Puebla…perhaps because we didn´t have the time to explore it properly, our impression of Puebla was that it was losing it´s core vitality. Strip development and big box stores string out along the highway, as well as masses of two storey housing complexes…we weren´t sure if it was government housing to support the poor, or if it was some kind of live-work-play north american style development..but they were cramped, with no greenery and there was a lot of them!

Tehuacan…finally, we can stop comparing the landscape to the Okanagan! Here are vast expanses of cactus and some parts look like a landscape from Dr. Seuss´ Horton Hears a Who! Here, the Sierra Madre del Sur Mountains are large, golden, grey, or rose coloured (depending on the light) and they are just beautiful!

At one point in the drive, we stopped at a summit and we were surrounded by tops of mountains and deep valleys. It was exquisite!

After all those mountains and their deep canyons, we came to an area of Muntains of deep rust red brown with more lush verdant greens interspersed with grasses, like straw. The tops of the grasses were shiny and glowing …feathery beauty in the sun.

Oaxaca…

The Zocalo (the central square which is bounded by the Church, the City Hall, and cafes) is vibrant. We could not resist to go to a little cafe where there was musicians playing violins. It felt like something out of a movie set…and they allowed us to bring Guapo (the Mastiff) and Chula (the multipoo) along with us.

We sat at a table next to an elegant gentleman who told us many stories. He told us that he had six dogs at his home in Chiapas. He told us about how when he was a teenager, he fell in love with an American woman and went with her to the United States. He told us that one day, out of the blue…migration officials came and forcibly took him and sent him back to Mexico and that he was never able to say goodbye to his sweetheart. And that when she came home, she thought that he had abandoned her and her newborn baby. He told us about how he had recently been kidnapped for his money and that he had to sell his houses in order to secure the ransom. All these stories, we listened to, while the kids played in the trees of the zocalo and we nodded and shook our heads at various vendors who would weave through the tables to sell their wares. Finally, we broke free from his spellbinding tales, and made our way back to the truck to go to Monte Alban.

Monte Alban was beautiful! We saw it as the sun set over Oaxaca. We went to a part of the mountain that had not been archeologically explored and revealed…but that was clearly ruins, just overgrown with mountain trees and vegetation. Tamar and Jerson and Hoelune delighted in finding artifacts (ie rocks that were obviously part of steps, or walls and not naturally smooth and straight edged)…which we painstakingly returned so as to not be disrespectful to that culture or to contemporary Mexican culture.

Leaving Oaxaca, there are sensuous undulating hills. There is dense population here…but somehow, even though their homes creep up the mountain sides, they do not seem to be at odds with the mountains themselves (this I again noticed in El Salvador, but not in the new developments which are much like ours in Canada ie. imposing straight lines and grids and levels on essentially curvy and mountainous terrain). In Oaxaca, there isn´t that stark contrast of urbanisation eating up the mountain, like there is in the Okanagan. Maybe it has to do with the size of houses, or the narrow roads or the established domestic plantings…(this was my musing when I wrote my original comments, but now I can see that it has more to do with how the development follows the natural lines of the mountains ie. with narrow and steep streets, rather than carving wide, level streets etc. into the mountain.)

The Mex 190 was not a cuota highway. There were no more cuota highways south of Oaxaca and I think that you have already read my comments about this dangerous road which weaves through the mountains with only one lane going each way…deep drop offs, big trucks constantly crossing the centre line, no visibility, no signs and constant switchbacks. When not worrying about our odds for survival, we took the time to admire the agave planted at 75 degree angles up the mountain! When we finally came down from the mountains, the climate became moist. Paper folds like clothes instead of crackling here. We did not pass through San Cristobal de las Casas, which apparently is the hotbed of political unrest…we went the southern route and were relieved to find a nice flat highway with two lanes dedicaed to one direction the whole way!

Chiapas seems to be largely uncultivated or at least apparently uncultivated to my eyes which associate cultivation with large tracts of monoculture agricutural production. It seems to be sparsely populated with few villages (at least along the route we took). There are several rivers and lots of fields that seem to have been strewn with multiple sizes of boulders. I was relieved to have actually seen some water flowing in the river beds…if little water compared to the amount the river beds hold (note a comment here…now I realize that we are here at the end of the dry season…the wet season will commence in March and all will flow again..but at the time I wrote my original comments, I was worried about climate change and the effect that global warming would have on the people…that´s probably still a valid concern…for all of us in all parts of the world!!)

