The Summer of Broken Dreams

The title for this post was originally inspired a few weeks ago when I attended the World Youth Conference in León, Guanajuato. You might recall this conference as my first Mexican television exposure. Side note: I have been filmed again. To my knowledge, my interview hasn’t been aired yet but I don’t doubt it will be. Tamaula hosted a huge workday on my birthday last week, complete with a documentary crew to film clips that will be airing on local television. Did they need to ask me twice to get in front of the camera for an interview?

Back to the back story of this post’s title. While attending said conference (that even though I only attended it for free food and free television exposure, I still received a congratulatory certification of participation), I found something I’ve been looking for a long time. I don’t really know how to describe the contraption as a jumping thing. Picture two 30 foot high poles tied to the sides of a trampoline with the equivalent of huge rubber bands tied to each pole. Basic idea is strapping yourself to the rubber bands and jumping to launch yourself 40+ feet high and flip on the way down. That is my idea of fun. And it was free! Unfortunately the economics of free means a huge line that I waited in for an hour but didn’t get to see the end of. The bus was leaving and I wasn’t allowed to stay in León for the night so my heart was broken. I was really set on being as dangerous as possible outside of getting involved with Mexican drug lords. But, this episode only inspired the title for the post. I considered writing the “Broken Dreams” post but figured that was a little dramatic if all I missed out on was jumping and flipping on a trampoline.

Well, the fates conspired and this weekend provided the perfect marriage of an inspired blog post title and my goodbye post. I’m writing on my last night in Tamaula. We’re leaving in about 5 hours for Irapuato, DF, and “el norte”. My favorite joke today was telling everyone, “Ahora estoy a punto de salir de este país de perdedores, pero tengo que salir por otro país de perededores.” That’s been getting be a few laughs today. I’m saying that I’m just about to leave a loser country but I have to go to another loser country. Though the beginning of the weekend saw me talking a lot about Mexico and the US meeting in the World Cup finals the pinche (refer to the story about Leo) Argentines and Ghanaians conspired to destroy the hopes of close to an entire continent. We both lost! It’s not all bad news. I would have been annoyed to leave Mexico if they were winning and the US wasn’t.

This is going to be my last blog post for the summer. I’d like to end it on a high and (not really) low note. Let’s start with the low note.

At least one reader of this blog (my mom) will remember the story about living with a convicted felon and his family. They aren’t my host family. No, they are visiting my host family. Still. We’ve definitely passed the three week mark. I’m so happy that I’ve become enough of a part of this family to get all the gossip. I started learning more about a week ago when I found out that two bags of popcorn were stolen from my room. Doña Martina, my incredible host mom, sat me down when I got back the night I found out and had an extremely dramatic conversation that confirmed many of my suspicions. Doña Martina told me she liked it a lot more when it was just us (us still being 9 people). However, it was clear that the visiting family had not only worn out their welcome, they had burnt a hole through the welcome rug. Despite this, as I write, they are still here. I got the goods today. For three weeks I thought they visited because they were in dire financial straits and had to eat. Many incidents and conversations just bolstered this hypothesis. I won’t bore you with all the details of this fascinating journey but unfortunately I can’t ethically give you all the juicy details either. They may suck, smell bad, and be overall extremely annoying to me and my host family but they’re still real people. So, I’m going to try to keep as much of their privacy as I can but I feel compelled to share this. My suspicions were completely off. They certainly aren’t wealthy but they’re not here because they didn’t have anything to eat. Rather, the father’s criminal activity in the United States didn’t stop at the border. I wish I knew the whole story (even though I couldn’t share it), but I know enough good stuff. They’re fugitives. Yep, a family of fugitives. They’re on the run and can’t even go down to Irapuato because the police would pick them up. That’s way more exciting than just living with a convicted felon. It’s also way more terrifying for my mom but she’ll sleep easy knowing that I posted this after leaving Tamaula.

You see why it’s not really a low note? I want a life full of experiences—good and bad. This experience happens to be living with a wanted man and his frustrating children. Seriously, I almost followed up the “If I Were An Animorph” post with “If Guanajuato Had ‘Cops’” post, but I figured that was too risky.

