Week 2

This week we stayed with Zina in her guest house. If you ever visit Isla Mujeres and need a place to stay, we suggest getting in contact with Zina!

This week we started working in the secondaria (middle school) teaching a 2 week long sex education course. We went to Cancun on Sunday to get copies made since we needed over 1000 copies and probably would have used up all the ink on the island. We went to the office depot to get our copies and the people working in the copy center were so incredibly helpful, even after making over 100 copies of reproductive organs. They even gave us a free cardboard box to put everything in.

Now that we have all of our supplies and materials, Zina's guest house has now been transformed into a fully functioning teacher workroom and materials library for sex educators. We have giant pictures of reproductive anatomy spread out on the floor as well as posters detailing the cause and effects of sexually transmitted diseases and infections, AND we have are using the cardboard box office depot gave us to hold all of our information packets, condoms, and carrots (for the condom demonstration). There is even a nice papeleria across from us that is open late, hurray!

The wonderful civics and ethics teacher, Cristina, has allowed us to take over her classes for the next two weeks and has been teaching with us a lot. She is AMAZING!! She is extremely knowledgeable about sexual and reproductive health and it is obvious that the students really trust her. I hope we get this lucky at every school we work at...

The kids are really full of energy and the classes we are teaching are HUGE, there are a couple with 40 students in them at least. The classrooms seem to amplify the kids voices, but drown ours out. We need a megaphone or something. However, they do seem very engaged and interested in what we are teaching them and are very willing to participate.

I think the word is starting to spread around school about who we are and what we are doing there because everytime we walk through the courtyard of the school with our cardboard box, kids start following us asking for "condones" (condoms) and wondering when we are going to come and visit there class. Every once in a while a condón will disappear from our box and we will se it floating over the school with writing all over it, or being launched across the courtyard like a water balloon.