Girl Scouts Global Action Award 2014

We are always on the lookout for quality life experiences for Tessa (hence our involvement in Girl Scouts). When we decided on a last-minute cruise with a port of call in Costa Maya, Mexico for our fall vacation this year, I knew The Native Choice Mayan Experience Tour would be a great opportunity for Tessa to earn her Global Action Award. As it turned out, it far exceeded our expectations. I highly recommend it to anyone traveling that way.

I'm not sure how much thought most troops give the Global Action Award, but to me, it's one of Girl Scouts' most important. It's nice for our girls to say that they want to make the world a better place, but the Global Action Award teaches why the world needs them to do so. I just wish Girl Scouts would go a step further and provide better support for this award. A good book and video list with copies available for checkout at Girl Scout resource centers across the nation would be a great start.

While the Mayan Experience Tour touched upon several of the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, the one we primarily focused on was 2. Education opens doors. We completed a service project to benefit a village school in Costa Maya, which compliments activity nine from the Global Action Award for Girl Scout Brownies activities list.

We began our Mayan Experience Tour an hour inland at Chacchoben Maya Ruins...a very nice collection of ruins in a jungle setting.

After leaving the Maya ruins, we stopped at a nearby village where Tessa got a firsthand look at modern Maya homes. It was fascinating to discover that many of them are built on top of ancient Maya homes...often built with some of the very same brick! She learned that people grow their own food and hire hunters to acquire meat. The beautiful vegetation around Maya homes is functional. The plants provide herbs, fruits, coffee, cocoa and other foodstuffs.

Our tour guide explained the process of turning corn into flour as a Mayan woman demonstrated how to make corn tortillas. Modern Mayans speak the Mayan language as well as Spanish. (Many younger generation Mayans speak English as well.)

Tessa tried her hand at making a corn tortilla. We all did, actually. Our host who had many, many, many, many, many more years of practice had to tidy ours up a bit.

Corn tortillas are a staple of the modern Maya diet. Our tortillas were cooked on an open-air stove, which is the typical method of cooking at the village. The flavor and texture is a little different than those we buy here at the store, but Tessa loved them. I think she ate six-to-eight of them.

Our tour guide, David, who is also co-owner of The Native Choice, showed us the fruits, vegetables, beans, herbs and spices commonly used in Mayan cooking.