So for the high note. I hope this translates well without knowing intimately the people involved. Last night was the funniest dinner I’ve had since arriving in Mexico. One of my host sisters is dating a guy in Arkansas named Beto. Turns out the family more regularly refers to him as “Beto el Gordo”. That translates to Fat Beto. My host sister is thin as a rail but we apparently can’t say the same for her novio. In fact, one of the funniest jokes of the dinner was Doña Martina telling me how my host sister and her boyfriend form the number 10. She’s really skinny like “1”, and he’s so fat he makes a “0”. The conversation started because I asked my sister when her boyfriend was coming back. Luckily for joke’s sake, he’s returning in December. Martina says they’re going to dress him up like Santa Claus and put him on a donkey to bring a gift to Oscar, my little host brother. The best jokes are the hardest to explain. They might be especially funny because they were in Spanish and I was understanding everything everyone was saying. We were talking about the possibility of me meeting Beto if I drove through Arkansas this summer. I told my host sister that if I meet her boyfriend I’ll take a picture with him and send it to her. This set off a riot, but you wouldn’t have known it. The other host sister and Martina were really serious when they said, “Oh, Tomás. He’s not going to fit in a camera. Yeah, you’re going to have to take at least 3 or 4 if you want a picture of him.” As we considered the possibility of me sending the photo via email they explained that it just wasn’t going to work. He won’t fit in the computer screen. First, they say, I’ll have to send a photo of his left foot, then the right foot. Finally, I can send a picture of his face. This is great but the other host sister (with a normal-sized boyfriend) concluded with the observation that it really wasn’t going to work to send the photos because there’s just not enough internet out there. My kind of people.

This is the time for sappy goodbye stories, etc. I’m not comfortable with long goodbyes and prefer the quick and dirty. So here it is. Goodbye Tamaula! I’ll miss you but hopefully I can come back in March. Thanks for everything. You were great. I promise this isn’t another one-summer stand.

P.S. I realize I’ve been really short on photos in the last few posts. I’ve liked to use photos that relate to what I’m talking about but that hasn’t really been applicable lately. I think I could get interrogated if I put up a photo of a fugitive and we already know about the problems with photos of Beto. Anyway, I don’t want to leave you wishing. Here are a few of my favorites from the last couple of weeks.

Yep, we went to a mask shop.

Best friends!

Amazing view

Favorite photo

If I Were an Animorph

Chances are you don’t know what I’m talking about when I title this blog post with “Animorph”. This was a series of books that came out in my formative, middle-school years (late 90’s, early 2000’s). There were dozens. Looking back with 3 years of an English degree under my belt, I can safely say the sheer numbers of Animorphs books probably indicates the quality of them left much to be desired. Doesn’t matter. I loved these books. The basic idea: Some alien technology comes to Earth and only a few teenagers have access to it. The kids can acquire the DNA of any animal they touch and then have the ability to morph into that animal at will. Get it? MORPHing into ANImals. They’re Ani-Morphs. Yes, this is a silly premise, but I hope it will shed more light on my experience here in Tamaula.

So, if I were an Animorph the animal I would morph into first would be my family’s donkey. Why this donkey specifically? There are two reasons. First, the donkey is named “Tomás” (which is the name I use when I’m speaking Spanish). I asked my family a couple of weeks ago what the donkey was named and they told me it didn’t have a name. I immediately requested they call it Tomás and when they asked why I said it was so they don’t forget me after I leave. This has actually turned into quite the little joke. I think at least half of the town knows about the donkey named Tomás. When they see me they ask about Tomás and I say, “Which one?” That always gets a laugh. We also talk about how after I leave the family can still talk to a Tomás. They’ll just be saying things like “¡Cállate Tomás!” (Shut up Tomás!) and “¿Tomás está amarrado?” (Is Tomás tied up?).

Tomás el Burro

If you are unfortunate enough to have ever lived near a donkey, you know what an awful noise they make. Trust me, there’s a reason they don’t teach kids in nursery schools what sounds a donkey makes. I am interested to find out what those donkeys are actually thinking when they make so much noise pollution. When I was reflecting on donkeys a few weeks back I started to compare them to the boy who cried wolf. Donkeys always sound like they’re dying so I wonder what noise they would make if they actually got hurt. Because they’re always bellowing they get ignored and I think this would work against them in the case of an actual injury or emergency.

After my day as the donkey Tomás I would morph into Doña Lucas. Doña Lucas is a young hen that lives at Doña Mago and Don Rey’s house where Colleen and Caroline stay. I noticed it the first day I arrived because of its broken leg. As I mention in my guest blog post about Doña Mago I also suspect my affinity for Doña Lucas contributes to Doña Mago finding me hilarious. I might just be projecting here; she probably just recognizes how ridiculous I am.

My last morph would be into a person, well, a new person—the baby I live with. Leo is the son of Alejandro and Rosario. I think I’ve mentioned earlier that Alejandro is about 3 months older than me. He’s married, has a one-year old, and his wife is about to pop again. It does not make this blog’s most avid reader laugh when I tell her about how much catching up I have to do when I get back to the United States. Leo is one of the cutest babies I’ve met. One of the things that is most cute about him is how much he likes to talk. He knows 3 words and all start with the letter “P”. The first, not surprisingly, is “papa”. The other two are, respectively, “puta” and “pinche”. I’m purposely not translating here because they’re what Doña Martina calls “grosserias” (cuss words). Yes, I do living with a cussing baby. I’m been trying in vain for weeks now to clean up his language and teach him how to say “Tomás”. Why morph into a cussing baby? I just want him to say my name! One of the main reasons I’m thinking about returning in March is because Leo’s mom has promised that if I come back in March he’ll know how to say “Tomás”. That might just turn out to be all the motivation I need.

