a week of learning

this week i´ve definitely come in touch with my feminine side. i had an assignment for one of classes to learn a traditional craft, and the only one i figured i could learn at this point was embroidery. all the women here embroider napkins, which are usually used to wrap tortillas in. thankfully, when i showed up back at the house on monday, Beatriz was sitting there making a napkin, and, in fact, all the women in the rancho have been making napkins this week. they told me it´s the napkin making season, because they just harvested, and they´re not planting yet, so there´s nothing else to do. so i learned to embroider with them. really it wasn´t that hard after i got the hang of it. maybe some day i´ll try more difficult designs. though i did try to learn, i knew i would not be able to crochet (is that how you spell that word?) the border around the edge, and Martina was nice enough to do it for me. i watched her as she did it, but i did not understand at all what she was doing.

another day this week, i helped lola wash the dishes from breakfast. this wasn´t that strange, since i´ve of course washed many dishes before, but the way they wash dishes in the ranchos is a little different than our American standards. we washed outside on the cement step by emily´s room, with about four different buckets. there was a bucket with soap, a bucket with the dirty dishes, and then two rinsing buckets. all of this involved cold water, of course. she washed and then i rinsed, then i put them in a big bucket which we later carried into the kitchen to put away. the really dirty dishes with food stuck on them they clean with dirt. lola did this with one of them that had milk burnt onto it. she took the sponge, then reached down to the ground and got some dirt on it, then scrubbed the dish. then she washed it. kind of interesting.

after washing dishes, emily and i went with lola to the river to learn to wash clothes in the river. i´ve washed clothes by hand before, but washing in the river is a little different, because you´re kneeling down over a flat rock sitting on the edge of the river. of course, the river isn´t very big, and they stopped it up a little downstream so that there´s sort of a pool that they wash in. this makes sure all the soap sits in the water where you´re washing, which i´m not sure is what they´re really going for, but it gives them water to wash with. emily and i also carried the clothes to the river and back on our heads, a Mexican custom with anything heavy, apparently. it´s one thing to have that much weight on your head, but how they balance an open bucket full of water on their heads while they´re walking i´ll never know.

so, really, participating in these activities doesn´t bother me, nor make me feel like i am less of a man. but in Mexican culture, these are strictly activities for women. the men never go to the river to wash clothes, and i´ve only heard of one that knows how to embroider, though i´m sure he doesn´t. it´s been a week of learning.

long time...

Dear blog readers (that is, if there is anyone still left that considers themselves readers of this blog),
I realize I have not written on this blog for approximately a month and half, a fact that Emily reminds me of almost every weekend. We now have only one week left in the ranchos, and so with Emily’s motivation (or her trying to deny that her blog is mine) I’ve decided to write something brief about the past month and a half.

During this time, Emily and I have painted two houses. As explained before, the government has given houses to a number of people in the ranchos, and we’ve become involved in the painting of a few of them. Our student, Efigenia, asked us to paint the front of her house without knowing even if we could paint, not to mention paint well or not. Thankfully, we did know how to paint, and I had already helped someone here paint before that. We painted stars on her house.
Last week, Efigenia’s sister, Verna, asked us to paint the front of her house, too. When we asked her what she wanted on it, she said stars, or maybe a chicken. We offered the idea of painting a sun, a moon, and a star. They laughed quite a bit at the idea of painting a sun on the house. Needless to say, we did not paint a chicken on the house; we ended up painting flowers.

At the end of October, Emily and I had the opportunity to be godparents of the two babies in our host family. Jovani (eight months old) and Alina (six months old) were baptized in the Catholic Church. I don’t really understand the concept of godparents, but Emily and I were asked to be them. We weren’t the real godparents, which are called the godparents of the baptism, but rather we were the godparents of the medallions. This meant that we bought small medallions of the Virgin on necklaces for each child. It was a lot of fun. I felt really good to have established that sort of relationship with the family. When we were there at the church and later at the party at the house, we really felt like family members. Sometimes, I felt like more of a member of the family than the extended family. Since that time, we have built an even closer relationship with the family, I think, and there is much more trust and a more relaxed feeling between us. I feel that we’ve moved beyond most of the feelings and attitudes that constitute a host/visitor relationship and have arrived at a more familial relationship.

