"More Than Tourists" Goes On the Road

This week we will be loading our camper onto our pickup truck and leaving our home in Papagayos to head north through San Luis Potosí, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Yukon Territory, and finally Alaska. We've been hired to work on an RV tour of Alaska this summer. Our job will include bringing up the rear of the caravan and assisting with a number of tasks.

We'll be looking for ways to have meaningful contact with whomever we meet along our path. We hope to apply some of the lessons we've learned here in Mexico to help us be more than tourists wherever we travel.

We'll keep you posted.

Swine Flu in Papagayos, Mexico

First of all we want to let folks know that we are well and there are no known cases of swine flu in Papagayos at this time. Now I'd like to tell a little more about how folks here are reacting to the health warnings.

On Sunday April 26, 2009 we went for a picnic in the next valley with our good friends Simón and Rosa. The day was bright and breezy and we enjoyed a spread of good food under the shade of a Huastecan Fresno tree, then a walk along a stream bed to the site of a waterfall. We were unaware of a pandemic. All was well with the world. It was great to be alive and sharing time with friends.

After our picnic and walk we headed into Ciudad del Maíz to do a few errands and a little visiting before heading back to the village. In the stores and on the streets we saw a few people wearing masks over their noses and mouths. We asked one shop keeper about the masks after a masked customer left the store. He said there was some kind of disease going around.

We headed to the Ortegas' house to do our visiting. Jazmín was sitting in the shade outside the kitchen. She stood up to greet us with the traditional handshake and kiss on the right cheek. After the usual exchange of pleasantries she asked if Chuy was going to school the next day. As far as we knew there would be classes the next day. She reported that she didn't have to go to school until May 6th. That all the schools were closed because of the swine flu. She also explained that some people were wearing tapabocas to prevent the spread of the disease. We made a point of washing our hands well with soap and water before asking for a drink of water and going to check in with Jazmín's elderly grandparents.

The next day we checked online about the swine flu epidemic. We found the websites of the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control to be especially useful to us. Now we are checking them twice daily for updates.

In the afternoon on Monday our teenaged friend René stopped by to visit. Instead of a handshake he had settled on linking crooked elbows as a suitable form of greeting that was more sanitary. It was a little funny, maybe a little too physically close, but a great conversation starter about the influenza and health precautions. But then he leaned over our lunch that was heating on the stove and asked what was cooking. Steve pointed out that he could be more thoughtful about health precautions around food.

That evening we walked over to Simón and Rosa's house. On the way we saw another friend. The automatic handshaking ritual froze in mid-air. He said what with the flu and all, maybe it would be better not to shake hands and we agreed. Clearly we need to find a friendly, healthy alternative to this national custom.

At Simón and Rosa's we were greeted by traditional firm handshakes with everyone there. We were offered chairs and then food, but no chance to wash our hands first. We ate anyway. We'd come to find out if they had heard if the meeting planned for next weekend had been canceled or not because of the flu epidemic. Simón is in charge of a group of folks in our state learning to make and use herbal microdoses for healing. A large meeting was planned for as many as forty people to gather here from all parts of Mexico. Simón said he was waiting for the call. If someone didn't call him by tomorrow he would initiate the idea of postponing the meeting until after the flu passes. That seemed like a good idea to us.

Last night, Wednesday, Hector and Chayo came to our house for a little visit. I think they smelled the chocolate chip cookies that were baking in the oven. We offered them coffee and cookies which they were glad to accept. While the water heated for the instant coffee we also offered them anti-bacterial alcohol gel to clean their hands. Hector held out his open palm to receive a squirt of hand sanitizer and explained that he had washed his hands many times during the day and had just showered so his hands were probably pretty clean. I know they had just passed through the barb wire fence near their pig pen to get to our place. I guessed that another cleaning wouldn't hurt.

Our conversation centered around the flu news reports and rumors, the numbers of sick people and deaths and questions about which states in Mexico were already affected. We shook hands when we said goodnight, then went to wash one more time before brushing our teeth and heading to bed.

I was awake in the middle of the night with my mind full of unanswerable questions. We have planned for months to travel to the U.S. at the end of May. Steve had questioned if maybe we shouldn't be prepared to leave sooner than that, possibly on short notice, if there was a warning of imminent border closings, for example. My mind was a tempest. Should we leave Papagayos as soon as possible? Or should we wait and leave on our planned departure date?

After tossing over and over for an hour I finally woke Steve to talk about it. We came to a compromise decision. We will prepare now so we could be ready to leave on short notice. These preparations are all work we would be doing in the next few weeks anyway. If we stay until our original departure date we can get all the gardening done and leave the house and yard in great shape. If we have to go early, Hector and Chayo will help harvest the garden and water the new plantings for us.