Tapachula seems to be a very smallish town (drawn deceivingly large on the map we were using), which is dominated by a large Sam´s Club. The people shopping at Sam´s Club are doing all the same things we do in North America…buying large quantities and truckng them out to vehicles in the parking lot. I wonder about the impact that this is having on the core of Tapachula but do not have time to investigate further, because we are at the border of Guatemala and we want to cross as soon as possible!!!

It seemed simple enough. There was the big sign that directed toward Guatemala. We followed the road. All was well and calm, until we came toward what looked like a village…a group of men started gesturing toward us and shouting. It was a cacaphony. Having read so much about the dangers of Guatemala and the possibilty of being carjacked, I told Jerson to keep going and to speed up not to stop under any circumstances!!!….that was until I saw a fellow flashing an official looking neck card. Then I remembered  the other advice that I´d heard..when at borders, you must stop when requested by officials or they may shoot!!!! What to do!? The men weren´t dressed in uniform, but they had official identification badges! Confusion. Decided to stop. The man ran all the way to the truck, he told us he worked for the Guatemalan blah blah blah and we had to follow his directions…it all seemed a little shaky, but then agan, Guatemala is a poor country…maybe they couldn´t afford uniforms? So, he jumped on the back of our truck and we drove toward the border.

Now, I´d read about crossing the Guatemalan border on the internet (yes, I researched this trip as much as I could for all angles and I used the information that I´d found on the net, too). One person posting on some site about driving though to Central America mentioned people who “help” at the border for a small fee. They said that these people were extremely helpful and that they definitely assisted in crossing. Mind you, they also said that these helpful folk were children…and children these were definitely NOT! Anyways, something rang a bell, and I realized that he might only be quasi official if official at all. But, it was too late. As we came toward the border crossing area, we were thronged by a huge group of men who were all shouting at the same time. Some had thick wads of cash in their hands, to convert pesos into quetzals…others had those photo id´s, others were just hangers on of various types. One man began, on the Mexico side, washing the winshield. This is no different than in Victoria, generally. It had happened all throughout Mexico that hardworking men would begin washing the winshield…then they would collect a few pesos and be on their way with very little interaction. Well, we actually told this guy that it was okay to wash the winshield and we gave him a few pesos. It was chaotic. The guide who had initially stopped us took full control and guided us to a pay parking area off of the main border road. In this parking lot, the guy who had washed the winshield began to wash the whole truck with his grimy cloth and bottle of water. I didn´t stop him, because I thought that he was trying to give value for the pesos that Jerson had given him. I was a little annoyed, because I didn´t want to advertise a nice clean carjackable truck (which in reality ours isn´t because it is much too old! But that is beside the point…) but I didn´t want to take away his dignity or his profession, so I didn´t say anything. Then the guide took us to the photocopy place for us to photocopy the documents and he asked about the vehicle import permit…we explained about not having it. It would be a problem, he said. We would have trouble leaving Mexico but everything can be arranged. Did that sound like what the policeman in Mexico City had said? Your right, it did. That is a euphemism for, you´re going to pay! Well, he wanted to have my original documents ie. my passport and my drivers papers. I refused to give them over. He said that he was going to have difficulty helping us if I didn´t cooperate. This was being said in rapid fire spoken slurring Spanish as we walked quickly through a narrow street full of vendors etc. while we were trying to watch simultaneously our three kids the two dogs…it was rush rush rush. Then I got mad. I said that I wasn´t going to do anything in this rushy rushy mode and that we could just forget working like that because that was how big mistakes were made. I went with him to the Mexican Immigration, that went smoothly, except that the official there told me that I should be having nothing to do with that man! Then we went to Mexican customs, where they asked for that importation vehicle document which we didn´t have. I told her that we didn´t have it…they shook their heads and said that they couldn´t help us. We would have to talk to her boss…Our “coyote” whisked us away at that point and we regrouped where the car was parked. He told us that he could speed up the process…that he could take care of everything and make the problem of the importation permit go away…for 200.00 U.S. He would need my original vehicle documents and my identification documents. I said that I wouldn´t hand them over, that I could go along with him, and also that we didn´t have that kind of money! He said that maybe he could do it for less money but that it was a delicate situation of negotiation and for that reason I couldn´t go along. He went away to check on the situation. Now, we´re standing by the car and it has been sort of half washed. It´s still grubby on the top etc. But, we are wanting to support the fellow in his gracious gesture and so we thank him for the nice job. Then he tells us that we owe him the equivalent of $20.00 U.S. in quetzales!!!!!  He glares at us threateningly. And that´s where I have to end the story because I am expected back home right now!

