Week #2 volunteering in Selva Bonita

Selva Bonita not only is a ecotourism center, Don Damian and his family have big visions to actually improve things in their community and around:

👣 The first big vision is to conserve the Mayan culture and their knowledge about plants, medicine, agriculture, food, textiles and the language for future generations.

🌱 The second vision is to conserve the nature and the subterranean water in the peninsula and to implement an ecotourism that benefits the community, the environment and the planet.

Don Damian has great ambitions and wants to establish a more holistic approach on tourism that can even help to regenerate, socially, economically and ecologically. During our brainstorming, there were many ideas, but there are also a lot of ongoing projects in the center and the family. We as volunteers wondered how they will be able to do this all, so that we eventually recommended to focus on improving the center first in order to be able to invest in projects. E.g. they also recently started to do workshops in the schools and the community hall of the town. Until now they are funded by bigger organizations of the peninsula which require a lot of documentation and lack transparency.

I was lucky to take part in some of these workshops and could at least support in the registering and supervising of the kids. I actually didn’t think to attract that much attention, but they literally loved me and asked a thousand questions❣️The most frequent ones:
- What does this and that mean in English/German? 🗣️
- Does it snow in Germany? ☃️
- Why are your eyes blue? Are they real?🤣En savoir plus