DAY 1 & 2

On Saturday (11/8), 8 people departed from 3 different airports on 3 different airlines to travel to Merida, Mexico on our fourth mission trip to Solyluna. Solyluna is the organization on the Yucatan peninsula that works with children with multiple disabilities and who were given little to no chance of survival.

7 of us arrived on Saturday, and the arrival of the other team member was delayed until Sunday. We used Saturday evening to do initial setup of the house we rented for our stay here. It is an older, 5-bedroom traditional Mexican home with an open-air courtyard and small pool in the backyard. It is very comfortable, and we're happy to be here.

Typical of all our mission trips, we had to stock up on necessities. There were no plastic tumblers in our house (just lots of glassware), and luckily, we were able to take advantage of a Walmart post-Halloween sale.

Halloween hasn’t taken hold in this part of Mexico, so there were lots of these tumblers on the clearance shelf at an incredible price (less than 70 cents each).

We had Sunday off as we will be arriving to Solyluna’s Hidalgo facility early on Monday morning to begin our work. After a leisurely breakfast of Mexican-style scrambled eggs (eggs with ham, onion, chile peppers and Oaxacan cheese) with Mexican bolillos (rolls), we drove an hour and a half to a very isolated cenote. Cenotes are underwater taverns very common to the Yucatan peninsula because of its porous, flat limestone bedrock. The Papakal cenote is “closed”, meaning that sunlight does not enter the cenote.