Family Chapter Two: Hilary's adventure.

The Fernandez- Macgregor family from Los Angeles visited us in May, stayed with one of our lovely Mexican-Maya host families, and fully immersed in the language and culture. Journalist mom Hilary, screenwriter dad Jonathan and sons Theo and Benji all wrote about their experiences in travel blogs that they're keeping up as they continue an amazing adventure through South America. They’ve kindly allowed us to publish excerpts from their entries describing their experience at Na'atik and in our town, Felipe Carrillo Puerto. Below, Hillary details her experience of living in the Zona Maya

Our Week in La Zona Maya

We are here! In our tiny town of Felipe Carrillo Puerto–the center of the Mayan resistance, and the home of our school Na’atik–Un Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas. We all graduated today, and received certificates and a tee shirt. Although Benji (my lifelong collector of certificates) said: “I don’t see how I can graduate if I can’t even read what it says.” I found our school on the internet on a list of the 10 best language schools that are off the beaten track in Latin America. This was number one. I love off the beaten track, because if you go to language school in a place like Cuernavaca or San Miguel de Allende, every Mexican in the city speaks better English than you do Spanish. Here, pretty much no one speaks much English. They speak Spanish, or Mayan. You learn fast because you MUST speak. The more isolated the spot, the faster you learn. That is my philosophy, and it turned out to be true. Though, we are really off the beaten track. This is truly a town that time forgot. Sure, Zumba is here, and jeggings. But there are no airplanes, no urgency. Everything is quiet, lazy and slow. It is a tempo I do not think you can find anywhere in the States today.The school is run by Catherine Gray, an American most recently from Seattle, who came down to Felipe Carrillo to do bird research as a volunteer for the Audubon Society, and never left. She ended up marrying a local, becoming an English professor at the local university, and, eventually, starting her own school, Na’atik. (To’on Na’atik means understanding each other in Mayan).The school is intimate and sweet. Catherine built it herself, hiring her own architects, doing her own endless bureaucratic paperwork, and coming up with her own vision. It is tiny—with about 100 locals who are studying English, and, the week we were here, the four of us Ferndandez-MacGregors, plus another American who had been studying here for three weeks. That’s it.We got absolute personal attention. When we drove in on a hot, dusty Sunday afternoon, we drove straight to Catherine’s house. She was there in her shorts and tank top with her two dogs, two children, a huge smile, and a chaotic halo of curly red hair.At the suggestion of Catherine (and Molly—the excellent fundraiser and organizer of the school) we (I) had elected to do a homestay. They said it was more fun, more interesting, and, I got the sense, also good for the local economy. Jonathan was reticent. And I guess I was a little, too. We received questions like: Could you sleep in hammocks? Do you need your own bathroom? Do you need hot water? Could you all sleep in the same room.Jonathan was game for all, but drew the line at hammocks. So we ended up all in the same room, two hammocks and a double bed, and our own bathroom. There is no hot water. But once you are here you really don’t care because it is so hot that you are taking showers to cool off. That is the local form of air conditioning. Just take two to four showers a day.Catherine took us to meet our homestay. She explained that Dona Norma, our homestay mother, cleaned the school, and Don Chucho, the dad, wired it for electricity. Jonathan asked if they were poor. She said, it might seem like it to us, but not really. Poor, she said, was students who would come to her classes at university falling asleep because they had not eaten in three days because they were spending all their money to go to school.Our family live in a house of cinderblocks on a street that was just paved in the last year or two. Across the street the people still live in palapas—the traditional Mayan huts—and cook by fire at night. (Though they do have a television in their palapa). We are literally at the edge of the jungle. One afternoon we took a wrong turn and we ended up on unpaved roads in the jungle with palapa after palapa. We are at the edge of the 21st century. The back edge.Our family all sleeps in hammocks. They have no books. Dona Norma cooks all our meals on a tiny stove that is smaller than the Coleman stove I take camping. She has a refrigerator, one knife, two pans, and a cutting board. Outside she has a grill. But in that tiny kitchen she can cook some of the best meals I have ever tasted. Also some of the strangest.One day we had spaghetti with hot dogs, the next we had a classic chicken soup with chicken asada cooked over hot coals (escabeche). It was so good that even though it was over 100 degrees outside I could not stop drinking the broth. I was sweating and sweating, but still I kept eating. We had aguas frescas at every meal—made with limon, mame, melone, banana. All to die for.We always eat separately from the family. I thought it was because they are shy. But I think they only have four plastic plates and four forks. So only four people can eat at a time. The