It's now been just over 2 months since Hurricane Dean ripped through the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, wiping out the picturesque sea-side fishing town of Mahahual where P and I have spent our vacation the last two years in a row. Information on the status of the town and the people is hard to come by, given that there is no real media coverage down there. Fortunately there are some folks who have set up blogs and uploaded photos to the web...

I ran across the following blogs recently: the folks at No Abandones Mahahual have just launched a new site called Mahahual After Dean that depicts Mahahual before and after Dean; the Help After Dean site has some info and links to local initiatives; a woman named Whitney has posted pictures of Mahahual's rebuilding efforts, which is all the more encouraging after looking at the images of destruction posted by a French woman named Sylvie.

The news is definitely bleak overall however. Though we finally received some good news about our good friends Janet and Guillermo from Kohun Beach, who survived the storm by taking shelter in their concrete storage building, there was also some sadness and loss as we learned that they lost all three of their beautiful beach-front cabanas. They don't know what they are going to do. Like most folks down there, they did not have expensive hurricane insurance.

We still haven't decided whether we will return to Mahahual this year. It's a tough call. Though we'd like to go back to support if not help out the wonderful community we fell in love with on our honeymoon, the thought of knowing that our favourite place to stay is just a memory washed away by the biggest storm in memory is tough to accept, and may or may not be a good idea, at least until some of the infrastructure has been restored. So we'll see...

In the meantime, donations can be sent to a few groups that have taken the reigns where Red Cross has failed to deliver. Please check out the Help After Dean site for more info.