Lessons Learned

Day 34 in Mexico

Two days ago, I had my one month anniversary in Mexico. I won’t claim that every day has flown by (though the weekends sure do), but looking back it’s hard to believe that I’ve been here that long already. I’m quickly falling into a routine, feeling surer of myself as I continue to learn the city, and my Spanish speaking skills are starting to come back to me after a long period of disuse after my study abroad time in Argentina. I thought it might be interesting to reflect on some of the things that I’ve learned so far in my time here. We (the YAGM group) were told at our Chicago orientation that we would almost certainly be taught more by the people we lived and worked with than we taught them, but some of these things I never expected to learn. I’ve already mentioned learning the difficulty in saying no, and that water usually isn’t really water, but that was just the beginning. So, in no particular order:

1. Vocabulary. I thought my Spanish was actually pretty good before I came, forgetting that the only time I was using it was in classes, writing essays and analyzing literature, not related at all to daily living. Some of the new words I’ve learned actually summarize my experience here pretty well, I think.

§ Órale and Ándale, pues – probably the most common phrases I’ve heard here. Órale translates to “cool” or “okay.” As in, “Look at this (insert cool object here).” “Órale.” But it’s a word that seems to pretty much fit any situation, person, greeting, or conversation. Ándale, I would say, translates to a more polite way of saying “Get out of here, you.” When I tell someone I have to go, this is almost always the response.

§ Mande? – also very common, Mexicans here use this phrase instead of como, meaning “Come again?” if you didn’t hear what someone said. It is a phrase I hear often, and a more literal translation as it relates to me is, “Good lord, I have no idea what you’re trying to say.”

§ Me pica – what you say if something’s spicy (the verb picar means to bite); probably the next most commonly used phrase for me after the above phrases. Also formed as the question, Pica mucho? or, “Is it really spicy?”

§ Goteras – leaks, as in, “the roof over my bedroom has several goteras.”

§ Topes – speed bumps, a very common occurrence here. Particularly unpleasant to go over in a bus, they are even more common in some smaller towns, like Temixco, a small city close to Cuernavaca. There you can find them every 20-25 feet or so on virtually every road.

§ Zancudos – mosquitos.

§ Patas – Chicken feet, as in, “My friend Sara frequently has patas in her soup.” I have not yet had the pleasure of trying them.

§ Cinta – tape, learned from projects at the kinder.

§ Guajolote – turkey, and ardilla – squirrel, both learned from animal bingo at my job.

§ Internet inalámbrico – wireless Internet. Quite helpful.

§ Various new food words, such as chilaquiles, tunas, micheladas and nepales.

2. My bus routes. This is something I did expect to learn, but some things about them are rather unexpected. The buses here very widely, from glorified vans to luxury tour buses. I take two of the various rutas (another vocab word, simply meaning bus), the 1 and the 13. I have learned to expect good things from the 13 buses. Most of them are much more luxurious than average, with cushy cloth seats and less jarring transmissions, although there do exist the few exceptions. Other things I’ve come to expect from them include truly impressive, tricked-out sound systems, black lights both inside the bus and underneath it, and gleaming silver spikes on the hubcaps. I do love my number 13 buses, and I find my rides to and from work surprisingly relaxing, and some of the time I do my best thinking, planning, and reflecting.

3. To take my umbrella with me everywhere, no matter how pleasantly warm or sunny it is. The chances of it raining any given day are very high during this season.

4. That roosters are smart enough to start crowing every morning at 6:30 a.m. (pretty much on the dot) but are not smart enough to realize that morning is over, and thus keep crowing throughout the day. They have also not gotten the memo about weekends.

5. That, for young children learning English, yellow is across the board the easiest color to say, and usually their favorite.

6. That, every Monday, Mexican school children must wear white for Honores, a ceremony saluting the Mexican flag.

7. Traffic rules. I think it’s a very common experience for Americans to go abroad and be surprised, even shocked, at the lack of traffic control in different countries. That was my experience going to Spain, Guatemala, and Argentina, so I expected the same in kind from Mexico. Still, it’s always an adjustment period. I’ve learned that in Mexico, the right of way belongs to the one who muscles his way in. If you want to turn left across traffic, you pull out and force the oncoming cars to yield to you, and then continue. Same for roundabouts, same for merging onto highways. Pedestrians are not given right away, but there are traffic cops that prove helpful for this purpose. Seatbelts are almost never used by anyone besides the driver (even for young children, which I admit I have a hard time accepting).