boys sleep in hammocks—big, beautiful, colorful hammocks (Catharine showed us how to get in, how to sleep, how to not knock for your neighbor). We sleep on the bed, but I am almost ready to convert. The bed is hard, and the hammock is cool. Last night, after I lay in the hammock for a couple of hours and then got back into the bed, I still felt like I was rocking. The way you feel after you have been on a boat all day.It’s primitive. The bathroom has only a curtain (spongebob squarepants sheets, repurposed), and no door. They bought a toilet seat just for us, and the septic system is very delicate. We had an incident with a clogged toilet, and the cure is to keep pouring buckets of water down the toilet. Gravity will fix anything! They said if they had to, they could borrow a plunger from an uncle in another neighborhood.There is no privacy. Children are staring in the windows—the regular windows, and the high windows that ring the room near the ceiling to allow ventilation. Geckos and giant moths are always flying in. The roosters start crowing at about 4 am. Way before dawn. This morning there was a rooster crowing so loudly I thought it was in our room. It was right outside the window.But the family is so kind. So attentive. And we are adjusting. Becoming part of the neighborhood. I help in the kitchen a little, and talk to the neighborhood kids in bad Spanish and good English.The boys’ fantastic Spanish teacher, Irene, taught them to play Loteria, so last night we started with me and Benji, and by the end we had so many kids we ran out of boards. Little Ixtel, the daughter of our homestay family (age 8, beautiful and whipsmart) called the names, and corrected our pronunciation when we mangled words. As I sit here writing, Theo is swinging in his hammock, singing in Spanish, about Mother Earth—Ayo Ayo Ayo.Molly took us for an awesome walking tour of the town on Monday night, Tuesday we had a dinner with our teachers. Wednesday we had a field trip with our teacher, Edwin, to learn about the city’s history, visiting La Cruz Parlante (the Talking Cross), a sacred spot, and the seat of the Mayan resistance. And Thursday we had class at a lagoon, learning how to do descriptions, then swimming in the cenote and a lagoon. (homework: write a description of the place). Friday we wrapped it up, and went out for a big taco lunch which lasted nearly three hours (mostly because the service was so slow, but who cares?) Jonathan and I ate the best tacos of our lives, a coco frio man rode by on his bike and sold us his last two coconuts, then waited for the kids to finish, so he could chop them open and cut out the yummy coconut flesh for them.Catherine and Molly took care of everything. Catherine’s son, Piero, played with the boys when we had longer classes than they did, and when Theo jammed his finger playing basketball Catherine stayed with us at the hospital and talked to the nurse and doctor to make sure we got the care we needed.Catherine even made arrangements so that the boys could run track in the afternoons with her son, Piero. She took us to the city track and introduced us to the Coach, Maestro Nim of Punto Allen, a tiny fishing village inside the Sian Kkan biosphere reserve. Here in this dusty little town is this amazing track coach who runs a free program and has trained runners who become champions at huge state meets. They are beautiful to watch. He is strict and warm and believes he is imparting a life philosophy to his runners. The track was a dusty, dirt track, but the kids had the best form I have ever seen—long strides, high knees, strong arms. He accepted my kids without question, and Piero translated every day, as Coach Nim and his assistant worked on my kids’ running form. He gives them a test and assessment every Friday to see where they are. Slowly they move up. Some of them have been running every day for four, five and six years.The boys started out in the younger group, then Theo got moved up to the older kids. Still, he said it was embarrassing when these little Mayan girls who come up to his waist would sprint by him during drills.Every day we got personal instruction. Jonathan and I were in the same class (she should have been about 17 levels above me, but he stuck with me for the review). Still, it is hard to beat that kind of personal attention. It is like having a private tutor. The boys had a charming woman named Irene, from Mexico City, who took them shopping for fruit, taught them songs in Spanish, taught them Loteria, and left us with a list of cartoons and movies for them to watch in Spanish.The week flew by. I can’t believe it is over. Benji has a fever—I believe from the extreme heat. And we are all very wiped out. But it was a great week.Still, I will be happy for temperatures under 110, hot water, air conditioning, Wi-Fi, privacy, and no bugs in my bed, lizards in my room, or roosters outside my window.You can read the rest of Hillary's blog, here.

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The best way to experience the Mexican lifestyle is in person, with a Na’atik Immersion experience. Not only do you live with a local Mexican-Maya family, sharing home-cooked meals and free time, but also receive expert instruction in your chosen language at our school. Best of all, every immersion experience helps fund our subsidized and free local education program, helping local students to access opportunities and make their own futures.