Nourish Goes to Mexico

So, we have all safely departed from El Gusano, but our blog is lacking some serious entries. I’ll try to update as best I can by sharing a couple of my journal entries from while we were in Mexico.

5.24.2008

So, I have two host sisters. One is 15 years old and finished Secundaria, but decided she didn’t want to go to high school –“There’s no need,” she said. Today I was talking to my other sister, who is 17, for a while about what she wants to do when she graduates from Bachillerato. She had mentioned before that she wants to enroll in CONAFE -- a program that would train her to become a teacher for two years and then guarantees a scholarship to attend college afterward. AWESOME! As far as I know, we’ve only heard about one person from this community who went to college – it would be SWEET if she got to go, right?

Well, today her plans have changed. She’s now planning to come to the US to “visit” some relatives live there.

Unlike the other people in our group, I’ve really never had any kind of meaningful relationship or interaction with an immigrant living in the US besides people that I see or speak to in passing. I’ve heard the facts, the numbers, the economic causes and effects. But, to hear my sister say that she planned to make THAT trip in such a matter of fact way was really stunning way of being introduced to a more human side of immigration—as opposed to plain facts.

5.28.2008

Today we went to the Bachillerato to help with a few different classes. Both the Secundaria and Bachillerato are in the neighboring ranch – El Capulin. It’s about a 20 – 30 minute walk from El Gusano, but some of the students that attend school there come from MUCH farther away.

In the morning, Dustin and I got there first to help with a math class – but for the most part, we spent more time figure out exactly what was going on. Somehow, solving for one variable with three variable equations turned into an hour and fifteen minute long mess of numbers and criss-cross multiplying that took much longer than it should have.

After math, the kids had a break before their next class, and most of the girls went outside to play basketball. A bit later, the rest of our group came to work with an English class. Since it was my first time at the high school, I was kind of nervous about working with kids so close to my own age -- but I actually enjoyed it a lot more than I had expected. I worked with two girls who were both 17, and they both reminded me of some of my friends from home so that made it a bit easier. The teacher had asked us to work on conversational, functional English, so we spent a while talking and going over basic things like “What is your name?” “How old are you?” “Where do you live?”… Ultimately, we ended up talking in Spanish – about what they want to do after Bachillerato, what they want to study, where they want to live, and so on. I told them about what I study, why I’m studying, where I live, etc. And we had a pretty awesome exchange of experiences and ideas.

I think the most enlightening part of this trip to the Bachillerato, though, happened when we started talking with some of the other girls that had been working with Josh. We talked about immigration and its effects on the communities there, and more specifically, on their families, because every student there has some relative who lives in or has lived and worked in the US. So, this is when I was reminded of why I was nervous about working with teenagers: they ask some pretty challenging questions. One girl whose relative had lived in the US said she had been told that black people in the US hate Mexicans. “Why don’t they like Mexicans?” she asked. Well, that’s a hard enough question to address in English – but I tried to do it justice with a response in Spanish, stumbling over my words but explaining that when two groups of people share a common socioeconomic status and are sometimes competing the same jobs, some ill feelings might arise. At the same time, I tried to make it clear that what she explained was a generalization, and there are a lot of misunderstandings and misinterpretations concerning the immigrant population in the US – but, Black people don’t hate Mexicans.

More to come! Gotta read through the rest of my super awesome journal and find some more stuff to put up.