The other main decision we made is to keep in close touch with our grown children, our family and all of our friends both near and far.

Our true security still comes from our broad network of close relationships. At the deepest levels, all is well.

Belief In Cures

Chayo came over to visit on Saturday. She was worried about her young adult nephew who lives in the north. He has had headaches for a month and has not been able to work because of the pain. The young man's mother, Chayo's sister, had called to see if information about a cure could be found here in the village. This was a last resort for them following doctor visits and expensive prescriptions that did no good. If they could concoct a cure at home that would be great. If not they were thinking of coming back to the village so he could be treated by a healer in the village.

The healer that was consulted is doña Luisa. After a phone conversation a cure was suggested of bathing his head in a tea made from romero. By the time this information was passed back north Chayo's nephew had been scheduled for an MRI to rule out a tumor in the brain. Chayo believes it is best to follow every possible option to find a cure.

This conversation led to her telling us about other cures she has seen work. When she was a teenager the girls of the family had to carry water long distances to fill the needs of the family. She and her sister had made a trip to a pond with the large water buckets and were headed back home when her sister had an "attack." The girl fell on the ground and Chayo thought she was dying. After a few minutes she came back around and they went on home. In the next few weeks more attacks followed and the family sought a cure. The recommendation was to drink the blood from a male deer while it was still hot. This proved impossible, so blood was dried and later made into a tea. After drinking this concoction, Chayo reported, her sister was cured.

Chayo also knew another girl who had taken ill because she was afraid of dying after the untimely death of a friend. A curandera was called in and touched the girl in a certain way on her head and made washing motions in the air around her. Soon she found relief and was able to live fully afterward without fear.

With belief, with thoughtful hands and prayers, Chayo said, cures can be found for illnesses that pills and doctors can't remedy. (Here is where you read the disclaimer - don't try this at home without supervision, etc. This is the intercultural acceptance part of the story. People here believe in cures more than in doctors. People in the US believe in doctors more than cures. In your own life you get to choose a satisfying combination according to your beliefs.)

The Curandero

A few weeks ago I was riding our horse when he stumbled and pitched to his knees. I was thrown off sideways and landed on some rocks with the horse laying across my legs. I've healed for the most part - the cut on my elbow is now just a series of small scabs and the pain in my shoulder and ankle is hardly noticeable. For the first several days after my fall, I was walking really twisted as my left hip was out of joint. But after about a week of applying ice packs and ointments, I had thought I was better. I was walking straight again, and my hip no longer hurt. But perhaps I made a mistake by thinking I had healed enough to begin using the mattock and shovel and wheelbarrow to continue an earth-moving project I had going in our back yard.

When I started walking crooked again, Chayo suggested that our neighbor don Pancho could help me. Don Pancho is a curandero. Our dictionary translates the word as "quack," but the people here in Papagayos use the term with respect. It refers to a healer, one who may not possess a medical degree but nonetheless has a natural gift for curing others.

I went over to don Pancho's place and he agreed to see what he could do. Don Pancho is an elderly man with eyeglasses and long dark hair flowing from his ears. He explained in Spanish and mime that he would massage my hip. He led me across the yard and into the part of the house his family uses for sleeping. He pointed to the bed in the corner and I understood that would be the "massage table." I crossed the room, but before I could lay down, a very indignant chicken rose up from the pillows and squawked and fluttered her way across the room and out the door.

Hanging on the wall above the bed was a large and worn photograph of a much younger don Pancho dressed in the fanciest get-up you can imagine. As he liberally applied Vick's Vapor Rub and kneaded my muscles, I asked him about the photo. Yes, he had once sung and played guitar in a mariachi band in Mexico City. But his fingers hadn't touched a guitar for many years. I suggested that his fingers probably remembered. He wasn't quite so sure about that, and anyway his interests had changed. Music was no longer his passion. And besides, his beautiful mariachi suit had been eaten by the mice.

When he finished the massage, he rubbed on a tonic from a large Pepsi bottle. It was the color of Pepsi, but he assured me that it contained alcohol and a number of herbs and that he had concocted it himself. He said I should come back in a couple days for another treatment. Meanwhile, I should not shovel any more dirt; I needed some more recovery time.

As we opened the door and exited the bedroom, the very indignant chicken squawked and re-entered, ready to reclaim her spot on the bed. She had been waiting impatiently for us to finish so she, unlike me, could get back to work.

