Shackin Up in Mexico

There’s nothing like living in your very own home, providing for yourself…being completely independent. Or that’s the illusion every teenager lives by throughout their high school years. Pretty soon I get to test this theory, along with Charles and the other 5 students. We even got to build our own house!As you can see, it’s a pretty low budget place.  That’s with good reason though, as we have devised a brilliant plan to live like the other half does. We’ve been living down in Mexico now for about a month, and we have seen a little bit of the reality that many people live in here. Driving home from the grocery store we will see families wandering around gathering their fire wood for the evening or next few days (this depends on how much they find), and when visiting Bonita Garcia we have been in a church with walls of cardboard and tarps. And though we live among these people, our reality is that we live in a nice big house, with running water and electricity. We pretty much own the block. We have no idea how they live, and what they do in a day. We want to understand.So for the past week or so we have been collaborating our own thoughts and knowledge to put together a brilliant, if not insane project. We will live in our own, handmade hut for 4 days with one other person. We will get up with the sun and get to work on a working project at 6am and we will work until 3. Once off of work we will be responsible to buy our own food, water and pay our own bills. We will have to search for wood, cook on open fire (mmm…nothing better than campfire food), and learn how to wash our laundry the old fashioned way (by hand…oh my)! We will live as closely in a Mexican families reality as we can…  All of us are super enthusiastic about how this will turn out, and I think we might all be secretly waiting to see who can survive it.Actually building the place turned out to be quite an interesting process of tying, tacking, folding and stapling stuff together.Tara and Nikki brought home our siding, Charles was nice enough to find a roof for us and donate some tarps to waterproofing and shower material, and we were set. We tacked a bunch of cardboard together with nails and staples and then of course our roof is an old beaten up truck canopy.  A few saw horses, a pile of old tires and some tree branches and we had a nice heap of a home. It really is quite an acomplishment though, from the heap of carboard and scraps we had in the beginning. I am sure that any true Mexican home, even made of cardboard, would be far more dependable than this one. Hopefully it can withstand the Mexican wind at the very least.   Our makeshift shack was put together in a matter of days, our shower a matter of hours (yes…we will be pouring water over our heads inside a shifty blue stall), and our firepit a matter of seconds. Everything a person could ask for for survival, and far less than any of us has ever thought of as home. We’re all set for our next adventure!Now the question is…can we do it? Stay tuned =)( Kristi)