Busy july in Patios of La Estacion

This past month has been full of festivities: celebrating the last days of classes for children and the town’s Patron, Apostle St. James celebration. The Community Mapping group, part of the Community Center Remodeling Project, has taken advantage of this time to share with the rest of the neighborhood what they have been doing and learning.

These summer months they have seen how to cultivate mushrooms and construct dry toilets from a house visit in the city of Ocotepec. They have carryed out two cleaning campaigns in the neighborhood, and with the money gathered from recycling material visited the scenic train of Cuernavaca, and bought plants to trade in for recycling material with other neighbors. The participants visited the natural lands of Texcal and the Amanalco ravine park. Roberto, an active participant in the mapping group, has also carried out tens of recycling and paper-mache workshops.

Roberto also lend us a helping hand in collectively creating a mojiganga (a traditional paper-mache doll) that along with a torre (paper-mache bull with fire-works shooting out of it) was passed around during the cleaning campaigns and the patron festival. Community wishes of how people would like to see their neighborhood were pasted on the mojiganga and torre, as a means to share and begin conversations with other community residents.

During these activities, we have gotten to know different people in the community like Nestor, the painter who with the help of other graffiti artists, via a mural elaborated the outer walls of the kindergarten.

(Violence only generates more violence.)

Community participation, the joy in conversations and gatherings, and the sharing of food has represented the seal of La Estacion.