Easter Week in Papagayos

The week leading up to Easter is called Semana Santa. Here in Papagayos, it's a time for visiting and for families to gather. It's a time for picnics. We went with Chayo and Hector and about twenty of their relatives on a picnic on Thursday. We crowded into three pickup trucks and drove several miles down pasture lanes and through cattle gates to a place in our valley that Laurel and I hadn't seen before. We sat on the edge of a large pond surrounded by shade trees. In spite of the fact we had brought enough food to feed forty people, Hector repeatedly threw his net and hauled in small fish to be cleaned and deep fried there over a campfire.

A tradition we imported with us from our culture is watching the sunrise on Easter. Laurel and I got up early and took lawn chairs out to the yard. Facing the hills to the east, we sat and sang a couple Easter hymns. As we waited for the sun to clear the horizon, we watched a flock of about thirty garzas fly in from the north. These long-legged, long-necked herons wheeled above us. For ten minutes or so they were a mass of two opposing spirals as some chose clockwise and some counter-clockwise in their dizzy circling. As we looked upward, each garza was a profile without detail, a silhouette appearing dark gray to us against the brightness of the imminent sunrise. One by one they dropped out of formation and spiraled lower to land in the full lavender bloom of a jacaranda tree. As we watched each bird dip below the eastern ridge against a backdrop of dark green foliage, we saw each silhouette burst into a feathery collage of detail and change instantly from gray to bright white.

Our six-year-old neighbor Gabriela reminded us about a week ago that she remembered our annual tradition of hiding candy and colored eggs. Mid-morning on Easter, we went over to Gabriela's house and told her that yes, the Easter Bunny had come and had left colored eggs outside in our yard and candies in our house. She and her younger cousin and brother came over and searched and found the treasures. The Easter Bunny isn't accustomed to traveling to Mexico, but for us and our neighborhood children, he'll make the trip.

What a State We're In!

The republic of Mexico, officially titled Estados Unidos Mexicanos (the United Mexican States), consists of 31 states as well as a federal district with the nation's capital Mexico City.

We live in the state of San Luis Potosí. It is named after our state capital, a town that was founded in 1592 as San Luis in honor of King Louis IX, the only French monarch to be made a saint. When silver was soon discovered nearby, the name Potosí was added, in reference to the rich silver mines of Potosí, Bolivia.

Roughly just north of the geographical center of Mexico, our state is ranked 15th in size and 16th in population. In a nation of 31 states, it's hard to be more average than that.

But for budding geographers who like to pore over political maps, there are a couple of special, not-so-average things about our state. One is that it holds the distinction of bordering more states than any other in Mexico. In the USA, it's Missouri and Tennessee that hold the record for each bordering eight other states, but San Luis Potosí is the winner by touching nine neighbors. (Padre Salvador, one of the priests in Ciudad del Maíz, was in an expansive mood recently and sang us a song about San Luis Potosí and its ten neighbors, but the lyrics included a state that is only nearby and doesn't actually share a border. So we're sticking with nine as the official count.)

The other geographical oddity that makes San Luis Potosí famous is its shape. There's no denying the state outline looks like a Scottish Terrier. With its oversize ears pointing north and its furry nose headed toward the west, the state just about jumps off the map and onto your lap. (Incidentally, here in Papagayos we're on the doggie's back. Think of our location as a flea.)

So my brother Warren was recently making friends with a stranger in Virginia. When he found out the stranger was Mexican, Warren casually mentioned that he has a brother (that's me) living in Mexico. "Oh, in what state?" the stranger asked. Warren couldn't remember the name San Luis Potosí, but he did remember enough to describe it. "Well, on the map it looks like a Scottie Dog."

"I'm from San Luis Potosí too!" the stranger exclaimed. "That's my state!"

Playing God and Creating Soil

Gardening has always been a key part of my life and sometimes it makes me feel like God. So far I have had twelve different gardens; all but three of them I started, literally, from the weedy ground up.

In 1999 while living in Guilford, Vermont and gardening a patch that had been gardened for at least 40 years, our rototiller broke permanently. I was tired of the noisy gas-guzzler and ready to take a new route to gardening. A trip to the public library rewarded me with a copy of John Jeavons' book "How to Grow More Vegetables and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine." He is the director of the GROW BIOINTENSIVE Mini-Farming program for Ecology Action. (See our link at the bottom of this blog.) My gardening life has never been the same since.

There are many parts to his ideas about gardening that excite me. One of them is the idea that you can actively grow soil. Not just use it or prevent it from eroding, but build on what you have. Help Mother Nature to nurture you. I liked the idea.

Since that year I have been growing compost crops. For example, I grow grains that can be harvested for the cereal, of course, but grown mostly to build compost piles to later feed back to the soil. My crop rotation now includes about 60% of the garden area for compost crops.