8. Slowly but surely, some of the many cafés here. I now know, for example, which ones have wireless Internet, which ones are considered expensive, which one serves the best chicken sandwich ever (I would say equivalent or better to the turkey sandwich at Tucson’s Coffee Xchange, and that’s saying something), which one serves heavenly mango smoothies, and where you can get alfalfa sprouts. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to learn where I can get a truly reliable Skype connection (one of my big priorities right now).

9. That if my host parents eat something and think it’s really spicy, that I should not try to eat it myself. I have had two dangerous run-ins with spicy food – once I was told to try the beans in a soup to see if I liked it. Mistaking a floating chile (added only for flavor, not for actual eating) for a large bean, I ate the entire thing. Oops. I also tried adding a very small chile to my dinner one night, as it seemed like it could have benefited from a little spice. It didn’t seem that harmless when I tasted the tip, so I added the whole thing, seeds and all (it really was quite small). The smallest chiles, turns out, are often the spiciest. There was some serious crying, mouth fanning, and milk drinking that followed.

10. Some of the basic responses at mass; I do, after all, average two masses a weekend. It’s really quite similar to the Lutheran service, but unfortunately even when I recognize something from our service I don’t know how it translates into Spanish. I’m learning just enough, however, to become a more active participant.

11. Many of the injustices, corruption, inequalities, and difficulties that plague Mexico, as well as the stories of some of its people, related to me through my host parents over and after dinner. I’ve heard some of their stories from travels to poorer, more indigenous states, like Chiapas and Guerrero, as well as some from their conversations with the inmates at the jail they visit on Saturdays. Though the subject matter is not often easy to hear, they’ve already taught me a lot, and our conversations after the meal and before I head off to bed are some of my favorite times.

I’m sure there are many more lessons that I’m forgetting, but it’s a start. Next I’m searching, as I said, for reliable Skyping locales, as well as some lessons in Mexican cooking. Hasta luego!

¡Viva Mexico!

Day 27 in Cuernavaca

Another week gone, and another begins. I’ve started teaching English in the kindergarten at La Estación, which was a little nerve wracking for someone with absolutely no teaching experience. I did work in a tutoring center, but I don’t think doing the crossword puzzle while making sure no one messed up the computer log-in system qualifies as experience. Thankfully, it is going pretty well (though I’ve only had two classes, so I guess we will still have to wait and see). I have to teach five different classrooms English, half an hour each, three mornings a week. When each class averages about 30 kids, it’s not an easy task. The kids, however, seem to like me okay. I’ve now become “Maestra Katy” or “Meesss Katy,” which they started calling me before I had even taught them anything; they see me walking by on the street and call out “Maestra! Maestra!” (Teacher! Teacher!). We’ve started with colors; next I’m thinking numbers. In addition to teaching, I’m spending time in the community center, primarily helping out with serving breakfast, cleanup, and whatever other odd jobs they find for me to do; basically, my job description is ESL teacher/dishwasher/inept babysitter. I’ve also begun eating lunch, or comida, in the homes of the women who come to the community center. It’s really remarkable to me how much work these women squeeze in a day, though they don’t work outside their homes. Many of them have upwards of five children, who only go to school for half the day (either morning or afternoon), so they have to do all the cooking and cleaning for a family of seven or more by themselves, plus pick up and take care of their kids when they get off of school, plus do all the shopping, and still find time to spend at the community center, making breakfast for 120 people. I ate today with a mother of five, who was also in charge of the community center breakfast today. She was apologetic that she didn’t have much time to fix me a good meal – she made me chicken in mole sauce, Mexican rice, and tortillas. It was fantastic.

I had a shorter week last week, because of the Mexican Independence Holiday. That was an interesting experience for sure. They block off the downtown and there were tons of people in the zócalo (the central plaza) for the Grito, the cry that kicked off the Mexican War for Independence that they reenact every year at 11 p.m.; at the end they all shout the names of the heroes in the war and “Viva Mexico!” several times. There was mariachi music, street vendors, lots of food, dancing, etc. etc. Before going, I heard all sorts of advice and opinions on the celebration, ranging from “everyone’s drunk and crazy and it’s really really dangerous” to “it’s not dangerous at all, everyone takes their kids.”

