Good Works Gazette
November 2025 Poco a Poco San Pedro Itzicán October 2025 Niñas Sabias September 2025 Niños Incapacitados
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Good Works Gazette – November 2025
Poco a Poco San Pedro Itzicán Like the indigenous community they serve, Poco a Poco San Pedro Itzicán is steeped in a place-based outlook. Their mission is “to help the people in San Pedro Itzicán and the surrounding towns to improve their lives and the lives of others, for generations to come.” This may seem
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PROFILE:
Temazcalera Miriam Margarita Gutiérrez Rodríguez Miriam grew up in Chapala enamored with the lake and the mountains, her love of nature seemingly innate. She followed her passion into a career in Urban Planning and the Environment, taking a job with the municipality of Chapala in environmental compliance in 2006. She loved her work and also
Good Works Gazette – October 2025
Niñas Sabias The only thing I knew about the organization Niñas Sabias before interviewing its dynamic founder, Hana Figueroa Uriás, was they provided reusable cloth menstrual pads for local girls. This is the least they do. Niñas Sabias, which means wise girls, is on a mission to empower girls by destigmatizing menstruation and planting the
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Good Works Gazette
Niños Incapacitados This is the first in an ongoing series featuring groups doing good work in our local community. I launched this column featuring the program Niños Incapacitados to honor my volunteer service there which has forever changed me for the better. Entering information into a data collection sheet, I didn’t notice the little girl
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Local Artist Profile: Blanca Ruth Casanova
Blanca Ruth Casanova’s artwork is as bold as she is humble. Her pieces embrace color, texture, and emotion with an intense sense of physicality. They are more like portals than objects. They feel like spells, calling forth our own emotions and experiences. Like all brilliant art, it is intensely personal and therefore universal. Casanova mines
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Local Profile: Francisco Urzua Ines
Many of the exact details of the first 40 years of Francisco Urzua’s life are sharp in his mind, but mental health struggles have scrambled their order and lent significance to them in a haphazard manner. The thread that runs through all the multihued shards of memory is the understanding that weaving stills his mind
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Thank You Marcus Berlin Willoughby
My friends Lydia and Michael have a lovely house in La Floresta, the hearts and minds of saints and, most significantly for this story, four painfully cute doggies. Nothing grounds you in the now more than the intense attention of canine goodwill ambassadors. Enveloped in wiggly wonderfulness, I could not have known I was about
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Lime Tree Life Lessons
I sit on the tiled floor of my back porch, listening to the mourning doves hoo, hoo, hoo and the other little birds cheep, chirp, and twitter, trying to write something profound about my lime tree. My big, perpetually dusty, labradoodle, a failed foster named Güera (white girl), pushes her irresistibly cute face into mine,
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My First Christmas In Mexico
I experienced my first church-centered fiesta a month after arriving in Mexico. Resplendent with Aztec dancers, fireworks, parades, beer vendors, carnival rides and nightly music until dawn, the nine-day party celebrating Saint Francis (the patron saint of the main church in Chapala) keyed me into the understanding that Mexican Catholicism was not the Catholicism of
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