Our Home for Six Weeks - Front and Back
So here we were. All in all, we were pretty lucky in our destination. Our host mother was awesome, awesome, awesome. And we had running water (a full bathroom with a toilet and shower in a little building behind the house) and our own room. The plan was to rotate our meals at people who were getting the latrines if I recall correctly. Our duties were:
Esther (our host mother) took us on a tour of the town and showed us around all the houses and introduced us. (I remember at the time thinking I was so lost and I would never find any of these places again, but of course I got to know the town pretty well pretty quickly.) She wanted to take us to Santa Fe, a town over, but we remembered on the way that it was against the rules, so we turned around. Oddly, we got scolded for this later and got an official "warning" which upset me as I tend to be conscientious about the rules. Both me and Xochitl (my partner) got ill almost right away in our stay from the drastic change in diet. Diarrhea, vomiting, all the fun stuff. Esther was extremely cool about it. She was also cool about burning our trash, which I did not realize at first she was doing. I am so used to just tossing everything in the trash and it disappears with the garbage man that it didn't occur to me that there IS no garbage man here. I started being a bit more careful about what I threw in the trash from then on.
Disclaimer on the below: it gets better.
See? Not SO bad...
La Presa means "The Dam" and at the center of town is, you guessed it, a dam. Actually, until recently, I thought it meant "The Bridge" because that is what it looks more like to me.
La Presa has, I'm guessing, a population of about 200. Maybe 60 or so families. It's nestled in a big valley with some hills behind it that we ended up hiking on quite a bit.
La Presa has a little shop. You can get really tasty coca cola (where they recycle the used bottles and bring back clean used bottles to put soda in). Mexican coke is very tasty. They also have candy of a sort. Nothing as good as good old fatty American candy bars, but there is a chocolate shell involved. The one I liked was called "Flipy." Oddly, the kids here eat cough drops like candy. Yay menthol?
It's a strange mix. Even in this small town, the gap between rich and poor is broad. Some people have two room mud houses with no running water at all (these are the families we are building the latrines for, obviously.) But others have a walled several-room house with a courtyard, a full running water toilet and shower, and a TV with a Satellite dish. (We even had a running count of "Satellite Dish Houses".) We even ran across a Nintendo and learned that the "blowing on the cartridge to get it to work" trick has crossed international boundaries. The two teenage daughters of one family dressed in stylish new jeans like any American teenager. But others - some of the older, poorer married women - seemed to wear the same worn out dresses, day after day. I didn't catch any classist behavior and all the kids seemed to play together regardless, but it was a little strange to see such a juxtaposition. Though I think the residents are always curious about the latest thing happening. Our Route Leader told us that the whole town gathered at her arrival. Once, the whole town came to watch when a guy arrived selling towels and whole sets of sheets, blankets, and pillows. (I guess the residents of La Presa can't just go to their local Target for this stuff...)
We are adjusting pretty quickly. Our main staples are beans (lots of beans!), eggs, potatoes, and tortillas. Occasionally chicken, fried veggies and yummy sweet bread. Most of it is surprisingly tasty (MOST of it) and we have not gotten sick again. It's really hard, though, when a townsperson takes the trouble to cook something that you just can't get down. (Like greasy cow intestine.) Politeness will only get you so far. But, for the most part, I've been happy with the meals. My favorite thing is the tea and this rice milk type thing that our host mother makes. I like it a lot and just hope that there's no unfiltered water involved. Our host mother has been boiling our water, which is extremely nice of her, and I've been using my water filter, too. I got scolded at by our Route Leader - she comes by once a week to check on us and motivate us - when our host mother asked if I preferred flour or corn tortillas. I said flour (which I thought we had been eating anyway) but apparently those are more expensive? Though my route leader also takes our "chocolate orders" and buys candy in the city for us, so I can't complain too much. In my journal, I describe one of these as "the best damn 3 Musketeers bar I've ever eaten". She also brings us mail. I was really, really happy to get mail the first delivery. (In order for us to have gotten mail the first delivery, my mom would have had to send the letter a week or two before I even left for Mexico. I did not expect it, but there it was! It was awesome.) It seems like my folks spread the word and I got letters from just about all my relatives which made me very happy.
I've kind of gotten used to the bugs and animals. The sound of the donkey in the morning is indescribable. I also regularly run into horses (and cute colts), cows (and cow-pies - once we played soccer in a "field of shit"), chickens and pigs. Some birds have built a nest on the showerhead, which I find amusing. It does not interfere with the shower, interestingly enough. There are a lot of bugs and insects, which is to be expected in this climate. Flies, grasshoppers, mosquitoes, spiders, giant moths, and these weird flying beetle things that scare the heck out of me. We amuse our host mother with our fearful bug-killing antics. There are also lots (and lots) of tiny adorable frogs that hop around in the fields nearby. SO CUTE. But the giant toad that took up residence in the toilet bowl one morning... not so cute.
Huaniqueo is a bigger town about 30 minutes walk from La Presa. We walked (or were given a ride there) often. They have a neat town square and regular markets on Wednesdays. They also have a long distance phone - I managed to, the second half of my trip, finally call my parents! We went to a Catholic mass there one day at a pretty church with Jesus and Mary statues (that I thought looked quite Caucasian). I thought the hanging sashes and decorations inside the church were beautiful and the echoing piano and organ music with a beat was fantastic. Though the service was so identical to the English version that I understood pretty much all of it. One night, most of the way into our trip, we went to a "baile" (a dance) there. This turned out awkward for several reasons. One, I looked awful. I did not bring dress clothes on my volunteer trip to Mexico so I ended up wearing this too-colorful skirt and, you guessed it, hiking boots. Two, I did not know proper Mexican dance etiquette. Apparently, you are supposed to put your hand on the man's arm as if you are pushing away instead of around it. I did the latter since that made more sense and it apparently meant I was interested or something (?). After that, I got the right idea about the positioning from watching the other skinny, well-dressed girls. And no one dances alone, which I also thought was a little odd.
In general, though, just to be clear, I did feel very safe here. People we have met have been awesome. I think the only problem in this case was alcohol.
The rest of the materials for the concrete didn't arrive until we had been there a few weeks (we just had the giant piles of sand and gravel outside our window for days and days). We had been waiting on cement (powder), lime, and malla (which is this metal grate thing that is supposed to act like rebar). All we could do in the meantime was dig and inspect holes and build "brocals." Every single latrine hole was dug too big; only one was even close to the right dimensions, but this was from the guy who knew what he was doing and later provided his own rebar. We had to have some people dig a new hole since theirs hit the water table, but the big ones made me nervous since we were supposed to span it with concrete. We still built the "brocals" for the holes that were dug (which, if I recall, involved digging around the perimeter of the hole and sticking smaller rocks together to give the concrete slabs something to sit on.) Some people tried to build them on their own, though, without really knowing how, which was not great. The materials were so late in arriving that several of the women who were slated to get one got frustrated and dropped out. It was a long and angry conversation with a bunch of women in a circle under Esther's porch in the rain that I still remember now, but barely understood a word of. Once we did get the materials, we still were novices at the whole mixing concrete thing. We lucked out when two of our peers (volunteers from our route in the next town over) visited our town and helped us out. They had already finished all their latrines (jealousy!) and helped us properly mix concrete. One of them had excellent Spanish, the other was fluent, so they had no trouble communicating with the locals. Apparently, the locals had been sort of mocking us, saying "they don't know what they're doing." Which was true, I suppose, but not very encouraging. Though, their own town locals had apparently been mocking them a bit. One was of Asian ancestry and the other of Mexican ancestry and I guess that they did not come off as proper Americans or something.