Our YAGM group (at left) decided that we couldn’t miss out on the experience, so we decided to go to the Grito but leave fairly early before things got too crazy (though I’m pretty sure Peter thought we were going to get shot). We had absolutely no trouble at all, which was great, and there were a lot of families there. We were going to eat at the house of one of Sara’s teacher friends, but that didn’t exactly work out. She wasn’t there when we arrived, and her family had no idea we were coming; just another cultural mix-up. By that time it was getting closer to the Grito, and also pouring rain, so we went back to the center and camped out in a tarp-covered outdoor restaurant to munch on quesadillas. Then we grabbed a spot standing on some park benches to watch the festivities from a bit of a distance. The crowd went crazy for the mariachi music, though to me it really all sounded the same. Every song that they played, however, got a big cheer from the plaza. They had big screens set up too, so everyone could watch the governor of Morelos as he came out onto the balcony and delivered the Grito, waving the Mexican flag. It was pretty cool to see everyone get whipped into such a patriotic frenzy. Immediately after the Grito, they had a huge fireworks show right overhead; it was so close that I’m pretty sure they shot them off from the other end of the plaza.We did book it out of there fairly shortly thereafter, though, for safety reasons and because of the rain and because two members of our group didn’t have a day off the next day (poor girls!) The rest of us, however, got to sleep in on Wednesday, because there was no work or school. It was very nice to have a mid-week break, though I think that’s the last holiday that we’ll have in awhile, perhaps until Dia de los Muertos in November. Here are some pictures of the festivities, the rain-soaked crowd, and me and Peter (also rain-soaked) all courtesy of Sara's camera/Facebook album that I decided to steal. Gracias!

Other than that, things are going pretty well; I’m just starting to settle into a routine, which apparently involves two masses a week – one on Saturday at the jail, and one on Sunday (and I’m not even Catholic!) The weather has improved, thankfully, and although it still rains quite a bit it’s interspersed with some warm, sunny days. I’m starting to catch on to some of the Mexican customs; I’ve recently discovered how difficult it is to say “no” to an invitation, especially since it’s considered rude here to say “no” outright. At the same time, even if you do manage to say “no” in an indirect way, that somehow translates into “yes, of course.” It’s just easier to accept and go along. Thing is definitely a learn as you go experience; it’ll be interesting to see what I learn next.

Am I in Mexico or Seattle?

Day 21 in Cuernavaca

Well, unfortunately the beautiful weather has subsided for now and has been replaced by almost relentless rain. It not only pours every night, it now rains almost every afternoon, and some mornings as well. It seems to have been perpetually cloudy for the past week and a half, and my host family said that Mexico City is having some pretty major flooding problems. Yikes. I look forward to seeing the sunshine’s return (my Arizona summer tan has, alas, faded away).

I’ve completed my first week of work and am just starting on the next. I’m still working on figuring out my role at work, as there appears to be a lack of the workplace structure that I am familiar with. I’ll walk you though what has so far been a typical day: I arrive at my first work site, the community center at La Estación, shortly before nine, at the tail end of their breakfast program. One of their most successful programs is their breakfast program; they provide a hot meal with juice and jello to the neighborhood’s mothers and children. Between 100 and 120 people show up between 8 and 9 a.m. every weekday to eat, and it’s no dining hall. It’s a rather small space that for an hour comes alive with people. The mothers in the community sign up for rotating breakfast shifts every week, doing all the shopping, cooking and cleanup. They make a mean breakfast, though it’s not a breakfast that I’m used to. I am now, before nine in the morning, eating tamales, enchiladas, quesadillas, tostadas, and everything with salsa picante (translation: spicy!). It’s really something. Then I go to the kindergarten. There are three different levels, from three year olds to five year olds, and I’ll be teaching (or trying to teach) them some basic English – colors, numbers, basic vocabulary. This first week I spent observing, and now I’ll be forming some lesson plans and starting this week. I think we’re going to start with the color red. The three year olds don’t know their colors in Spanish yet, so it will be interesting for all of us, especially since I have no teaching experience and the kids can be rather… rambunctious.

