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.
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.
I laughed so hard about the photos of you throwing kids in the air. Still chuckling.
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