My research has progressed quite a bit. A couple weeks ago, I went to the municipal offices here in Irapuato and found the engineer that is in charge of the rural water systems in the municipality and thus in charge of the water system in Santa Rosa. He was very nice and willing to share with me, and I got some good information from him. The next day, I found him and members of the water committee from the villages and the engineer from the state government in Santa Rosa. They were there with a group of engineers from a private company whom the state had hired to do a complete diagnostic test on the well and the entire water system, even down to the charges to the users. I got contact information for the engineer from the state (supposedly the state government is who installed the well and water system originally), and I’m going to meet with him today, November 26th. I hope to get the last bit of information from him that I need to have a good picture of the installation and beginning of the water system, and I also hope to be able to get a copy of the report they had this company do. I have a feeling that it wouldn’t be a problem at all for me to get a copy, because the municipal engineer willingly gave me a copy of sounding they had a company do on the well a couple months ago.
For those of you who are completely lost and don’t really know what it is I’m researching, I’m studying the piped water system that exists between three of the four villages (‘ranchos’) where we teach literacy students. The system has been in place for about six years. The majority of my research is to find out as much as I can about the past, present, and future of the water system, but I am also (in one way or another) studying how this piped water system has effected the people and communities it serves in a development aspect. My original assumptions were, of course, that a piped water system constitutes a higher stage of development, but I wanted to know how it’s really done from the people’s perspective, figuring that there are necessarily other consequences that a piped water system brings to front that may or may not qualify the community as being further developed.

And now, a word from our sponsors (a.k.a. Emily):

Hello, Matt’s blog. Have you been feeling rejected? Neglected by weeks without a new entry? If these feelings sound familiar, I invite you to come on down to Emily’s blog (www.lavidaranchera.blogspot.com), and check out the latest goings on in the ranchos. Don’t be deceived by the name; it’s just as much about Matt as it is about Emily, since they’re temporarily joined at the hip for this Latin American extravaganza.

At Emily’s blog, we know how to take care of our readers. Entries are guaranteed weekly by Monday at noon. Pictures included with at least 90% frequency. And these aren’t just empty promises: if you notice that we’ve violated one of our guarantees, notify management via a blog comment, and we’ll send you a free gift certificate for some unidentified and useless thing. Speaking of blog comments, please feel free and encouraged to share your thoughts with the rest of the Emily’s blog readership by posting your comments. Don’t procrastinate or delay. Just hop online and post those comments today. Watch your world expand as you come into cyber-contact with a spectrum of readers. Just remember to identify yourself, and share a little something about how you got onto Emily’s blog (this information helps us let other potential readers know what they’re missing out on by not visiting Emily’s blog. It may also be sold to large telemarketing agencies who will crush your soul with their soliciting, but try not the think about that).

So remember, when you feel left out in the cold by scarce blog entries, when you just want somewhere dependable to turn to, give Emily’s blog a try. Our blog is your blog.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled program:

Last week, I went with Martin, the dad of our host family, to ‘cuidar’. This is nearly a daily activity that involves taking the cows out of the corral behind the house and out to the grazing land outside of town, watching them all day, and then bringing them back in the afternoon. I wanted to learn how to ‘cuidar’, so I had asked Martin to take me. I actually didn’t end up spending the whole day out with the cows because Martin sent me back with his son and the donkey to make sure the huge stack of firewood didn’t fall off the donkey. We had ended up taking the neighbor’s cows and goats as well. It was a very interesting experience. Though you do have to make sure every now and then that the goats don’t go off in another direction or that the calf doesn’t get left behind, these animals know where they are supposed to go and where they are supposed to come back to. Martin told me that starting around Christmas, and I think lasting until it rains again, about in April or May, they let the animals go and graze on their own. They’ll take them out part way in the morning, just outside of town, then they’ll go out further on their own, graze all day, and then come back in the afternoon/evening. It’s quite amazing.
Making sure no cows or goats get left behind and that they are going the right way apparently involves shouting at them with some unintelligible grunting noise, hitting them with a stick, or throwing rocks at them. You can hit the cows with fairly large rocks and it doesn’t seem to harm them at all—it’s just like hitting a thick piece of leather, but it does get them to move. Martin also would throw pretty large rocks at the goats, but usually from a distance, like when they started moving ahead without the cows. He normally wouldn’t hit the goats, but just get near them, and with about three throws like that and yelling at them they’d move back.
It was pretty fun to ‘cuidar’. I learned that the cows and goats still obeyed me even though I wasn’t their owner. Once I got down the yelling and throwing rocks part, I could move a whole herd of goats. (Martin took care of the cows most of the time I was with him that day.)

Well, that’s a quick run down of a very few of the things I’ve been up to in the past month and a half or so. This will be our last week in the ranchos, then on Monday, December second, we’ll all travel to Guadalajara, where Brandon will catch his flight home and the other three of us will go to stay at Angela’s parents’ timeshare on the beach in Puerto Vallarta for a few days.

