Latin America Travel Association - Mexico Evening

LATA Event - sponsored by the Mexico Tourism Board

There was an excellent turnout of LATA members for the presentation of a new video about the Mayan world  at London's Canning House this week. Sarah Bradley chaired the event which was sponsored by the Mexico Tourism Board.

The water fountain is being used by 500 people every day

Manuel Diaz, Director for UK from the Mexico Tourism Board, spoke engagingly about the Mayan calendar and the start of a new era. The Mayan calendar is not only more accurate than our own Gregorian calendar, with its occasional leap year adjustments, but includes a 26,000 year cycle, the Long Count. The current cycle ends on 21 Dec 2012.

David Gilmour, chairman of the LATA Foundation, was able to update LATA members on recent fundraising activities  for our projects - £2030 for the Sonrisa dental clinics in Argentina; over £4000 raised by the PooFest for water projects in Nicaragua and in Mexico. He was also able to thank LATA for agreeing to cover all the adminstration costs of the Foundation, such as bank transfer fees and monthly justgiving costs.

Philippa Vernon-Powell of New Life Mexico talked about their inspirational work with street children, drug rehabilitation programmes, their clean water initiative which has enabled them to build 15 water houses since 2010 and the sewing school which the LATA Foundation helped to set up and which opened in April 2011.

The LATA Foundation is grateful to LATA and to the Mexico Tourism Board. Special thanks to Journey Latin America for putting us in touch with New Life Mexico.

Date added: 22 September 2011