Guest Blog Post: If you could teach me one thing, what would you teach me?

This post will hopefully appear on my friend Sophie's blog as a guest post. She has a really interesting concept and summer project. I highly encourage you to look at her site:

http://enlightenus.wordpress.com/

This post is a much different format from my standard. I hope you enjoy it.

Setting the Scene

The porch was the first place I sat when I arrived in Tamaula and the family was the first I was introduced to. I should have known they would turn out to be special people and that porch would turn out to be a special place. I’m living in this rural Mexican community for 6 weeks to summer to teach English in the middle school and to do research about access to water and the water supply. I’d been here about three weeks before I got around to asking the question. I wanted some time to develop relationships with the people here and, the way I figured, they weren’t going anywhere and neither was I—so there wasn’t any harm in waiting.

The porch belongs to Doña Mago and Don Rey. They live in a small, one-story house with faux bricks painted on the side facing the road. Doña Mago told me a couple of weeks ago that the entirely dirt front yard would turn completely to mud during the rainy season and she’s been proven right. There’s barbed wire hung in a somewhat protective circle all around the house to hang laundry and there’s a fence bolstered by a 15 foot long pile of firewood. The rockier part of the yard starts as you go deeper inside the property. There’s a clothes washing sink-like rock that they use frequently even though they also use a newer washing machine that they keep on the porch. Further on there’s the outdoor bathroom and shower with a water tank on top and a water heater on the back to provide a real shower despite no running water. Beyond lie the horses, donkeys, hens, turkeys, and cactus garden that I haven’t quite figured out yet. It’s a useful yard; each area has a purpose. There the children play. There the women wash. And there the men saddle the horses and donkeys to work in the fields.

Sitting on the porch happens just about every night. It’s a lot more refreshing than the stuffy rooms with too-small windows and more doilies than could ever be useful. Doña Mago sits in the center. She lives in this house with her husband, 3 daughters, daughter-in-law, and two other UNC students who are working in Tamaula with me this summer. She’s a 57 years-old mother of 12—4 men and 8 women. Several children are in the States, several live in other houses in Tamaula, and the youngest circle in her immediate orbit. She has the loudest and quickest laugh in addition to beautiful, long, shockingly gray hair. Though she is what others here would describe as “bien gordita”, she actively manages and participates in the work of her domestic kingdom. I haven’t seen her ride her donkey up the mountain to get water but she leads it there on a regular basis.

I ask her the question: “Si pudieras enseñarme solamente una cosa, ¿qué me enseñaría?” Like most of what I say this question is followed by a quick laugh. I’m not sure why she finds me so funny but it might be because I tell her that my best friend in this town in one of her little chickens with a broken leg. It also might be because I have to refuse her attempts to feed me about 2-3 times per day. I live with a different family and eat there three times a day, but Doña Mago still feels some kind of intense need to constantly try and make me eat more. After she laughs, she says she needs to think about that. I tell her to take her time; she doesn’t have to answer right away. I want an answer with thought behind it more than I want to hear something right away.

Don Rey comes back from putting up the horse for the night. He sits a couple of feet behind Mago in a comforting position. He has a warm, wrinkled face with kindness etched in each line. His eyes are deep-set, sunken by wrinkles and decades of squinting. His eyes have that very cliché mysterious twinkle, like he’s always telling himself a funny story or joke and enjoying it alone. He, like Doña Mago, has a quick laugh; his is deeper and stretches out a little longer. Doña Mago interrupts her laugh to talk again while Don Rey seems to savor laughing out loud. I don’t even need to bring up the question this time. Shortly after Don Rey took his seat in the normal place Doña Mago told him about the homework assignment I had given her. “Ask him, ask him. He’ll give you a good answer,” said the daughters.

“OK, Don Rey. I already asked Doña Mago and she said she needed some time to think about it but I want to ask you too. If you could teach me one thing, what would you teach me?”

The Lesson(s)

“Como montar en caballo,” came his immediate response. “How to ride a horse” is what he would teach me. I, of course, ask why. I’m not surprised by his answer. Out of the list of skills Don Rey possesses this seems to fit the definition of a skill. And it’s something that has to be taught to someone. His answer to why I need to learn to ride a horse came equally quickly—“So your feet don’t get tired.” This, I’m guessing, is the most immediate and obvious benefit from riding a horse. I know that there’s more here so I keep pressing him. “Why should I ride a horse? What else can I do riding a horse?” He answers in a very grandfather-like, “well”. He reclines a little lower in his white, plastic chair and emits a short sigh. “Well, all men need to ride horses to work.” Now I think we’re getting somewhere. Horses are essential for providing livelihoods (I should learn so I can work). Riding horses is also representative of Mexican manhood (I should learn because I’m a man). It’s at this point that Doña Mago decides to turn in her homework a little early.

