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.