Aaron Antrim’s blog

Hi all,
Sorry this is such a mess. I’m sure there are grammar errors, and I know it’s a cyclone of disorganization. It’s almost 2am here, and I have a short presentation to make in front of almost 100 students in Spanish tomorrow. I want to send this out immediately so I won’t have to come into the computer lab this weekend, and so I can be freer to do other things.
-a

11 de Junio

(Esto ha sido una semana y fin de semana muy buenda.) This has been a very good week and weekend. My Spanish is past survival level but still terrible and limited, but even so as I write my vocabulary choices somehow tend more and more toward Spanish word, something which I will resist because my audience, for the most part, doesn’t read Spanish. To start:

The beginning of the week wasn’t particularly memorable — class, assignments, swimming, getting home at 11pm after homework in the computer lab. Then, on Thursday, we (the gringos) and a few others went to visit Hotel Perote, where I with two other ENGR 305 Appropedia Tech colleages will be refurbishing and redesigning a prototype solar hot water heating system developed and only partially implemented last year. Our goal is to come up with a system which will heat the hotel’s spring fed pool in the winter. This is an ideal solar system application because 1) The hotel has asked us for it, not the other way around 2) Parras gets more sun in the winter than in summer 3) We understand that freezing temperatures are very rare in the winter, meaning it may not be necessary to take precautions against pipes freezing such as using antifreeze and a heat exchangers. What this opportunity means is that we, my group members and I, need to get our asses into gear.

My host family had taken me to see Hotel Perote earlier, immediately after I arrived, but I hadn’t seen as full a picture as I experienced Thursday evening. The full picture being: Languidly sprawled white adobe buildings just outside of town, perched on the high edge of a desert valley over which the sun sets. After we hiked up to a hill we cooled off in the pool which we will be developing the solar water-heating system for.

Language note: Some English grammarians say one shouldn’t end a sentence with a proposition like I just did. I say that’s ridiculous and to hell with them, or as Winston Churchill said, “This is the kind of impertinence up with which I will not put!” I have to say here, this story is somewhat apocryphal, as Churchill did not actually say this and the sentence does not actually end in a preposition. “Put” is part of a two-word verb phrase in this case.

Anyway, after I had enough fun to injure only mildly (worth it), we went up to a ravine leading from a cave and watched as 8,000 bats (scientists have counted them) flew above our heads into the sunset. We ate dinner in an impressive building overlooking the pool. Its roof is a dome of bricks which seems to have been constructed in defiance of gravity. It is not a construction technique I would like to see used in earthquake-prone California.

Along with our dinner in these breathtaking surroundings, we also drank some truly horrible “vino,” for which the grapes are grown crushed, and fermented right there at Perote. Even though “vino” can translate to mean wine, it also translates more generally to mean liquor. I think we drank some Sotol (comes from agave) and something which was sweet like port (that’s probably what it was). Both are best mixed with coca-cola, which is perfectly common and socially acceptable, at least in South America, I’m told, and I hope it was at Hotel Perote as well. The alcohol brewed at Perote is intolerably sweet. Some varieties literally taste almost exactly like cough-syrup. I should (nay, it’s good I didn’t) have asked if they had a contract withe the company that makes Benedryl.

Then, we opened the french doors opening out to the desert, the pool, and the vineyards and we salsa-danced at our various skill-levels (but all at some level above zero, because one of the other students, an expert, is teaching all of us) on a giant glossy tile floor. Yes, it was almost that like that. I am trying to avoid overmuch exaggeration in these emails.

What I have provided so far is a mere plot summary — boring to write, as well as to read. I apologize.

More at the heart of my story here is not what I do, or how much the liquor tastes like cough syrup, but what I think and feel. This weekend I started out very withdrawn, which, at least to me, was very understandable, seeing as how I am working fairly hard, being inundated with new experiences, constantly struggling to speak Spanish, dealing with minor digestive discomfort from a new diet, and deprived of the independence, self-reliance, and time alone in my own house I have become accustomed to. My host family is great, but it is weird readjusting to life in a fully interdependent household. So I spend a good few hours composing my last email Friday, did some other stuff, attended a class, and finally hung out with other gringos at Edgar’s house (Edgar is a Mexican UTC student), but, still feeling quite introverted, left early at a quarter past one in the morning. Yes, a quarter past one is early. Kids (everybody, actually) will party until 6am. It’s understandable, because the air is so much more pleasant at night in this clime. The latest I’ve stayed out was until 3:30am. And on most weekend mornings I beat my Mexican host family in the race to get out of bed (but I think I am the only one who knows this is a competition, though).