There’ll probably be another entry next weekend.

the dream

This is an amazing ´62 Beetle, in amazing condition, that I found at a used car dealership in Irapuato. The car is amazing. The radio is original, and they told me the motor is as well. It was great to sit in the car and dream about driving it down the streets of Provo. The people at the dealership were going to give it to me for 7500 dollars. But the tires are shot, so I´m not sure if it´s worth it. Anyways, it was a nice dream.

Some catching up

Hi everyone. I know it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here; I apologize. It’s hard to find time in the city to write something and then take the time to post it.
Anyways, things here in Mexico are still going well. We’re working on preparing some of our students to take a test sometime the second week of November. The way the program works that we teach with is that a student will get different ‘modulos’, or sort of sections, that come with their own books, and then to pass off that ‘modulo’, they have to finish the work in the book and take a test on it. So, a few of our students are going to be ready, so we’re working on making sure they are. There aren’t going to be any BYU students here come winter semester, which means there won’t be any one here until May to continue teaching our students.

It’s really exciting getting to know the Mexican culture here. On my mission, I never really got the chance to be as involved in the culture as I am here. Here are a few pictures from the past few weeks to show what I’ve been up to:

One day I went to visit Rosendo and Josefina, a couple I met my first day in the ranchos, and Josefina was making cheese. She gets the milk from her daughter, Ana, whose family has goats, then Josefina makes the cheese for her and Ana goes to sell it in the city (Irapuato). I thought it was really fun to watch Josefina form the cheese into these sort of disk-like shapes, then place them on this suspended board to dry a little. The disk hanging on the top of the rope is to keep the rats from getting at the cheese.

Here is Emily painting. (Hopefully she doesn’t mind me putting her picture here. She takes plenty of pictures of me and puts them on her blog, so I figure I’m safe.) A couple weeks ago, Emily and I went to paint the ceiling on Nacha’s new house. Nacha is one of our students that we teach. It was kind of difficult to paint since it the ceiling is made of cement (like the rest of the house) and it was kind of just thrown on like stucco. But it was fun to help anyways.

This is Daniel working on his new house. Daniel is Martin and Martina’s son-in-law. (I’m staying in Martin and Martina’s house. Daniel lives there, too.) I’ve helped Daniel a little bit when he’s been working on their house. Mostly, I just pass him tools he needs or mix cement for him. There are these little houses going up all over the villages. They are from the government, from a program called DIF (Desarrollo Integral de la Familia, or Integral Development of the Family, in English). The DIF gives all the materials for free to people who have houses made out of rocks and who signed up, then the people have to put forth the labor, which could be by themselves or if they have enough money they can hire someone to build it. All the houses have to be made with the same floor plan, so they all look the same. The DIF also gives paint with the other materials, but so far everyone I’ve seen has gotten the same colors (pink and crème), and they are required at least to put the pink on the front of the house. I think it’s in about two weeks that the DIF is coming to inaugurate all the houses, so then I’ll have some pictures of how some of the houses look.

The other day, while Emily and I were teaching Ramona, her grandson (I can’t remember his name) was kind of bothering Ramona and not letting her study. So I went and picked up some kid’s history book that was lying there and was showing the pictures to this little boy so Emily could teach and Ramona could learn. Somehow, without me knowing it at all, Emily took two pictures of me while she was teaching. She’s really good at sneaking pictures without people noticing. Anyways, this little boy is like two, maybe. It was a lot of fun; I’d point to things in the pictures and tell him what they were called, then when we came across them in other pictures, I’d ask him where that object was and he’d point to it. Or I’d point to the object and ask him what it was and he would remember the name and tell me. It was amazing. (The girl in the picture is another granddaughter that showed up just when Emily took the picture.)

This is the first scorpion I found in my room. This was actually like a month ago or more. The scorpions here are really small, and from what we’ve been told their sting doesn’t do much, it just hurts for a little bit, but then goes away. This picture is right before I killed it.