“I’ll teach you how to make tortillas; you should know how to make tortillas.” I want to know why, so I ask. The answer seems pretty obvious to Doña Mago, “Well, how are you going to eat before you get married?” There are at least two interesting assumptions in this response. The first is that I’m going to marry a woman who can make tortillas and the second is that if I don’t have tortillas then I won’t have anything to eat. These assumptions might not apply at all to my life back in Virginia and North Carolina but after staying here in Tamaula I can understand where Doña Mago is coming from. I like this lesson, too. Like riding a horse, making tortillas is a very useful activity—it feeds people. It’s also something that needs to be taught. If this were a homework assignment I’d say that Don Rey and Doña Mago have certainly come up with something that answers my question almost perfectly. I asked them what they would teach me and they came up with two essential activities that need to be taught. However, and it might have been a result of the language and cultural barriers, I don’t think they understood that I was looking for something deeper—“life lessons” doesn’t translate into Spanish with the same kind of weight attached to the phrase. So, I turn back to Don Rey and probe further.

“When did you learn to ride a horse?” He was about 10 years old when his father taught him. I imagine that his father was about 10 years old when his father taught him. And on and on, perhaps back to the days of Spanish colonization that introduced horses to the country. “Why else is it important to ride a horse?” I ask. His answer indicates that it would be harder to say reasons why riding a horse isn’t important. Horses here are the plowing machines. All the fields around Tamaula are plowed by one man behind two horses. You can ride a horse to go work somewhere. Before some of the men in the town got trucks in the last 10 years the horse was a heck of a lot faster to get down the mountain than going on a donkey. You need a horse to go collect firewood that the women use to cook. This seemed like the perfect point to pivot back to Doña Mago with her tortillas. I was also starting to get a sense of how these two skills are interrelated and representative of a self-sufficient, very different life-style.

Doña Mago also learned how to make tortillas when she was about 10 years old. That seems to be an important age here, in a way that turning 10 can’t be in the United States. Her mom taught her how to make them. It’s an art; I can attest to this. Each woman in the town has their own variation on the recipe. Some put a little bit more flour and some put less. All recipes have the same basic ingredient, corn. As Doña Mago explains how you prepare the corn to make the tortillas I let my mind wander a little. This is the same corn that you need horses to help plant and cultivate. It’s also the plant Michael Pollan preaches about doing so much harm to America’s waistline. I want to push back on this. Corn seems to be the key to both lessons from Don Rey and Doña Mago—riding horses and making tortillas. Doña Mago finishes her instruction by saying, “But hopefully you’ll marry someone who can make you really good tortillas.” Unfortunately I am missing the basic metric for how good my wife’s tortillas will be—namely, how good my mom’s tortillas are. Since my mom doesn’t make tortillas my future wife might just get a free pass.

“Why corn, Don Rey? Why do you plant corn here? Couldn’t you plant flour instead?” I ask, knowing that you could plant flour. These questions seem to discomfort him the most. I imagine it might have been strange for someone to ask him to explain why he lives the way he does. If someone asked my family why we would have a minivan we’d probably respond similarly—“Because we do.” “Why don’t you drive a station wagon instead?” they might ask. Well, my family likes to drive a minivan. We all fit inside and it serves us well. Don Rey made a similar point, “we’re used to planting corn. That’s why we plant it.” My facial expression might have given away my hope for something more than just being accustomed to something. He thought and continued answering. “You see, people eat the corn, but the horses, donkeys, and hens can eat the rest of the plant.”

Finally, here was the spark I was looking for that launched me into mentally tracing the circle of everything I had learned that evening. The sum of these two lessons was much, much more than their separate parts and they represented an entire way of life. Men ride horses to plant the corn in the fields and to collect the firewood for cooking. Women use the corn and the firewood to make tortillas to feed themselves and the men. The rest of the corn stalk is ground up and fed to the horses. It’s a cycle, a reciprocal, beautifully simple, method of living that is inspired because of its self-sufficiency. No outsiders need to be involved in the process and the role of new technology is complicated in this world. Does electricity (that came to the town 3 years ago) help or hinder the processes of working, cooking, feeding, and eating? So far the lifestyle exemplified by horses and tortillas seems to be holding its own. Don Rey rides his horse past the trucks that more and more regularly go up and down the mountain. Doña Mago still makes her tortillas on top of the firewood-heated oven while her daughters use the wireless internet USB to check their Facebook profiles.

I might be happy to return to my American diet of high-fructose corn syrup when I return to the States next week but I’m going to miss the simplicity and tranquility those corn tortillas represent.