Anyway, Saturday morning I woke up early, got some coffee and yogurt and papaya, and headed up the the UTC campus to do some of my own work. Last weekend I felt that I missed cleaning my house, because, for me, it’s an opportunity to clean out my mind at the same time. It’s an inventory taking time, an organizational opportunity, and a way of clearing things out so I can be more focused and less preoccupied. Naturally, if this is what I expect from cleaning, it also extends to the digital realm, which means that sometimes vacuuming and responding to and archiving unread messages in my email are two parts of the same process. Here in Parras, where my host family actually gets mad if I try to wash dishes, my only opportunity to process bits of my life in some more-or-less tangible way is digital, so that’s why I headed up to the lab, cleaned up a page on arcatacommunity.org, installed Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/ on the site (another of Google’s new offerings that continually blow my mind), sent a letter into the Arcata Eye about the free @arcatacommunity.org gmail and neighborhood groups, got the Eye editor Kevin Hoover to join the Sunnybrae group, and asked him if I can write an Arcatans Elsewhere column from Parras, a query to which I received an enthusiastic reply.

All this worked well as a substitute for the things I do to take time out to arrange my life and things when I am at home in Arcata. Having succeeded in gotten some time to withdraw, organize, and importantly, dedicate myself to something I am actually effective at doing, which, believe me, becomes a hunger after a while of trying to do things in an unfamiliar place with limited Spanish, I finished up in the afternoon, feeling reassembled and went on to do a few things. Track down Parras’s only weekly periodical, which I discovered is 6 photocopied legal-sized pages (for a town of population 43,000, I have discovered, from government documents). I also picked up La Pallabra from Saltillo as well, and was amazed that I could comprehend 95% articles on familiar topics in a Spanish-language New York Times insert. It was really confidence- and hope- inspiring to find my Spanish reading skills were there for me.

In the evening I went to work translating my presentation on sustainable transportation and alternatives to single-occupant vehicles with a Mexican student, Edgar, who attends our Appropriate Tech classes. Edgar, I’m convinced, must be the most intelligent student at UTC, which calls itself a technical school, but is pathetically like high school. UTC is intended the same educational purposes as a junior college in the states. Its students are between 18 and 21 years old. From the limited view I’ve seen, the state of Mexican education is pretty bad, but that’s a discussion I save until a planned email I’m going to write in character as ¨the ugly American,¨ filled with hubris, insensitive, arrogant and completely narrow-minded, who just totally rips into everything around him — the public bathrooms, the inaccurate clocks and widespread lack of an idea of punctuality, much less its practice, corruption, rampant drunk driving — wow, I’ll have quite a time.

Anyway, most of the students behave socially like they´re in high school, and approach academics the same way. I got incredibly frustrated helping this kid Hymie to translate a very short report in Spanish into English. He left out periods all over the place. It was difficult to translate from a language I barely speak and read when it was unclear where sentences end and begin. I ended up correcting his Spanish (well, adding periods) AND translating to English, AND getting frustrated again when he incorrectly told me an adverb was a verb, and we got hung up on translating it for a long time. Fortunately, Edgar, who greatly surpasses his colleagues, was willing to help me translate. Even though there are English classes here at UTC, it’s painfully obvious the students learn very little.

Edgar’s ability to speak English far surpasses other students, and he has learned on his own from English language T.V. programs and films. It’s good to talk with someone whose English ability is equal to my Spanish, because we can both face the challenge of the language barrier together, with greater understanding of it, and more ability not only to understand the other, but help and coach them.

I ended up taking us over three hours and, between us, several beers (alcohol is remarkably useful for operating in a foreign tongue) to translate only a single page of my presentation because we went off in all sorts of tangents related to my presentation topic and other world issues, differences between life in the U.S. and Mexico, and discussing differences between English and Spanish. I feel like this was my first or second real conversation in Spanish. Sure, I’ve had plenty of conversation that have gone on about different small topics: dinosaurs, the World Cup, Arrested Development (yes, my host sister says she’s watched it), Mexican politics, racism in the U.S., the high cost of beer in the U.S., how crazy my parents’ dog is, etc., etc., but I feel like they were all practice conversations: conversations I may well have had in the U.S., but without thinking much while having them or intending a whole lot. Since they were difficult conversations to have in Spanish, I had forced myself to make them, just in order to get language practice.

