Ek' Balam - The Maya Town

Why?

People keep asking me why I took my family to Mexico for 3 months. And personally, I don’t know if I have a SOLID reason. I initially thought it would be fun, filled with great food (lots of tacos) and we get to skip the Seattle winter. Another reason was to learn what is like to live in Mexico.

A few days ago, we visited Ek’ Balam. A Maya town of about 800 people, and we got to spend a few hours with them. Manuel was our guide, and he took us around town and taught us so much about the culture there.

This town is a few miles outside of Valladolid (where we stayed) and the drive there was very quiet. Not a lot of people going in and out of this town.

When we got there, we met with Mario, who introduced us to Manuel. We then walked around town learning about the Mayan Culture. In a very “traditional” way, the men go out and work in the fields; while the women stay at home doing some knitting, weaving, and household chores. In the past few years, these traditions have evolved, so its no longer the men go out, and the women stay- they get to choose what they want to do. Their main sources of income are the grain from the fields, the farming of animals, and their sales of the knitting of various forms of hammocks.

During this tour, we had the incredible opportunity to visit with Dona Paulina. She allowed us into her home and showed us how to make hand-made tortillas. We were told that in the Mayan culture, women could not be married unless they knew how to cook. One of the ways in which they would be “tested” was to see if the tortillas that the women made would inflate when being heated. If it didn’t, the woman would be told that she wasn’t quite ready yet. She gave us dough she had already made, and we all made our own tortillas. She makes about 100-120 tortillas each day for a family of four.

Tortillas are a HUGE staple of this community. The men bring home the corn, and the women turn it into flour to make tortillas. Great teamwork IMO. The second staple in this town are hammocks. We saw a few people making and selling hammocks outside of their homes. Mayans of this community sleep in hammocks from the time they are born. Our second “event” was to help make a hammock. We spent a few minutes helping a local with the hammock she was making. For this specific person, she told us that it takes her about a month to make a hammock as she does it in her spare time (anywhere from 1-3 hours a day). I obviously asked if couples sleep in different hammocks, and they said, “no. They sleep together”. I was blown away. I keep saying how much I miss our King bed. I wonder what they would think about my bed…

Their home was simple. It has 2 main rooms: the kitchen and their bedroom. It seems like people also gathered to hang out in either the kitchen, or bedroom (which also had a TV) or outside. They move their hammocks out of the way throughout the day so that people can come in and out of the home. Also, their homes are also their place of business.

We have seen a lot of cool things in the 3 months we have been here but seeing this community and hanging out with them for a few hours was absolutely fascinating.

So why did we come? Not sure. But it's definitely changing our lives.