Me and Doña Mago

Using Your Imagination

First, let me answer the obvious questions. You must be asking yourself, “Hmm, I wonder if Clay has been on Mexican television yet?” It also may have crossed your mind, “Man, wouldn’t it be cool if Clay lived with a convicted felon?” The answers, respectively, are yes and no. Yes, today I was on Channel 12 and no, it’s not cool to live with a felon, but, don’t worry, it’s (hopefully) only for a few more days. Yesterday we rode a bus with about 20 kids from Tamaula to León, the biggest city in the state of Guanajuato. León will play host to the World Youth Conference in August and yesterday was the Pre-Conference to select the 20 kids that will represent Guanajuato in the fall. Unfortunately, our kids weren’t able to present their proposals (which were about how they were going to solve the Millennium Development Goals) because someone forgot to sign them up. This same person was a judge in the competition. Right, we haven’t figured it out either. Despite this disappointment, I have to hope the kids enjoyed being in the city, seeing a lot of different people, eating free food, and playing different games (like riding a mechanical bull). I’ll be honest; it’s surprising that I ended up on TV. The two other American girls and I left the conference to explore León and didn’t come back until there was free food much later in the day. But there I was. Beaming on channel 12. Do I mind if you think of me as an international TV star now? No, I don’t really mind.

(I skip down to the next paragraph knowing that my mom’s heart is still beating fast waiting to learn why the convicted felon isn’t going to felonize me.)

So, I’m learning something about how Mexican vacations work. First, I’ll throw out the reminder that I live in a 5-bedroom house with 8 other people including one baby  and one pregnant woman. This past Tuesday I came home from watching a movie with the kids to the welcome sight of 8 new friends! I assumed they’d be leaving that night. I still hoped they were leaving when I went to bed Wednesday night. By Thursday night, I learned they were planning on staying about a week and I decided I should start treating them more like real people and to try and start remembering some names. Still haven’t mastered the names but I would say we’ve created more of a bond. Yes, I still sleep in a room by myself and no, I have very little inkling of where everyone else is sleeping. I was having lunch today with Caroline (fellow UNC student) and assorted members of the two families. The dad of the other family (who is never out of his US Army uniform) happily and quickly informed Caroline about his three felonies in the US. They were for drunkenness, a fight, and something else—something that definitely wasn’t killing somebody. That I would remember. I don’t know why people want talk about this so casually. I can’t speak for Mexicans or Hispanics at all, just for the men I’ve talked to here in Tamaula, but I haven’t heard a story about any man who went to the United States and was proud about staying sober. My action plan—support immigration policy that encourages men to travel with their wives. It might be less fun but I feel like everyone will be better behaved.

The Important Stuff

I spend most of my time talking to people about using and getting water, possibilities for the future of water in Tamaula, and how water affects their daily lives. The situation is more complex than I would have imagined for a town of 218 people and I learn more every day. The goal of these formal and informal interviews and other research activities is to produce a report in English and Spanish by the time I leave in 19 (!!!) days. In the report I want to lay out short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals for improving access to, cleanliness of, and sustainability of water in Tamaula. My hope is that the Fundación Comunitaria del Bajío, Choice Humanitarian, and the Karen May Foundation, along with other groups, can use the report to ask people for money, create funding priorities, and generally make peoples’ daily lives better.

I’m blessed to be living and working with Caroline Wood, another UNC student-researcher, who is focusing on the intersection between migration and development. More than I would have expected our research is overlapping. She’s conducting a census for the town and included some questions about water storage capacity and whether or not families have a cistern. We’re also both very interested in land rights and how that whole system works. One of the options moving forward here, if the new well doesn’t replenish itself fast enough, is to buy some land on the other side of the mountain and pump some water from there. She also has a lot of conversations with people here and learns a lot of local gossip, etc. about water that she’s nice enough to share with me. I occasionally get the goods on someone’s migration story and can serve as an extra pair of eyes and ears for her. Hopefully I’m returning the favor.

Knowing what I do now about doing my research, I have found one thing that is most important. I’m bringing a different perspective, an outsider’s perspective, to the situation here. I can rely on this but if I want to imagine how things can be it’s really important to use my imagination to picture what can be.

It’s equally useful to try and figure out how 17 people are fitting inside this one house.

The “How Many Pictures Can I Cram Into One Blog Post?” Blog Post

Before I even start writing this I want to apologize that my blog posts can’t be hilarious like some of the other ones I read. I think the funniest things that happen in my life either A) aren’t as funny as their lives or B) aren’t necessarily fodder for a public forum like this. With these limitations, I submit the following about my weekend in Guanajuato City.

I already claimed this post will be chock-full of pictures, so I’ll start with one.