As I see it, I'm growing feed for my livestock - the microorganisms in the soil who do all the real work around here to cook up food for my vegetable plants. When my cattle are happy, I'm happy.

So, I've been playing God lately. Perhaps it would be fairer to say I've been imitating Mother Nature. I have been creating soil.

Of course, each of us has to start right where we are with what we have. In my case, this land came with a deep fertile fine-textured clay soil. This is a good soil to start from, but it means that water does not drain well. We had standing water in our first garden bed during rainy season and all the plants drowned. When it is wet we can't walk two steps without getting huge clumps of mud collected under foot. When it is dry the ground is hard as a brick, literally. And it has a dense covering of crabgrass - a plant that wants to become the king of the plant kingdom by rooting at every node and with the ability to grow six feet a week in rainy season. My hands ache from trying to keep it pulled from around the garden edges.

My goal is to grow soil that is ideal for pampered vegetable and grain crops planted in the limited area of our greenhouse and intensive garden beds. I want soil that is easy for me to work and weed. (In my past I've gardened in natural sandy loam soils and hardly knew what a treasure I had in terms of soil texture and tilth!) Here I want to develop a soil that tender baby roots can penetrate and make good contact with to find all the water, nutrients, air, and warmth that they need to grow without restrictions.

So, while playing God, I stripped the crabgrass, roots and all, off the garden beds, surrounding walkways, and from the soil under the greenhouse. I loosened all the topsoil that I could from the roots and saved it for my soil concocting. Using a wire mesh screen with one centimeter openings, I sifted rocks out of many cubic yards of river sand. I spent hours under the oaks trees in the local forest stealing their supply of leaf mold and soil to bring back to my mixing area. When I didn't have compost ready to add, I raked up dry manure from our neighbor's horse corral to contribute the organic matter needed in the mix for my garden.

With all the ingredients ready I measured carefully by the shovelful equal parts of topsoil, sand, leaf mold, and organic matter and put it all in the wheelbarrow. This was my mixing bowl and I used a trusty hoe instead of a big wooden spoon to thoroughly blend the combination. Adding rainwater from the barrel waiting under our eaves, I gave it enough moisture to change the colors dark and the smell to a rich forest flavor. Not so much water that it dripped and oozed, but just enough to settle the dust and bring it all together into a loose dough.

While I played God, Steve was hard at work, too. With a garden fork he opened the clay as deep as the tines would go, working in a cross hatch pattern so it was all as loose as possible. He added more sifted sand, letting it flow around the fork and down to form drainage paths for the water and roots to follow.

Then I wheeled the soil-feast into the greenhouse or to the garden bed. One shovelful at a time I filled the raised beds with my approximation of sandy loam soil. Then raked it level and watered it in to place.

In a few years I hope to grow the best soil possible. So, last of all I invited all the magical microscopic life to come live here, to make these raw ingredients into real soil.

It is clear that I'm not God yet, but I know I'm helping Mother Nature by creating a seed bed ready for planting.

Bursting with Life

In our corner of Mexico the weather is lovely in February and March. We have blue skies and sunshine with tee-shirt-wearing temperatures during the day and it's cool enough to rest well at night. Perfect. Having no rain for weeks means that watering the garden is a daily joy.

Last week the clouds, coming inland from the Gulf of Mexico, started to bunch up around the east side of the Gran Sierra. The view got hazy. I started to notice the humidity of the air I breathed during my morning walks.

Wednesday evening there was a fine mist in the breeze. It felt like rain, but we didn't even get a brief shower. In the morning Chuy told me he had dreamed of a beautiful rain that watered his father's recently planted corn and beans fields. All the farmers in the village must have shared his hopes for a good soaking rain. We waited under a solid cloud cover.

As Steve finished doing the dinner dishes that evening we heard the swish of the storm's approach. Then the first tapping on the sheet metal roof began. Soon the gutters collected a steady fine stream of water to drop into the rain barrel.

We got a glorious, slow rain timed so the soil could drink up every drop. Friday morning the hill sides were puffing and sighing with satisfaction. A maze of cloud shreds still draped the folds and twirled over the high ridge tops. The sun, peeking out for the first time in several days, spotlighted the newly unfurled lime colored leaves on the white oaks putting them in sharp contrast with the tender ruddy-brown of the red oaks' new growth on the slopes above the village. All of them were bursting with new life. Perfect.

Some Thoughts on Immigration

A friend forwarded an e-mail to us recently. She had received an opinion piece about Mexican immigration in the United States and wanted to know what we thought. As I read it over, it struck me that it wasn't so much the content of the piece that bothered me, but the tone of the writing that made me sad. It was mean-spirited.