When the kinder gets out at noon, I go back to the community center (it’s right across the street). So far, there hasn’t been too much to do there; the center offers workshops, but apparently the workshops haven’t been doing well, and it’s hard to maintain an interest level in the community. I did go to a reading workshop for children on Friday afternoons, where the kids can borrow books to take home, bring them back and exchange them for a new one. It’s a good program, but not very many kids came. I imagine that the day to day life in the community, which as I mentioned is one of the most marginalized in town, can be so demanding that attending community workshops almost inevitably takes a backseat to other, more pressing needs. There are several very dedicated women, however, that spend a lot of time in the center. I’m beginning to understand the importance here of “placticando,” or chatting. Face to face communication is not curtailed like it is in the U.S. There is a lot of importance placed on simply talking, chatting, and catching up. I spend quite a bit of time placticando, either at work or with my family, though my Spanish is definitely in need of some improvement. Hopefully that will come with time. We also eat in the early afternoon as well, and starting this week I’ll be going into the women’s homes to eat. I’m very much looking forward to that; some of them are talking about teaching me how to cook, which sounds fabulous, though since I’m so inept in the kitchen it might be harder than they expect.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I leave after lunch and go to Casa Tatic, where I am helping seven to nine year olds with their reading, homework, and spelling (in Spanish). I’ve only been twice, but it seems to be a good fit for me; there aren’t as many kids (in the kinder at La Estación, class size averages around 30), so I can sit and work with them individually. I feel more like a tutor or reading specialist than anything, and it’s really a joyous feeling to sit and listen to a little girl read a book aloud. We also eat at this worksite; Casa Tatic is part of a larger group of programs, and it not only provides an after-school program, but the kids get a meal, a vitamin, brush their teeth, and get some play time. A couple of them haven’t gone to school, and this is their only place to learn how to read. It’s really an impressive program, I think.

My host family continues to include me regularly in their activities. This Saturday I accompanied them to the prison outside of Cuernavaca. Every Saturday they and other volunteers visit the inmates, bring a meal, and host a Mass. I walked with them into an outdoor courtyard with about 400 inmates milling around. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous; in fact, my eyes nearly bugged out of my head. We’re taught to be wary of men here in general, that they can be more verbally aggressive than men in the States, and I was walking into a crowd not only of 400 men, but 400 men convicted of crimes? However, it turned out to be a really good experience. All of the men were very kind, friendly, and respectful. I ate with a few of them (eating is a very common theme to my activity here, if you haven’t noticed), and one even got me a Coke when I said I didn’t like the water (which isn’t really water, it’s fruit juice, or agua de whatever fruit). Many of them came up to shake my hand after the mass, and a couple even spoke some English to me (not much more than “where are you from?” but I was still impressed). I definitely think it’s an activity I will continue with.

I’m enjoying the company of my fellow volunteers, though I do miss seeing them as much as I did when we were in orientation. Still, it’s nice to meet up and chat, and watch television when we can, haha. Poor Peter is seriously missing his tennis and football, and I almost died when I went to Sarah’s house over the weekend and Friends was on. I am such a television addict; it’s like going through withdrawal. I also miss my kitty friends, though I did stop by the retreat center this week to say hello. They didn’t seem overly impressed to see me.

Looking forward to this week; it’s Dia de Independencia on Tuesday night/Wednesday, which kicks off with the Grito de Dolores in the city center and is followed by much celebration and a day off on Wednesday. Should be quite the experience. Also hoping the weather will improve, but we supposedly have a month to go in the rainy season. Ah, well. Hasta pronto!

Ay ay ay, estoy en Mexico!

Day 13 in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Favorite things so far: pozole (this amazing soup made with chicken and hominy), the weather, my fellow volunteers, the beautiful greenery and flowers, the cats at the retreat center for whom I’m thinking up a plan to smuggle them home (sorry, Ehsan)

Least favorite things: dodging traffic, the tarantula-sized spider I found in my bathroom at 6 a.m., the neighbor’s dog that starts to bark endlessly in the middle of the night (grrr…)

¡Hola todos! It’s my second full week in Mexico, and already so much has happened. We arrived on the 26th, after a weeklong orientation in Chicago that involved a lot of listening to speakers, small group meetings, and lots of discussions about our upcoming adventures, with a little Chicago sightseeing thrown in as well. It’s very odd to think that just two weeks ago I was sitting on the top story of the Hancock Tower in downtown Chicago, and now I’m here in Cuernavaca. It was kind of emotionally exhausting to talk about our feelings, hopes, and apprehensions so much, but it was good to get into the mind frame of this trip and spend time with fellow YAGMs (that’s Young Adults in Global Mission). Then, after a relatively short flight (compared to, say, the YAGMs going to Malaysia or South Africa) and two hour bus ride from Mexico City to Cuernavaca, we settled in for another ten day orientation. This one was much better, however, in that it involved much more going out and doing stuff than just sitting and passively listening.