So, I’ve already revealed the main point of this post. Guanajuato is a beautiful city and fully deserved the many pictures I took of the place. Here’s some supporting evidence:

And, of course, I have to include the obligatory panoramic shot. I fell less original as a person by posting this—just imagining the number of times the exact same photo has been taken. So, from my perch high atop the bandwagon:

And our part of our group with this in the background:

My mother’s first reaction to this photo: “Well, it certainly is one of the most colorful cities I’ve ever seen.” Yes, the colors are beautiful, but there’s more to the city’s beauty than color. I wish I could say the ridiculously corny follow-up, but the people were what really made it beautiful. Unfortunately, everyone there was either a tourist or used to a ton of tourists. Hence, the only people I really interacted with were my fellow group members and a little bit with a group of Americans who had stayed in Tamaula the week before. Maybe it's the mountains that surround the city or the well-preserved colonial architecture. Maybe. Probably a combination of all of those things along with a lot of plants. What stood out the most to me? The poverty. There are many people begging for money in the streets. There are literally hundreds of dirty-looking children trying to sell "Clorets" gum--enough for me to speculate, politically incorrectly of course, that this gum company exists only to provide income for poor people. I know that gum sucks. I will say, it's hard to be a tourist spending money when there are so many people who needed the money more. In another universe I'm working with these people right now. The universe you currently inhabit has a somewhat more selfish, busy version of me. (“Enough rambling Clay, what did you actually do while you where there?”—what I imagine you may be thinking) So, what did I actually do? I partied, downloaded Glee and music in Starbucks, explored the city, played tourist and went into 48,563 stores (see below), ate with gusto, danced,  became better friends with the people in my group, told someone that their opinion didn’t mean that much to me in the moment because they were wearing a onesie (wasn’t actually a onesie, just looked like one) admired the view, slept, did no work, had fantastic conversations about the significance and effectiveness of what our group is doing in the different rural communities, and wasted enough money to be very happy to return to ole’ one-store Tamaula.

Does all of this merit a blog post? You help me decide. I haven’t posted in a while and these are the most notable goings-on of my life. I will be following up with updates on my project and various activities in and around my new Mexican home. Before I go, I do want to at least mention (and include a few photos from) an amazing dinner on Saturday night. Our group decided to pull out all the stops and make a reservation at a fancy Italian-type place well-situated downtown. All I wanted was a view of the Teatro Juarez (one of the most beautiful buildings in the city) while the sun was setting. Dinner was at 8 and service was impeccable. Food was quite delicious and the price was reasonable. Our group:

Here’s what I ate. That’s half pasta fosilli with alfredo sauce and half with pesto sauce. What a beautiful combination. The red wine is not mine. I drank a cheap white Chilean Chardonnay, a vintage 2009. Most importantly, you can see the Teatro Juarez in the background. That’s what I was enjoying most throughout the meal.

Thanks for bearing with me as I waxed nostalgic about my superb visit to Guanajuato City. Truth is, I’m happy to be here in Tamaula, despite the fact it’s a dust-bowl and there’s not pasta alfredo in sight. Here I know the people and say hi to everyone when I’m hiking up the mountain to go home. Here the food isn’t as expensive (it often tastes as good) but the conversation is even better. (Example: today Doña Martina and I talked mostly about immigration and school violence.) Most importantly I’m learning a lot about something really important to the people I like to think are new friends—the water. I didn’t fully realize how much water I use in a day until I didn’t have it running all around me. It can actually be really refreshing to take a shower using a bucket. Don’t slam it ‘til you try it. I’d been bad-mouthing it for a while before I came but I’ve completely changed my mind. This might seem obvious, but seeing how scare a resource can be makes the value that much more obvious. More on this to come. For now, enjoy the photos and let me know if these stories are too inane to print!

The Three in One: Mas por Menos! Post

Where in the World is Clay?

Inspired in part by my lack of ability to get a blog post up on time and in part by my interest in trying new things, blog posts this summer will be thematic instead of chronological. Today features three short posts focusing on different aspects of my life that I hope that you, the reader, will find interesting.

Where am I? Sure, I’m in Mexico. But Mexico’s a big country (the largest Latin American country, in fact) of over 100 million people and the different parts are just that, different. I specifically am in a tiny town named Tamaula, which is near the urban center (nearly 600,000 residents) of Irapuato, and in the Mexican state of Guanajuato. I did a little research and found that Guanajuato is quite the interesting state. It was settled by the Spanish third, after the coast and the capital city of Mexico. The Spanish settles came to Guanajuato because of its famous silver mines. Reading through the Wikipedia article about the state, I mined some equally rich historical tidbits. The capital city of the same name, where our group will be visiting on the Friday, is one of the most popular tourist sites in Mexico. The state is home to former president Vicente Fox and infamous muralist Diego Rivera. It seems like we can make the unlikely connection between Guanajuato’s geographical centrality in Mexico and it’s cultural, historical, and political centrality. One of the major cities, Dolores Hidalgo, was the site of a march that incited the first battle in the Mexican war for independence. I’m feeling inspired just by learning all this. (Kudos to Wikipedia)

What does that mean to me? It’s easier to show you. Here are two maps: the first one is a more zoomed-out look of the larger area. I’ve circled Tamaula, where I live, in the upper left-hand side of the first map. The second map is zoomed-in on Tamaula itself.

