3. Today is the start of my third week in Guaymas, Mexico. I like to remind myself that I am in Mexico. Yes, that IS where I am.
Please sit patiently while I process life. I write this, because I feel this to be the essential purpose of a blog. So, if you are reading, thank you. I am thankful for each and all of you who read this. I cannot be sure who is reading, but I at least know that my parents are my most devoted fans. For that purpose my blog may not include everything I choose to do and what befalls me clandestinely. Of course, it only includes my best and highest thoughts.
I made a few titles in bold, so if anyone wants to they can skip ahead to chapter four.
I just finished watching Mt. Tetakawa hide the sun and cause a burst of orange in the sky. It hides the sun with its stubby thumb, the peak that from a distance looks to be a boulder perfectly balanced at the top of a cone. The mountain turns blue and the little waves on the sea lavender purple. My eyes fix on the pelicans, because I am amazed by their brave, head-first plunges. Can you imagine getting your meals this way? I wish I could try it just for a taste of their routine.
I have decided finally that I live here. Maybe this feeling will come again in two weeks, or a month, or two months, but after two weeks I am CERTAIN that I do live and work here, and that I have no reason to get up and leave. I am adjusted to the humidity, mosquitos, heat, the tarantulas, cockroaches and scorpions in various areas of my home, the often strange and incredibly brave men, and Mexican time, a relaxed rate of movement that pervades everything from the school systems to the clock in your home. When you tell someone you would like to meet them at around 4:00 in the afternoon, you might as well say sometime before 11pm or midnight. But it doesn’t slow down the fantastic speed of a cockroach.
Teaching English: Primero a Tercero
Last week was the first week of classes and my first week as a teacher. It was a very hard week, because I have never taught before. Every day I asked to know grace for myself and from the others teachers, but mainly from myself and for myself, because as a teacher, this is something of which you need a lot. I teach English as a second language to first through third graders, and at the end of the day, which goes from 6:45am to 2:00pm, I am very tired. When I get home, I take a nap, eat lunch on Mexican time at around 4:00pm and at some point begin preparing my lesson strategy for the next day.
The school is very organized, which I like. It has to be for things to work, and fitting into this structure is my point of adjustment. Having now completed one week, I actually feel stronger in terms of the job and its responsibilities; a lot of it is learning how to manage time, which one does learn in college, but I feel even more accountable to my use of time here, since I feel a responsibility for the students’ learning as well as my own competency in the moment of teaching a class of sixteen kids chatting in Spanish with their friends. This is what makes difficult the position I am in; the students, though they are great kids, behave as poor students, because 1) I am new, 2) I do not speak Spanish and have to command their attention and lead a class lesson in what is for them a second language and 3) I think that much of what I say does go over their head.
My classes have to be a balance of my ability to relay information to them in English and practice discipline appropriately, and their capacity and discipline to follow along in class. Last week I realized that I love the kids, as I am starting to see all forty four of them as separate personalities that I have the chance to learn. At the end of last Tuesday, my second day of teaching classes, I had a lethal headache and thought that more difficult days like this might do me in, but like my coordinator said, teaching will become easier, and it does, just piece by piece.
Staff Meeting
Last Friday there was a staff meeting after school. While eating hot dog pizza with salsa and drinking Coca Cola, we talked about everything and played get-to-know-you-games. For the most part the meeting was good, but everyone speaks Spanish, so of course I do not understand half of it. Actually, listening to the teachers talk in Spanish, feeling my brain automatically eject from a language that is not my own and of which I have the most basic comprehension, I had a realization that what I was experiencing was similar if not the same as the experience of my ESL students. For them, English is a second language. They show up to my classes to learn English, and I have to be ever so deliberate and careful to craft my language and tone according to their skill level, and to keep their intelligent little brains from an innocent drift into another world.
While the English language coordinator, Michelle, was translating bits of the conversation for me and my fellow English teacher, Bridgette, the group wanted to know what Bridgette and I think of Mexican men. All the women and men in the room are married with kids, so we English teachers feel that we cannot easily relate. Anyway, I laughed at the question, and proceeded to tell my story, translated very well by Michelle, about the forty year old, fat man who came to my door two nights before at 9:30 pm asking if I wanted to go downtown and get helados, which means ice cream, except that he used a word in Spanish I did not understand, a synonym for ice cream perhaps, and thus, acted out rather well what eating ice cream looks like. He was dressed up and wore cologne, and because of this I barely recognized him, until I looked at his face and recognized the man who had helped me get drinking water from the store the week before, the one with whom I had already had an awkward conversation in Spanish, one that even in English would have been uncomfortable. At one point in this same phone conversation we were talking about cheese, which was when I knew that the flirting was not going so well on either of our ends. Anyway, I stood there in my pajamas and told him the truth: I was tired and had a lot of work to do before I went to bed. He mumbled disappointedly as he began to turn around, “Another time…” I said, yes, another time, good night, but really I should have just told him that we would never be anything.
