to the roof which overlooks the area. The church was built by the Spaniards but has some Mayan stones that they took from them.

Before dinner, we explored the square outside the church and played soccer and tag with some of the local children. The children kept chasing after Sarah, one of our facilitators who ran cross country, determined to tag her. They also gave us a brief history lesson about the church all in English!

For dinner, we had panuchos which are fried tortillas with pulled chicken and refried black beans. They were cooked and provided by the community. Our group has felt an overwhelming amount of love and generosity from everyone we’ve met. We sat and talked with the boys in the youth group about their schooling (they were in high school and college) and their different majors. They were also intrigued by ours!

After dinner we watched a traditional dance by two performers in the church. They said they perform these dances at festivals and events in the village. During one of the dances they balanced a bottle on their heads and the final dance represented a bull and a bull fighter.

Afterwards we got ready for bed, hung up hammocks, and got settled in for the night! We learned that many Yucatáns use hammocks as their way to sleep and their entire live that’s the only thing they’ve slept in. We hung up our hammocks in the courtyard and were shown the different ways to sleep in them.

xoxo

las caballeras de contenta