Tamara

…sorry to leave you in that uncomfortable situation at the Guatemalan border. Well, what happened was that he was surly and threatening and we were concerned that if we didn’t give him the $20.00 US, he might decide that he was justified in doing us some kind of harm. So, we tried to ascertain what the feeling was among the rest of the group that had clung to us to determine if they were in agreement with him or with us…we finally exchanged some pesos into quetzales, apologized for any misunderstanding that we’d had and paid him less than $20.00 US, but in the quetzals that he’d insisted upon, as opposed to Mexican pesos which he’d refused (which made no sense to us at all, considering that we’d had encountered him on the Mexican side of the border crossing.

we decided that the whole situation had gone sour. And we didn’t want to give away our passports, or our money to strangers, so we thanked our self-appointed “coyote”, apologized for any inconvenience, paid him some money and drove away.

We drove back to Tapachula, where we licked our wounds, regrouped and tried to decide whether we should go back to try to get the vehicle importa permit from a larger centre…but I was unwilling to go back over those horrible mountains to Oaxaca…so finally, we decided to try to cross again, at another border crossing about 40 minutes south.

It was still cumbersome, but we were more experienced. Next time, we’ll remember the vehicle import permit and then they won’t have anything on us!

Okay, after the Guatemala crossing, I basically stopped taking notes on the trip! I don’t know what came over me…but now I have nothing to tell you about. We had a wonderful time in El Salvador…the kids got to know their family and now they actually want to learn Spanish!We will also have a bunch of homeschooling projects to work on…like learning about the volcano that created the Lake Ilopango where the children swam, finding out more about the Mixtecs, the Totecs, the Aztecs, the Zapotecs and the Pipil peoples of the Americas, etc. We got to see pineapples growing (from the ground, I’d always thought on trees…), coconuts (much larger and greener than the ones we get in the stores, mangos (grow on gorgeous big trees, like I’d never imagined), bananas (more varieties than we’ve ever seen…) Spent some really quality time with our family and then went back through Guatemala without incident. We are now on our way back home and we are looking forward to seeing all of you again!

Love Tamara and Jerson and the kids and the dogs

The next few messages that I am sending will be more about reflections on this mammoth trip that we’ve made, as it comes to a close…this one was written as we were crossing the border back into the USA:egar

When we began this trip, I have to tell you, despite having famly in Latin America…I was fearful. I remember lying awake as a child, dreaming of travelling through Mexico by car…and worryingand worrying about “banditos” getting me and my family! I don’t really know where these fears came from…they just hovered on the edges of my dreams, threatening that maybe my greatest hopes and aspirations were actually going to lead to my own destruction.

Before leaving for this trip, I worked very hard–trying to arrange for any and all eventualities. We are insured for car, business, health/medical and life. We’ve spent several hundreds of dollars on vaccinations for the family and the dogs. There is even a letter on my desk at home that is to be opened by my survivors (ie. birth family) in the event that we all perish.

When we first crossed the Mexican border, I am ashamed to admit, I practically considered everyone as a possible bandit! If a truck was behind us for awhile, I began to get nervous that they wanted to carjack us. Every group of people on the roadside (and there are a lot, waiting for buses etc) was potentially a gange of bandits who wanted to get us!

Where do these images come from? I realize that we have the responsibility of caring for our children and consequently we do need to be vigilant…

We’ve been in Latin America for about a month and a half. With the exception of the initial bad experience at the Guatemalan border, during this entire time, we’ve only seen hard working people. No thieves. No gangs. No bandits. Only people who are working very hard, often to earn very little, who treated us graciously. Innumerable times, we’ve stopped strangers to ask for directions…I wonder if our truck pulling up alongside of them made them nervous of us!? If so, they never showed it.