(You can click on any photo for a larger view)

Now to zoom in to what Google might call Street View if it did Street View in rural Mexican towns of about 200 people, I’m giving you a picture of my house. I live here with the Laguna family (more about them in another post). There’s 8 of us (one baby) and we fit very comfortably. My window is the top left.

What these maps might not have shown you is that the house I’m living in is at the top of the mountain. It’s the last house, the highest house in the town. I feel comfortable asserting that gives us the best views. Judge for yourself. Here’s an evening and a night photo of the view out of my window. The pictures are my view of Irapuato.

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Family Life, or Stealing Candy from a Baby

I mentioned that I live with one family, 8 other people. That doesn’t really do the situation justice. Tamaula’s a small town with a pretty small number of residents, but they’re only about 4 or 5 major families. Another student from UNC is busy putting together a family tree for the community. We’re all a little worried about how many times those branches are going to overlap and connect. Regardless, my new Mexican mom is named doña Martina (doña is like Mrs.) who is married to don Candido (you guessed it, don is like Mr.). Their four children all live at home. The oldest, Alejandro, is 21 and lives here with his very pregnant wife and their first child. Point of comparison: I’m turning 21 in 20 days. I can’t imagine life with a baby and a bun in the oven at this point; I’m too worried about my GPA. There are two teenage girls, Ana Maria and Maria Louisa (yes, I’m still figuring out their overlapping names), who are 17 and 19, respectively. To be honest, my favorite person so far is my new “little brother”. Oscar is 9 and quite the fútbol all-star.

Lucky for me, he also enjoys one of my favorite activities—watching Spongebob Squarepants. Here: La Bob Esponja.

doña Martina is one of 9 children and don Candido is one of 16. So I’m justified in saying this multi-generational family of 8 is relatively small by Tamaula standards. Because of the abundance of aunts and uncles, the Laguna household (I’m sure similar to many of the other households in Tamaula) often resembles a day care throughout the day, with anywhere from at least 1 up to 6 toddlers, infants, nieces, and cousins wandering around. One in particular, Yamillet (best way I can imagine spelling her name), caught my attention early on. She hates me. She’s 3 and here about every day. It wasn’t until the third day that she finally said anything to me, despite my repeated attempts to talk to her. She told me, “this is don Candido’s house.” I responded with, “I know. I live here too, upstairs.” Even though, Oscar vouched for me and said I lived upstairs she refused to believe him. It’s pretty clear her message was that I wasn’t welcome there. Fast forward two weeks, skimming over daily attempts on my part to engage her in conversation with no success. Today a series of fortunate events led to our first non-negative interaction. First, I was planning a trip to the zoo for the weekend after next and jokingly told doña Martina that Yamillet couldn’t come because she didn’t like me. Well, doña Martina and Ana Maria played along, telling Yamillet (again, she’s only 3; I’ve never seen a 3-year-old hold a grudge like the one she’s holding against me) that they were all going to look at lions and tigers and elephants without her because she didn’t want to be friends with me. I think the talk of exotic animals planted a hopeful seed. Almost immediately after this conversation she was playing with a ball that rolled away, and which I promptly retrieved for her. Next, I just happened to be getting a glass of soda and asked her if she wanted some. Bing bing bing! She loves soda. This may not be stealing candy from a baby but it is giving soda to a toddler to trick her into liking me. Here’s the first semi-smile I’ve ever seen on her face.

For right now, I’m calling this a breakthrough. We’ll see if she’ll say hi to me tomorrow.

In other little kid news, anyone who read my blog last year might remember this infamous photo.

It probably won’t surprise you that as a I was thinking about updating my blog today, my first instinct was to find the nearest 3 year old weighing less than 50 pounds and to throw him in the air. We might not have gotten the same height on the photo that we got last year, but we tried to make up for it with a more visually stimulating angle.

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Work Work Work, All Day Long

(Un)fortunately, life in Tamaula isn’t all watching La Bob Esponja and throwing kids in the air. I’m staying as busy as you can in a town this size teaching, planting, and water researching. Teaching and tutoring are our primary responsibilities as interns for the Bajío Community Foundation. We have English lessons for an hour each day, five days a week, with the three different grades of the Telesecundaria—which I think is the middle school. I work with the two girls, Maria Santos and Maria Teresa, in the second grade. We’re a small class but I know they’re learning a lot. Today they complete their first homework assignment. There’s a group of 11 Americans staying in town for a week to help construct a water cistern and prep the new cheese factory with a NGO called Choice Humanitarian. Santos and Teresa had to hold a conversation with one of Americans who couldn’t speak Spanish. Now, we’ve been practicing introductory conversations for two weeks. We start every class by writing out a typical conversation. Still, they were nervous enough to need me to call the girl over and to need to read from their notebooks. However, the pronunciation was flawless and I think they’ve more or less rid themselves of their initial fear of having a conversation in English with a stranger. Here’s me with half the class yesterday morning. Only one student was absent but that’s still equivalent to a 50% attendance rate.