The staff in the room, especially the women, found this story very funny and one told me that she has an English speaking uncle in Guaymas who if I keep to have as a contact, can ward off the forty year old when he comes back to my door next weekend. He would have, but I saw him in the street and ignored all of his slippery advances. Really, for me it’s just a funny story.
Sometimes the men here really do piss me off. For every holler, whistle and scream I get as a white girl in this city, I want to yell an angry word that they would not even understand. I just hold it in. Really, how could this not annoy a person? I’d like them to try on my skin and body and attempt to walk down the street like a normal person.
I wonder if the Mexican women in the room understood how annoying it often is to be a novelty here. They must know. For me, at the end of the day this annoyance sinks and dissolves into everything else that is good.
Good Morning Starshine, The Moon Says Hello
I think this is a good header to get the reader’s attention.
I recently wrote a letter to my friend Josh (I hope it makes it to the states in a somewhat timely manner of months), in which I wrote: ‘I have not moved to a place of cultural interest.’ Then I thought about this statement and questioned what I meant by it. What do I even mean by this? Here we have gas stations, movie theatres, Burger Kings, McDonald’s, and mom and pop restaurants. I mean that I have not moved to a place with notable architecture, with art in museums or public art, and neither is it romantic or charming. To me, this is a fair statement, because it makes since and is true. To use it as a platform to say that Guaymas has no culture is not fair or true. Like anywhere, Guaymas has a culture, and while this culture is not defined by institutions of art or obvious traces of beauty, I am discovering traces of curiosity and interest that turn into beauty.
In what I am coming to see as a challenging place, Guaymas is taking shape according to words I read in an article about a famous French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, titled, “Dialogue Between the Eye and the Heart.”
A few relevant quotations:
“ ‘Everything is interesting.” Cartier-Bresson has said. “ Everything is new.’ ” For Cezanne and Giacometti, too, to look, really to look, meant constantly seeing the world as if for the first time.”
Even if you do not know anything at all about Cezanne or Giacometti, I hope you resonate with the words, “to look, really to look;” these words show that beauty is not necessarily packaged and makes me think that perhaps art has to come from a challenging source, where, to use the most basic words, reality has the last word. Perhaps we must readjust our natural preconceptions of a location, of any life or people, in front of reality.
I experience this perspective when in Guaymas, each time I look out of a bus window across miles of dust and desert, the sun burning on people’s skin, while my helpless brain works at making assessments of the people here, their purpose, their realities, their dreams, of which I could never really understand unless I was born part of this culture. For me, all of it is new, and maybe for this sole reason, it is interesting.
Where making an image comes into play:
“What if- as his work suggests- brute life is not all that brute? What if there are instants when the seemingly blind movements of time coalesce into an order that is as profound and as revelatory as any created by art? What if that order is objective, outside us, there whether we see it or not? What if it can be captured and presented in a way that can do it justice?”
I like this, as both sort of a mystic idea behind artmaking and a way of giving dignity and vitality to the subject of our perception. I do not think the point of the author’s assessment is whether or not to believe in an objective order outside of our perceptions, but perhaps the quotation can help us to perceive the world with more wonder and passion to know the truth of things, especially people as they inhabit space, and certainly by means of a photograph.
Lastly, the author comments on the artist’s work, a gallery of images captured from around the world:
“We are all people; and people still have to do first of all with pride and envy and laughter and love and indolence and fear.”
Perhaps this is what I like about photographic portraits, and what I see in my friend Eric’s photos taken at home in the states, and recently, abroad in Sierra Leone. Some of us travel and find that humans resemble one another according to such attributes mentioned above, while at the same time, the world allows for curious and awesome variations on striking resemblances.
Home is a place, among all other places you love, which is the most comfortable in the world. Wherever I go, near to or far from what I consider home, I like to think of the words in the quotations above. The majority of Guaymas is for me new and therefore, uncomfortable, but it is that common standing of people, and the sincere warmth and remarkable generosity of Mexican people here, which makes life a blessing.
May we always look for the heart and dignity of people and with wonder seek a sincere image, as we ask the questions of one who is, for the time being, far from home.