I remember studying something in university about the construction of the identity of “the other”. The idea, is that when a group of people can be represented as “different” and possibly dangerous–or at least, at variance with our values in some significant way…we are able to ethically ignore, or even subjugate their needs.

But, if this is the case…who creates/constructs this “other”? And how are we complicit in the process? These are serious questions that I will be contemplating for awhile.

Regardless, as we prepare to cross the border back into the USA today, I am thinking about how the time that we’ve spent in Latin America has changed us.

Although we’ll still drive only during the day, I am no longer filled with the mixture of wonder and dread. The wonder has given way to a deeper, more mature appreciation and the dread has largely disappeared.

Having said that, after the incident in Mexico City, we do try to drive like locals ie. confidently…even if it means getting lost so that we don’t draw unnecessary attention to ourselves (note! we just got pulled over for speeding this morning and we did not get the “mordida” (ie. request for a bribe)–nor did we get a ticket. Instead, we got a very professional officer who just made us aware that we were driving over the speed limit. So, I don’t want to give the impression that every police officer is looking for a bribe.

When we re-crossed the Mexican-Guatemalan border…the process that had initially been so overwhelming and frightening with the throngs of money changers etc., we had very little problems. It was a lengthy process…the customs official, the animal inspector, the immigration official…all were very thorough, but we are more confident of ourselves and so we don’t attract people who prey on those who are insecure and unsure of themselves (note, in an upcoming message, I will be outlining exactly how the process works and things that you can do to make it smoother for yourself, so that you can approach border crossings with confidence).

If anyone even starts to clean our windshield now, we are very strict and tell them to stop immediately (which, if they are aggressive, they don’t listen…then we start putting our windshield wipers on and spraying them with the washer fluid! If they get angry at you–which sometimes they do…you just congratulate yourself for avoiding a situation like we had at the Guatemalan border!)

Clean, Straight, Decisiveness–this is the body language which must be conveyed.

…Same with the food:

On the way down, we were very scared of food. We spent a lot of our budget on pre-packaged food at gas stations. Could you imagine a truck filled with kids suffering from intestinal upset and diarrhea? That’s what we were afraid of.

Now, on the way home, we only buy gas and the occasional cold drink at gas stations. Everything else, we buy from food vendors and comedors (see earlier comments on how to choose a place to eat, and note that you should also look for semi-trucks stopped in front and people eating in the place…)

It is possible to travel through Latin America in a bubble…eating only at chains in order to preserve health…but then again, you might as well drive to Merritt! We ate gorgeous tacos in Arriaga, a wonderful home-style meal in a tiny truck stop in Oaxaca, a complex and delicious meal of seafood “Veracruzano” and countless delicious pupusas in El Salvador…food is a very important part of the culture, and eating meals is part of the process of partaking of and indulging in culture. One of the things that I’ll take away with me, is a heightened understanding of the role that food plays in culture. One of the ways of showing love, is to provide a meal cooked with love–we ate and ate and ate countless meals with Jerson’s family in El Salvador. And the people who are preparing the food, take time to meticulously cut each vegetable into tiny pieces so that the flavours meld flawlessly into a coherent and complex dish.

Hope to be seeing you soon…

“Thoughts Upon Crossing the Border into Texas and Doing Four Loads of Laundry in Coin Operated Machines and Taking a Long Hot Shower”

Before I begin my musings, perhaps a bit of context:

In El Salvador, al homes have good sized pools of water walled in by concrete, with a concrete patch in the middle. The middle patch has a drain and walls of about a hand’s width surrounding it. In most parts, homes have intermittently “running water”. It will run from between twenty minutes to an hour about two times per day. There is no schedule, so you just have to keep alert. It is an important time in the day, because that’s the time you turn on the faucet to fill up the water reservoir. Sometimes the water is cloudy and that is because there are high levels of chlorine added to it.