We are lucky enough to be here at the perfect time of year—planting season! I enjoyed planting so much last year and was concerned that without volunteering with an NGO that focused on farmers I wouldn’t get to go to the fields. I’ve planted more square footage that I might have bargained for in the past week. We plant frijoles (beans) and maíz (corn) together in the same rows. It’s a slow process but when you have enough people working together one field can take as little as 3 hours to plant! One of the things slowing us down is the abundance of rocks. I can’t figure out what there are more of, relatively speaking, in Tamaula—cousins or rocks. Maybe the family tree and the October harvest will finally shed some light on this mystery.

The lovely doña Martina hard at work

Lastly, but most importantly, I’ve spent many hours conducting my research about access to clean water in Tamaula. The research started slow but as I’ve become more integrated into the community the conversations have been getting easier and easier. Tamaula doesn’t have running water and it only rains here for 3 months out of the year. The other 9 months the people are dependent on a PIPA truck that comes from Irapuato to fill up big plastic barrels of water in the middle of the town. To get the water from the barrels people come in many forms: in trucks, on tractors, and, the most picturesque, on donkey.

I haven’t figured out the phenomenon of bringing your donkey with metal canisters and very young children in tow just yet, but maybe that will make it into the final report.

Despite the reliance on the government’s PIPA truck, hope is on the horizon. Someone who has been described as a “renegade” geologist, formerly associated with Choice Humanitarian, contracted someone in Irapuato to dig a well back in October. The water from the well comes down the mountain to this huge tank about 100 yards away from my house. Unfortunately, the water that has been coming out of the tank has been green (see photo). The problem wasn’t with the well or the water. Rather, because the tank was a light color, sun was getting in and growing algae. Last night, with about 6 girls from the Prepatoria, we cleaned and painted the tank black. With any luck, and with another coat of paint tomorrow, this will stop the algae and the water will be continuously clean and clear.

Mi Casa es Tu Casa, Clay Takes Advantage of Mexican Hospitality

Hola a todas y bienvenidos a mi blog para el verano! I have now been in Mexico for nearly a week. In fact, exactly 7 days ago at this time I was driving into North Carolina through a massive lightning storm with my mom, Carolyn, and Ben. We made it into La Quinta Inn and Suites (no, the one on the right, not the hotel with the exact same name on the left) a little after 1 am. By the time I fell asleep around 2, I had a solid 1 hour 45 minute nap before waking up at 3:45 am to head to the airport.

After a sleepy, stormy start to my 6 week journey to a new part of Central America, I arrived in Mexico DF (Mexico City) around noon on Saturday. First things first, I, the 3 girls I traveled with, and 2 of our friends from the Universidad Iberoamericana went directly to a roadside Bar-B-Que stand and enjoyed some delicious, traditional lamb BBQ.

The following 4 days were a wild adventure that consisted mainly of group bonding, eating, going out, playing über-tourist, and sitting in hours and hours of traffic. Research shows that even though the Mexico City  metropolitan area has 21.5 million residents, that in the city itself (population 8.8 million) there are only 3.5 million cars on the road. Could have fooled me. I personally counted 4.6 million other cars, the majority of which were in touching distance of us. Others riding with me can attest I declared on multiple occasions that, if my mother had been in any of the cars with us, she would have had a heart attack. Regardless, we all still managed to enjoy ourselves immensely. I was there with 6 other UNC students and assorted university students from Mexico City.

Wednesday and Thursday were big change days for us. On Wednesday I rode a bus for 6 hours north to Irapuato—the headquarters of the Fundación Comunitaria del Bajío (Bajío Community Foundation) that I am working for. The way Irapuato was described to me before the trip, it seemed like a small town/city where we might hope to find a grocery store or two. Irapuato is home to 600,000 people. Hailing from Luray and Rappahannock, I think I will always be impressed with the number of people around the world. If moving from 20+ million people to 600,000 in 6 hours sounds like a dramatic change, the trip Thursday morning to Tamaula was even more so. Tamaula is where I’ll be spending the next 6 weeks teaching, interviewing, and researching. The bustling metropolis boasts 218 residents—my kind of town. As soon as we broke off of the main highway onto the pot-hole filled road leading up the mountain I knew I was home, where I was supposed to be.

This is my first experience living in a homestay with a family. To be honest, I was a little nervous at first. However, the past few meals and conversations have made me much more comfortable. I even think I’m going to enjoy taking baths out of a bucket! Unfortunately I can’t share any pictures of Tamaula, where I’m living, and who I’m working with yet. I’m going to hold off for a few weeks before playing super-Gringo and go around snapping photos of everything.

Just to show you what super-Gringo looks like…

Thanks so much for taking the time to read my blog! Please follow it (link on the left) and feel free to email me to stay in touch (vickers621@gmail.com).