In Edgar, I found a conversation partner who is aware and concerned about global issues — one of his main concerns is global warming and he lent me a Spanish-language National Geographic on the issue. Cover story name: “Calentamiento Global.” Talking with Edgar about the issue helped me to understand a little more about the “global” part of global warming. It’s one thing to say the name of the phenomenon and understand some of the scientific reasons behind the name, but for me, it was something else to have a discussion about a problem I’m well aware of and concerned about in a strange place and in a foreign tongue. It was a slightly awesome experience to realize how many shared interests I have with over 6 billion other human beings on this planet, and that serious communication is possible as long as two people have the will. If necessary, language is inventable and adaptable on the fly.

The global scope of our conversation made me feel embarrassed to be an American. I was surprised to hear Edgar has strong feelings about the war in Iraq. I incorrectly assumed it was something that mainly the U.S., European, and Middle Easter nations paid attention to and cared about.

14-15 de Junio

Complaining about government is different when you’re complaining with someone from a different country because you’re both complaining about your respective countries’ governments. I found the scope of the complaining seemed to open up so that suddenly we found ourselves complaining about corruption and bad policy throughout the world over — a frustration so longer isolated to one nation but truly global in scope. It was a little bit awesome and scary to be a in a place and situation where I have less power and efficacy than I am used to having, and talk about the decisions of governments, my own, and those in which I have no citizenship and don’t vote, and to feel that I have about equal say in those where I do vote as well as my country of home citizenship. For a bit, I felt more helpless to effect change in politics than I have ever felt before. The sensation was slightly analogous to being a tiny cell in a human being’s hair follicle which has suddenly sprouted consciousness, and is troubled that the whole organism seems to be exhibiting some self-destructive behavior, but is totally powerless to change anything. At the same time as I was feeling this, I also knew I was having a conversation with a concerned smart young person in Mexico who is more sensitively aware of what is going on for human beings all over the world than I am — as I think I have taken an approach which has become mostly blind to human suffering, and instead focuses more on the mechanics of good decision-making and information sharing, on what change is actually possible, rather than what change is actually necessary. I don’t know what I’m trying to express, just basically apologizing for being (I’m sure plenty would disagree) a practical, realistic person — someone who, when the topic of staving people comes up, chooses to think and talk more about what E.O. Wilson had to say in Consillience (I have a blog entry here on it, scroll to the bottom with for the quote about the Rwandan genocide), and about our U.S. government´s food and reproductive health aid policies, not only because I think that discussing such topics is the most effective approach toward a solution, but because these topics, not the actual hunger itself, are topics which my brain can safely tackle and do something with, as effectively as it can analyze the syntax of a sentence, produce some HTML webpage code, or make a purchase comparison. This feeling, I suppose, is a curse and blessing of being educated: we are taught to solve problems in the abstract as much as possible, and they most frequently seem to be best solved that way, which can free one from making full emotional contact with the issue, and allow for rational decision making. The problem is, intellectual responses without an emotional response frequently miss something.

After having these thoughts and feeling then, and wrapping up translating with Edgar, last Sunday afternoon and evening I did some much-needed bonding with my host family. It’s not that we were at all on unfriendly terms, it’s only because my school schedule frequently is incompatible with their meal times, and because I’ve been busy with work and activity, that I have not shared as much time as I should have with my family. They are very sweet.