Although most homes are outfitted with modern systems for showers and flushing toilets, these technologies only work during the brief period of time when “el agua esta callendo” (translated as “the water is falling” ie. those few times when the water is actually flowing through the pipes. Consequently, “taking a shower” in the way we are accustomed, almost never happens. Instead, what you do is to take a “huacal” (ie. a plastic bowl) and dip it into the water reservoir and then pour it over yourself. The water is generally cool. Seeing as you are usually hot, this isn’t really a problem and you feel the water falling off of you warmer than you poured it on, until you cool off sufficiently. Nevertheless, the cool water is a bit jarring, regardless. The “shower” stall is outfitted with a drain and is adjacent to the domestic reservoir. Washing dishes and clothes takes place at the same location ie. the water reservoir. This is where the central concrete part with the drain factors in…There are no sinks in the kitchens that I saw. The dishes are carried from the table/kitchen to the water reservoir in a big plastic bowl. Then each dish is washed and rinsed by another huacal ie. dipping the bowl into the reservoir and pouring the water over the dishes to rinse them. There is dish soap like the type we use available, but the majority of people buy a dry cake in a plastic container and then dip the scrubby in the container, taking soap onto the scrubby. There is no hot water (unless you have a soft hearted sister in law who will warm up pot after pot of water on an open fire and then carry these pots of water to a very large bucket in the shower stall, so that your kids will be willing to bathe!).

Clothes are also washed by hand in the same concrete part in the middle of the reservoir. First you put the clothes in huge wash basins dry, sprinkle “rinso” (which is like our laundry soap) over the clothes, and then pour water over the clothes with the huacal. Then you let the clothes soak. You are surprised to see that the water gets quite filthy! Now, to actually wash the clothes, you take out each item, spread it out on the concrete middle part so that there aren’t a lot of folds, and make them initially wet by taking a huacal and dipping it in the reservoir and splashing the clothes with the water from the huacal. Once the clothing item is thoroughly wet, you take a cylindrical cake of laundry soap and rub it over the clothes. Then you scrub, rinse, scrub, rinse, scrub, rinse for a long time until the water rinsing off the clothes is clear and the clothes look clean (sometimes all the friction from all this scrubbing leads to holes in the fabric!) Then, you wring the clothing item dryish and hang it on the line to dry. When there is a lot of wash to do, there is some arranging and rearranging of the line necessary, as some clothes dry more quickly than others, or some parts of the line have more sun or shade. Jeans take the longest to dry, all the way through to the next day. When you take the clothes off of the line, you have to inspect them for tiny ants which may have fallen on the clothes from overhead trees! Those tiny ants really bite!

The smell of rain and the splatter of a few drops sends all the women scurrying to the line to remove the half dry clothes and bring them inside to dry on the backs of chairs etc. Then, of course, there is the folding and putting away…and by the time all of this is done–it’s the next day and time again to do more laundry!

Although my sister in law and my niece (a beautiful, talented and extremely helpful twelve year old) helped me several times with the laundry, by the end of the visit, I was receiving disapproving glances for hoarding clean clothes and re-using dirty ones!

So, with this context, I begin my musings on entering the USA and having access to hot water and coin laundry machines.

Well, I don’t need to tell you how quickly I was able to wash what would have taken me at least four hours of steady labour…just to get them wet and clean and hanging–not to include drying, organizing, folding or putting away time…Not to mention, that I wasn’t really “working” while the machine was doing the washing.

After “doing” the laundry, all washed and warm from the dryer, folded and put away…I went to enjoy a nice warm shower. I was feeling pretty comfortable and satisfied–so , I had time to watch some TV. And what was on the TV? A documentary about the challenges of shipping “HAZMAT” hazardous materials. Apparently, nuclear energy has some side effects ie. radioactive waste which has been being saved in huge pools in nuclear reactors since the 1950’s! Now, this waste is taking up so much space that it needs to be moved–all of it from all parts of the US will be shipped by trucks and trains to be buried in a mountain in Nevada (the Yucca Mountain Project). The magnitude of the risk is staggering…and it makes me think hard about the actual cost of all the energy consuming amenities that we’ve come to take for granted.

Actually, I am humbled by my Salvadorean family’s ability to make a decent, happy and clean life, without the huge consumption of energy that we’ve come to rely on.

Tamara