Andrea, our country coordinator who’s in charge of us here during our stay, packed a lot into just over a week. We visited almost everyone’s worksite, which was really cool to see. For those of you that don’t know, I’ll be working at a community center and kinder in La Estación, one of the most marginalized neighborhoods in Cuernavaca that’s smack dab in the middle of the city, and at an after school program called Casa Tatic, that mainly serves the children of indigenous street vendors. The other YAGM worksites include another school program; a human rights foundation; an arts and crafts project for the elderly; an organization that builds wheelchairs for the handicapped; and an organization that works in Tlamacazapa, Guerrero, a very marginalized village about two hours outside of Cuernavaca. Quite a variety! I’m looking forward to hearing stories from everyone’s different placement.

Our orientation also involved a lot of group bonding at our oasis-like retreat center, the Cuernavaca Center for Intercultural Dialogue Development (or CCIDD; picture on left), and I’m happy to say that we have a very good group and we all (so far!) get along well. There are five of us total, including myself. Katie and Sarah will be working in Tlamacazapa for the year, although they’ll be in Cuernavaca three days out of every week. Katie jokes that they’ll be buff babes by the time the year is over; apparently, Tlama is basically perched on the side of a mountain, so there will be some steep climbing going on for those two. They’re both super fun girls; Katie was especially fun to tease about her fear of cats, though she claims that they just make her nervous (she also claims that one of the cats at the retreat center we stayed at for orientation bit her, when it actually just rubbed itself against her foot). But she has no trouble with cockroaches; she chased on out of Sara’s stuff and killed it with her Choco. No problem with disgusting bugs; terrified of kitty-cats. I’m really eager to hear some of their stories as their work progresses. Peter, basically the smartest kid to ever come out of South Dakota (he was on Teen Jeopardy and went to Princeton!) will be working at the human rights organization and the program that makes wheelchairs. It’s amazing to listen to Peter talk; he uses GRE words like nobody’s business (I like it when he talks in Spanish, because his vocab is more limited and I feel better about myself). Sara will be working with the elderly and the other school program. She’s also super fun, and can talk a blue streak. It’s hilarious to get her started on teasing Peter; that kind of became the theme of our orientation (good thing he has a sense of humor). We all told our life stories to each other, representing different stages with little sculptures made out of clay. It was really interesting to hear where everyone is coming from. We also spent a lot of time just hanging out, playing in the retreat center pool, playing cards, and getting to know each other.

Other than that, Cuernavaca is a nice city, though the extreme socioeconomic highs and lows of Mexico are both very evident; you can drive by beautiful, gated houses and glass-walled Starbucks and soon pass a neighborhood of ramshackle houses made with sheets of tin and cement blocks. The weather, however, is magnificent. Warm and sunny without being super hot or humid, though we’re in the rainy season, so it rains almost every night. I’m excited to explore the city more; we did a little walking tour of the city center and the market during orientation. The market itself is a giant maze of stalls, selling everything from DVD’s to shoes to handicrafts to poultry (the meat market itself was quite an experience, and I saw more than one pig’s head on a hook). We also visited Tepotzlan, a smaller community outside of Cuernavaca that has a market on Sundays and an Aztec pyramid perched on one of the cliffs overhead, which we hiked to. It was a great day trip; here are a couple pictures of the amazing views, and of the four YAGM girls enjoying them.


Now the real deal is starting; orientation is over, I’m at my host family’s house, and I just finished my first day of work. I was apprehensive to leave my fellow volunteers, especially after we bonded so well, but my host family is very nice. It’s an older couple, Angeles and Fernando, and they live in a house that is literally perched on the side of a barranca, one of the many ravines that run through Cuernavaca. Their three children live not more than a five minute walk away (one lives next door), and they have several grandchildren and a great grandson. I’ve already bonded with their five year old granddaughter named, ironically enough, America. She’s a huge talker too, and a little ball of energy who loves to drink coffee. They’re making me feel like I’m just another member of the family. Angeles already had me marching with her in a religious procession through the streets of Cuernavaca with one of the schools she works with; Angeles and Fernando are both very involved with Base Christian Community organizations, which work a lot with political and social justice causes for the poor and marginalized here in Mexico. It’s fascinating to listen to the kinds of work that they do – every Saturday they go to the jail here and give food and mass to the prisoners. They’ve offered to take me along with them; that will certainly be an experience.

There’s so much more to tell, especially since I haven’t even mentioned how work went, but it will have to wait; this entry is too long as it is, and (if you’re still reading, or at least skimming it) I apologize. ¡Hasta pronto!