Living in Mexico
Okay, we´re going to try this again.It´s interesting being back here and living in the same little apartment I did the last time I was here. I forgot that the bathroom smells, and I am starting to recognize all the little quirks of the place. One of the first nights I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth and I heard little noises from the bedroom. It took me half a second to realize that Stephanie was living there as well. I had gotten into the ¨I´m living in Mexico¨ mode and was thinking I was by myself. It is nice having Stephanie here. My social life now has picked up. Before when I was here I only went out to church, and to the store and the internet cafe, but since Stephanie is here to do things with, we go out a lot more.
Tuesday night we went and hung out at the church and at the Pastor´s house. Pastor Pedro´s family is the family we have stayed with while on week-long trips to this town, and so his family has sort of become our family. When I say sister, it is referring to one of his four daughters, Lubia, Sarai, Abigail, or Areli. We have a lot of fun sitting around their house, which is what we did for hours on Tuesday night. Our Spanish skills are limited, and their English skills are almost non existant, but we still make jokes and goof around. Stephanie and I enjoy acting silly, and they just laugh at us.
Wednesday night we went to church, and the service was very pentecostal, something I´m used to because I attended this church while I lived here before, but when our American groups are here, it´s not quite like this, which I think is because of a lack of time with all of the translating that has to happen. There was an evangelist that came and spoke, he did an altar call, and was praying for the longest time, when Stephanie and I decided to sneak out and go to the Pastor´s house (next door) and see the Pastor´s wife, Leti, because she hadn´t been in church. Her head hurt, and she and Areli were watching tv, so we sat down to watch with them. It soon turned to watching the new King Kong, dubbed in Spanish. I hadn´t seen the movie before, but because of the part we watched (giant insects in a jungle) I doubt I´ll be watching it anytime soon.
Steph and I also learned that the word ¨Gacho¨ in Spanish means gross, nasty, awful, ugly, and we were throwing it around until Leti, about ten minutes LATER, decided to tell us that Christians don´t use that word. Thanks a lot Leti.
I also forgot how exhausting it is to be working with the kids here. Not only are you exhausted because you´re working with the kids all day (and they are major high-energy), but your brain is tired from trying to figure out how to speak to them in your limited Spanish. Do this, don´t do that, sit down, listen, don´t hit him, etc, are all things that you´re trying to say all day, among other things. I´ve snuck away to the kitchen to work with Cande, and left Stephanie to duke it out with the kids most of the time. The toddlers are precious, and the older ones are crazy.
Cande is the cook, and has worked here for probably 16 or 17 years. She is a woman who has been through a lot. She has one son, with a wife and a couple of children. She lost a son a few years ago, at the age of 18, in a car accident. Her husband had a stroke a couple of years ago, and Cande takes care of him. I think Cande might be a woman of steel. She works incredibly hard. I´ve been helping her clean up after breakfast, prepare a little for lunch, and clean up after lunch. My feet hurt at the end of the day, and it´s hard for me to imagine Cande doing this all by herself, but she does it.
Stephanie and I have been making observations about the kids, like the fact that kids all over the world try to eat play-doh, they all want to be pushed on the swings, and they love when an adult will get on the trampoline (or brincoline in Spanish, ¨brincar¨ meaning ¨to jump¨).
Stephanie mentioned how much the kids beat up on each other. At their homes I think a lot of them do not have parental supervision, and when I´ve visited the camps where these kids are from most of them run around the streets together as kids. I´m fairly certain that if we were to leave our kids alone it would also turn into survival of the fittest, but most of our kids are watched constantly and admonished quickly when a fight breaks out. With little supervision, the toughest of these kids will win the toy car that everyone wants. These children are not afraid to throw hard punches, at the young ages of four or five.
For those of you who don´t know, the place where I am staying operates as a daycare for children whose parents work low paying jobs. A good number of them work in the fields, while some clean houses, or make bricks. The majority of the children come from Native Indian backgrounds and have very dark skin and black hair. Sarai and Lubia, our sisters, pick strawberries in the field, and in church we asked Sarai how much she makes. With Lubia, she picks for about 9 hours, and they get paid 12 pesos per flat. In 9 hours they pick about 30 flats together, so they make about 16 dollars for 9 hours of work. Young girls, at 16 and 21, can work that fast.
Steph and I de-stemmed and washed a couple of flats of strawberries early this week. I cannot do that work without thinking about who I know that picked the strawberries, bending over all day. It could be one of our kids´ parents, a relative of someone I know in town, or perhaps our sisters, Sarai and Lubia. Sarai´s fingers were stained with strawberry picking.
After the kids left yesterday Stephanie and I were planning to go running, but it´s really warm here, so we decided to try to ride our bikes out to the beach instead. Well, I haven´t really ridden a bike since I was a kid and it´s hard work! We rode for about 20 minutes, and still weren´t to the beach, so I´m thinking I underestimated how far it is. We turned around (I´ll confess, it was at my whining), and headed home. 40 minutes of bike riding was quite a workout, especially in the layer of sand that covers everything- yikes!
Also, last night I read through the Korean phrasebook that I bought, and made flashcards. You might find some humor in the mental picture of me saying aloud all the vowels and saying them over and over as I look at the character assigned to each, hoping to memorize them. I´m actually learning a lot about the structure of their language and how the characters fit together to make words. Stephanie and I are wondering what we´ve gotten ourselves into, going to Korea. The Korean word for hello is ¨annyong haseyo¨, and for Arrested Development fans, it´s quite humorous. ¨annyong!¨
This morning I woke up not feeilng well, dizzy and nauseated, so I stayed in bed. I took some pepto bismol and felt a lot better. Stephanie thinks I might be dehydrated, and I think she would be right. Tonight she and I have been invited by Sarai to spend the night at their house. They´re used to having us stay at their house when we´re in town, so I think Sarai wants us to hang out.
Unfortunately, I cannot get the picture thing to work, so this blog will be photoless.
posted by Meghan @ 10:16 AM
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