The youngest daughter, Jessica (5-7 years old, I think), is quite small and has an impish look like she’s always getting away with something, knows it, and enjoys it. The middle siblings, fraternal twins Jessica and Carlitos (about 9 years old, I think) are really fun. Carlitos (Carlitos is a nickname basically meaning Little Carlos, as Carlos is the name of his father) displays a good-natured, friendly, and slightly dopey look sometimes. Carlitos is probably the most emotional of all the children, equally prone to raising his voice when he is angry, when his speech will come out more slowly rather than increasing in tempo, as he is to crying. He is the only child I have heard do either of these two things. Jessica, who excels at school, wears glasses on a librarian-style beaded string around her neck, and has a confident intelligent look whenever she goes to work at something. She frequently looks bemused at my ridiculous and bumbling Spanish (I understand what David Sedaris was describing better and better after reading his book Me talk pretty one day on the way here). The 17-year-old daughter is very sweet and amazingly dedicated to her family. She’s always very nice to me, but I don’t think she likes having me around as much as the younger kids do, as she is focused on her own life, and my presence in the household frequently means more burden and work for her, I think. The oldest daughter, Ana, lives with her husband in a house near the center of town that his parents gave him. Further demonstrating the strong family ties , she and he frequently visit. I got to see their house the other day. It is a large old house with thick adobe walls and high ceilings. Despite that he was given the home by his parents, his work is at La Fabrica (photos of the bike racks at the factory here — they don’t normally let people take cameras in the factory so I was very proud my Spanish was able to get me into an office to have a secretary call a supervisor, who got another employee to let me into the main yard and snap a few), and despite that he is a factory worker who makes very little money, the house has 3 T.V.s, two of which are very modern Sonys hooked up to impressive-looking stereo systems. There are also two refrigerators in the kitchen, both plugged in, even though all the food in both could be fit into a mini-fridge. I laughed at Edwardo for having an unnecessary second fridge, and chided him about it. He was equally amused at how unnecessary the second fridge was, but couldn’t offer an explanation for it, which I would have been genuinely interested to hear. They know I’m a literature student so that gave me another opportunity to make a little joke of asking where the books are. If one thing gave the impression of the house being barren more than the lack of anything on the expansive walls, it was the lack of books. They are, I’m told by my family, quite an expensive item here. Whenever I ask about the cost of something “expensive” here, I end up reminded of the economic difference between the U.S. and Mexico. I don’t remember the price for books here, but it was quite low by U.S. standards. I always hate to imagine how they would feel if I said my Spanish or Calculus textbooks would cost about $80 if I was foolish enough to buy them new.

The mom, Ana Luz, is extremely sweet, and probably my favorite person to talk to. Her hair is died a fairly intense artificial red, somewhere between brick and watermelon. she has a high sing-song voice which is very pleasant to listen to, especially when she’s speaking to her children. It’s particularly nice because Spanish sounds very beautiful spoken, whereas English sounds quite technical, business-like, efficient and effective, but not nearly as pretty.

Anyway, on Sunday I spent from 4pm to midnight with my host family. Somehow it didn’t feel like nearly 8 hours. We barbecued at the public pool near the house, and I joined them for Tequila shots. We ate meat and more meat — a hot sausage stir fry dish prepared over a small fire around 5pm and then wide stringy slabs of cow meat around 11pm. As things were wrapping up around midnight, I biked up to school and worked in the computer lab on a portion of this email, among other things, and visited with some with Lonny our engineering teacher until I left around 3am. The guards who controll access to the campus at night must think we Americans are a lot of crazy workaholics, and they’re right.

I know this email has been long and rambling with irrelevant details and tangents which I should have edited out, but every time I sat down to write with a point to make, all that rambling would just happen as if I had no power to stop it. I decided to leave it in, possibly because I’m lazy (”I’m sorry this letter is so long, but I did not have time to make it shorter.” Mark Twain), and also because I thought the lack of structure actually communicates something about what it is like trying to make sense of my experience here.

As to why I am sending this as an email out to family and friends, rather than just leaving it as the original journal entries I wrote on paper: I was inspired by reading part of a book another student brought with her, “The Goldstein Chronicles.” It is a several hundred page compilation of emails exchanged between her and her brothers and father of the course of several years, as she and her brothers when on different high school and college exchange programs, as well as made trips outside of school to countries in South America and other parts of the world. What emerges is a story of global citizenship told through personal stories of family relationships and growing up, woven in with discussions of global political events. Each side of the story — personal and political — provides a context for the other. I was very inspired, I guess I’m trying to make something a little bit like that happen here. I truly am eagerly anticipating whatever response you may have, if any, whether you are in Humboldt, Idaho, or abroad in the world. Signing off, Aaron

I’ve got a few requests for pictures. You can check a few out here in Parras program online gallery.

aaron :: Jun.27.2006 :: México ::