Carey Family Chapter Five: Con Cuidado, travel with care
This adventure is not for the faint of heart or the physically frail. There will be constant excessive heat. There might not be air conditioning in your host family’s home. There will be mosquitoes. Bring bug spray and hydro-cortisone cream. Your host home will be clean but there will be sugar ants. So, don’t keep food in your room, store fragrant items in ziplock bags and rinse the toothpaste out of the sink after you brush. You’ll have to remember to turn off the lights and fan when you leave a room and throw the toilet paper in the garbage not the toilet. You can’t walk around town with your nose in your phone. You may step into an open rusty grate and you’re probably going to mildly lacerate your leg enough to be done swimming this vacation. Be observant and realize that you need to be careful. Your kids will ride bikes without helmets and ride in cars without seat belts.Catherine is the school founder and she is amazing. It’s a huge risk for her to vouch for us as guests and to bridge the gap to provide a home stay experience. If you are considering doing this program, here’s my advice. Don’t wait until you are 80 percent sure it’s the right thing to do. Life’s events will take the opportunity away from you if you wait too long. Jump at 70 percent sure. Don’t do it if you aren’t willing to tread lightly. Staying with a host family means trying to live efficiently like they do. Less water, less electricity, sweat out the heat, wash the dishes by hand, ride a bike that is old and doesn’t fit you. Be flexible and teach your kids to be flexible. It’s like camping. You are going to suffer but when you survive, you will be happy.I enjoyed this adventure. It had all of the elements of happiness: learning new things, connecting with people - people you love and people you meet, challenges overcome, deprivations abated. Our Spanish is better and yet it still has a long way to go. A lot of who I am came from the adventures traveling as I grew up. It is so heart warming to be able to share these experiences with my kids. I was delighted to discover that my kids will now be able to enjoy some of the liberating lessons learned while traveling.Thank you Na’atik.
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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.