Worldschooling in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas ~ Year 1

On my 45th birthday, we arrived into San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. Mama Dina had been the main voice calling us to come as her and the two kids had landed there in February. I rented a room for us in a house that other travelers were also renting in a popular neighborhood in el centro and we enjoyed walking around the city center during the holiday season that, in Mexico, begins with Dia de los Muertos. I also enrolled you in the Waldorf inspired schoot that Shems & Athena were attending but this move proved the opportunity to rip the bandaid off of your rage and grief from losing your father. The school was too big and didn't work for you. Instead, it was triggering your rage and grief - which was my own - so I pulled you out as winter break began. We made a few friends this first year. Unfortunately, in late November, we received word that Mama Kimberly had taken her own life. This brought me right back to experiencing shock and I was filled with rage for months about how her mental health crisis was tended to but someone we know the most. So what these photos leave out is how my gut was hit with giardia in early December and how you contracted lice from school that we got rid of in early December but that came back a month later and took me almost two months to get rid of. To say life was extremely challenging during this time period is to truly put it lightly. Our friendship with Shane, Sara, Aluna and Sol brought us to renting our cabin in Explanada del Carmen, a Mexican/Mayan colonia that is a 40-minute walk from el centro. After a trip a five hour drive to the Pacific Ocean, at Boca de Ciello, with their family, we decided not to live together. It was lonely and we felt very isolated living in our cabin. However, we also had neighbors, like Iker and Orlando, that you could play outside with. Or, during the rainy, summer season, they would come over and you all would play futbol in our upstairs studio. We had been looking forward to enrolling you in a futbol club but we didn't know how or where to start. We enjoyed a spring break trip to Guatemala for our second adventure in this Mayan country, where we stayed at Mama Carolina's properties in Santiago again and, this time, we got to experience the cultural immersion that is 'Semana Santa' and the celebration of "Easter" there. The local people erect 'Alfombras' in the city streets using dyed sawdust in the creation of brillaint birds, insects, flowers, animals and more. At the cathedral, men stand rocking to the rhythm of a live band while a 2-ton sarcophagus rests precariously on their shoulders. Then, when it has grown dark, they carry the sarcophagus through the streets and the alfombras kicking up the dust and destroying all of the hard work that the people had put into their designs all day long. It's an amazing embodied experience of the temporality of life and its impermanance. You collected sawdust in a bag that we brought back to San Cris with us. We also stayed in our friend Tim's apartment in San Pedro while he was out of town. Lake Atitlan never fails to awe and inspire me with its alpine, pristine lake, zigzagging taxis dotting it and Mayan culture but my mental health was beginning to deteriorate here. I was doing everything I could to stay afloat, including daily baths in the lake for my anxiety. But I had started to feel like I was drowning again. Our financial situation wasn't helping in which our bank card had been hit with fraud on our shuttle ride between the two countries and was deactivated. I had no access to our money. But life has taught me that asking for help and being vulnerable always leads to connecting with kind humans. I experienced a sweet meet-cute with a kind Italian man at the border who was willing to help us. He ended up staying in our cabin with us for a few days as well. However, after he left, my mental health took another serious nose dive. I succummbed to being a pile of anger, rage and fear just laying around in our upstairs studio. However, we did find the futbol club we had been looking for and enrolled you on the team. I was so impressed with how you were out in the middle of a game, giving it your all even though you were still learning how to speak spanish and play soccer. Your confidence blows me away! You ended up on a championship winning team as the Chapulines took the gold medal in the San Cris 2022 tournament. I told you to not expect to always end up on winning teams. Brandy, my best friend from childhood, came to visit us and it was lovely to have her stay with us in the cabin. Her generosity was what we needed even as I could tell that she was noting how hard I was being on you. We lived through our first rainy season summer in San Cris before heading to Mexico City for a few days where we saw Red and did some sight seeing at Teotihuacan. Then, we were back in California for a month's visit. It was to be the Rainbow Shooter Mobile's last hurrah as I decided to sell our van. You cried about it but it was something I felt we had to do. Gas prices had sky rocketed, the Ford was a gas guzzler, and managing it while we lived 2400 miles south was too heavy of a responsibility. As our photos attest, we were able to visit with many of our loved ones. We even made new friends with a widow and her son who was your age whose Oceanside home we stayed in for two weeks. Papa Dale, Elijah's dad, had connected us. For the third year in a row, the van needed servicing around Labor Day weekend. Solomon, Mama Andria's son, brought us to the right place at the right time so that we could have a divine meeting with Benji. We hadn't seen him since we parted ways at Upmqua Hot Springs in Oregon! And after so much life and death it was lovely for the boys to have a group hug - three children touched by the death of a parent at too young of an age.