I have a lot of trouble with the term "illegal alien." I think of an alien as a creature from outer space, not another human being who happened to be born on the other side of an artificial line called a border. And while an action might be illegal, I can't accept the notion that a person can be illegal. To my thinking, laws should be made to protect and serve people. If a law classifies whole groups of people as illegal, if the law strips people of their dignity and human rights, perhaps there is something wrong with the law and not with the people. (For a more in-depth look at border issues, use the link at the bottom of our blog for Border Network for Human Rights.)

To me, the whole idea of national boundaries is questionable. Throughout history, land has been claimed by whoever was most powerful and richest at the time. Laws are passed, soldiers are mustered, people are killed - all so that someone can claim the right to resources and deny those resources to others less fortunate. Much of the land that we call the United States of America has been taken away from the people who happened to be living on it when richer, more powerful strangers arrived and claimed it. This includes much of the land now called Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, which used to be part of Mexico until the first half of the nineteenth century.

For a variety of reasons, most of our neighbors here in Mexico are poor. Almost every family in Papagayos includes someone who is working in the United States, either legally or illegally. These families depend in part on the income that can be sent home from the workers who have gone north to find jobs. As a US citizen, I can't justify denying these workers jobs just because my ancestors arrived in the United States first. Even the first "native people" who crossed the ice bridge from Asia onto this continent were immigrants. And every immigrant since then, including each of my ancestors, has either been welcomed or despised. For my part, I choose to welcome others rather than turn them away.

To me it's ironic that the essay our friend sent us ends with the phrase "In God We Trust." I can't imagine that God wants us to draw boundary lines across this beautiful earth, to build fences and pass laws to keep others out. As I understand the will of God, it is that we should treat our fellow humans as our brothers and sisters, to consider them to be children of God just as we are, and to share our resources with them. The Biblical injunction to love our neighbors as ourselves means to me that we should welcome all kinds of refugees (including economic refugees) into our land and into our lives.

My nation, the United States of America, was built in part upon might and greed, land grabs and slavery. But my nation was also founded upon ideals of liberty and justice. I try to remember those ideals and let them inspire me to show compassion and fairness.

Under the Palapa

In the heat of the afternoon I sat with Chayo under their palapa (a circular, palm thatched, open air sitting room.) There was a slight breeze. We were cool and comfortable sitting in plastic patio chairs listening to the dry palm leaves rattling in the wind. Just breathing was enough. It felt good to be alive.

Every few minutes one of us would think of a comment. A slow conversation, kind of lazy, that was not in any kind of hurry.

"That hen had fourteen chicks, but now only four are left, " she said as she scooped a little ball of fluff into her hand. She stroked its head a moment to calm it before setting it back on the dirt near its mother.

"It's Elsa's birthday today," was my comment as I watched the household across the street preparing for a party. Then my eyes shifted to the clouds building around the Grand Sierra mountain in the distance beyond the house. I sighed with pleasure.

"The weather is changing. The clouds will bring cold. Tonight or tomorrow," Chayo informed me. She is always teaching me the basics, like how to forecast the weather, from her wealth of life experience.

Next, my eye swept the inside of the palapa. Wedged above the beam and below the palm roofing were a dozen books. Chayo followed my gaze.

"There are a lot of books."

"Have you read them all?" I queried.

"All the ones outside the box."

"And the ones inside?"

"I haven't taken the time, yet. I'd rather do my sewing."

We took the box down from the place where it has been gathering dust.

The box of books was from the Mexican government. Inside there were readers about adult health issues and self care; there were related workbooks with questions and blank lines for short answers; there was an atlas of the human body with maps of the nerves, blood vessels, bones and muscles; and also a guide to first aid.

Chayo is in an adult literacy program. She has been slowly adding to the education she got in her two years of schooling as a child. Now she gets the boxes of books and a visit once in a while from a tutor. But reading and writing is hard work for her.

I read and write for fun. I have a pile of books I can't wait to get to read. Ideas for writing are always stewing in the back of my mind. A day doesn't go by when I don't pull a gardening reference, cookbook, or dictionary off the shelf. The next carpentry project will be a bookshelf to contain the tomes that are now stacking up on top of the ones already in the existing shelves of our house. There will be a section of children's books, too, set low and within reach of our young friends. In our village books are a luxury. In our house they are everywhere.

We thumbed through each of the books in her collection. There were lots of colorful pictures, large print, and open space on each page. They looked like second or third grade readers to me. To my friend, they looked impossible.

Maybe I can sit with her, under the palapa, and together we will read.