This is just to show those of you who know me well how much Mexico has changed me: yes, I’m wearing flip-flops and jeans. Crazy! I actually don’t wear flip-flops too much, but jeans are definitely a daily part of the ensemble.

dia de independencia

i know this entry is late, but last saturday night, the 15th, the four of us went to the Mexican independence day festivities downtown with the young single adults from our stake from the Church. it was a lot of fun, and way exciting. it was packed. there were tons of food vendors and people selling noise maker toys that were colored with the colors of the Mexican flag: red, white, and green, and there were also people selling some spray foam in cans. after a while, everyone gathered in the plaza near ´la presidencia´, which is the capital building, where supposedly at midnight the president of Irapuato was supposed to come out and do the ´grito´. the grito consisted of him yelling ¡viva miguel hidalgo! and then everyone else yelling ¡viva!, and then him yelling the same for some other person in Mexican history and the crowd doing the same. then at the end, he yells ¡viva Mexico! and everyone yells ¡viva!. it was hard to hear the president at all, so we just kept yelling ¡viva! with everyone else. it was a lot of fun.

so while we´re all waiting in this crowd for like two hours for the grito, people would start shooting off this canned foam, and once one person started, everyone in the crowd started, and so we all got foamed, then it would dry off pretty quick. it was like snow covering everyone.

the four of us gringos left right after the grito, and as we were making our way through the crowd we came to a big opening right in front of the church on the other side of the plaza. we thought it was strange that no one was standing there. then, before we knew it, fireworks and firecrackers exploded off the front of the church. there were no barriers or anything, someone people just knew not to stand there, everyone except for the four gringos there. there were huge fireworks shooting out of the top of the bell tower of this church and exploding right over us. it was crazy, but way exciting. finally, we gave up watching them and went back to the hotel.

here are some pictures from the festivities:

first, the four gringos: from left to right, emily, angela, matt, brandon. we were trying to show off our faces that are painted with colors of the Mexican flag. second is angela and matt after being foamed, then brandon and emily after being foamed. the last one is just a picture of the crowd and all the flags and things people had. good times.

some pics...finally

hey everyone,

well, i´ve made it through my first full week at the ranchos. everything´s going well still. we started teaching our students this week, though a lot of them weren´t there when we showed up. it´s understandable, since they have other things they have to do, you know?

the internet at the hotel hasn´t been working for the past week, so i´m not going to write a lot right now here at the internet cafe. but i wanted to post a few pictures of rancho life.

this first one is how i had to get in my room all last week: through the window. it´s a long story, but it ends up the key got lost to the door, emily had one made, but it only fit the inside, so we had to climb in the window to get in the room. thankfully one of the window´s doesn´t have glass in it.

the next few pictures are of my room. my bed sinks in the middle like a bowl. the first night brandon and i were both sleeping in the bed, and we ended up pretty much on top of each other. since then he´s at another house in another rancho. i ended up taking off one of the mattresses so that it´s not so curved.

later, there´s a picture of my room from the outside. it´s just that door in the middle and the window to the left of it.

next is a picture of nopales, which are cactus. we eat them fairly often (the green part). they cut off the needles, cut up the nopal, and cook them. also, the red parts on top are called tunas. they´re a fruit that you eat also. you cut of the outside, like you peel them, then eat the inside. there´s lots of seeds, though, which is kind of annoying.

lastly, there´s a picture of El Encino, one of the ranchos, from up on a hill called La Santa Cruz (there´s a cross on the top of the hill). it´s really pretty out here. the stars are amazing. last night it was a clear night of stars, then on the horizon almost all around there was lighting. it was pretty cool.

bienvenido a mexico

Well, I got to Mexico on Saturday. My trip was good, except for waiting for the girl from our program that I was supposed to meet in the airport in Mexico City, who I ended up waiting for for two hours, then finally found out that she had the flu and had changed her flight to Monday. Then two hours later I was able to get to the bus station to take the four hour bus ride to Irapuato. I ended up getting in a little after 1:00 in the morning. Thankfully, Angela, the girl I was supposed to meet, came in yesterday without any problems.
Now all four of us are here. We're having a great time together, laughing a lot and enjoying being here. Today we're finally going out to the villages for the first time to meet our host families and our students. Our job this week is to find out who is still going to be a student and if any of them need to take tests. Then we'll be back here in the city sometime Friday night, probably to leave at 2:00 am on Saturday to take a trip to Guadalajara to attend the temple there with other members of the Church from here in Irapuato.
Good news: the hotel we're staying at here in the city has wireless internet. The other three people I'm with all brought their computers. It appears that I'm the only one that was too scared to bring mine. Oh well. Thankfully they're letting me use their computers.
Being here in Mexico reminds me a whole lot of my mission in Venezuela. A lot of things are similar. And so I keep saying that such and such is just like in Venezuela, or it's a little different than things in Venezuela. No one has complained yet that I'm getting too nostalgic, though it's kind of getting on my nerves that I keep recalling my mission. Not that that's bad at all, but I'm not a missionary here and I want to enjoy Mexico for Mexico, not for being like Venezuela. Does that make sense?