So yesterday afternoon I pretty much spent all the time blogging, e-mailing and hanging out with the girls around here. Everyone has really interesting ideas and experiences so there’s always a good conversation to be had… usually at least one that is about something tough to talk about, but it feels good to think.
After dinner we watched a movie about globalization, mostly about NGO’s using cheap labor in foreign countries. The whole concept of the movie was that third world countries (it’s PC to say that here, or so they say) are now “racing to the bottom” in order to attract foreign investment. This includes very low wage standards and also very lenient environmental standards. It was so sad to hear about the ways that these countries were being destroyed, basically by capitalism that really only benefited the occupying NGO. It was so depressing to watch and think about the ways the richest countries are basically taking advantage of the poor country’s helplessness. It made me feel so lost. There are so many little things that I can do, but there’s so much that is such a larger issue that I feel I could never have any influence on. Some things would be so easy to change, just be being human and giving people basic human rights, but the big cat (it was literally an animated cat in the movie which was strange) would loose a few cents so won’t think of it. It’s like sitting and watching something and just letting it happen because I can’t do anything.
I’m hoping that we will talk about this feeling of helplessness a little bit later. So much of what we talk about and who we talk to is so encouraging and empowering, yet so many of the facts are also so disheartening that I feel discouraged and helpless. We also talked about this after we did the market survey and just realize how bad things really are. We all had really similar feelings about feeling helpless. It was good to talk about it and I started thinking about how you really just have to accept that you can’t completely change things, but that little “tryings” can have a little bit of difference. Even that is sometimes hard though. We’ve talked a lot about sweat shops and foreign made products. It’s almost impossible not to depend on imports from places where people are being treated inhumanely. It makes me feel guilty. Hopefully all these feelings will sort themselves out as we talk about it more.
Being here is making me think about being a teacher a lot more also. There’s so much that I’ve never learned about things going on in different countries, and I don’t mean to be a downer and only mean the terrible things, though there are plenty of them. There is also really great things going on everywhere that never really get talked about, especially when talking about a “poor, suffering, terrible” third world country. That was the other thing we talked about a lot… the fact that the superpowers and all their tourists exercise even more power by making these countries insufficient and in desperate need of our help to teach them how to be like us, because that is obviously better.
We read a poem about the idea of taking photographs as a sort of exercising of that power because it does the same “oh poor people” or “oh, happy Mexicans wearing bright clothing,” basically just stereotyping of cultures. I had never thought of taking a photograph as something that could mean so much, as so much of a responsibility. So many pictures that people take, myself included, are actually for such self centered purposes… a sort of look what an adventure this is, look how brave I am, look how I am “helping.” They just affirm that power differential and play into those stereotypes. When people take pictures they may be looking for something especially interesting of unusual, but I think a lot of the time, they have an idea of a picture in their head and are just waiting to find it. I am totally guilty and it really made me think about how I want to take pictures. This is not to say not to take them, but to make sure that they tell the whole story, whether through the diversity of images or an actual written or verbal story.
So, all that made me think about teaching and how that can be my little difference. I’ve been doing much too much thinking here and though it is confusing and depressing and tiring, it is also thrilling in some ways and exciting! I am thrilled with how the program really encourages us to do so, and pushes us.
So where did I really leave off? Right… the depressing movie.
So after that I was about ready for bed. My brain had enough and was ready to shut down. Then someone brought over the Sound of Music, which I had watched a bazillion times when I was little. I also talked to Chris for a bit, who had come back from climbing. He said we should be able to go climbing sometime soon, so I’m really excited for that. He also said that a few of the people that he goes climbing with are girls so wa hoo! I watched a little more of the movie and then was off to bed.
Today was an insanely busy day and my head is just filled with new knowledge and thoughts and experiences.
First thing after breakfast we had a meeting with all of the staff that work around the house. That’s one thing that is really nice, they encourage everyone to really get to know each other and integrate the cooks and cleaning women and administrative people and maintenance people and the door man (only on thurs, fri, sat nights) and the teachers into the whole community. The people who work here are amazing people with so much more than I realized going on outside. I think they purposefully hire people that are making differences in everything we study around here.
We broke off into small groups at one point to have a conversation with one of the staff members to get to know them better personally and ask them anything we wanted about them or the area or Mexico in general. I was in a group with a woman, whose name I don’t remember, who works in the kitchen. Religion and family were very very close to her heart, in ways both good and bad so she wanted to talk about that. She told us how more than 30 years ago she became very involved in the church and how she read the bible to give her and her children rights. At that time she and her children only ate beans and didn’t have any rights in the house while her husband would go out drinking to the cantina. She started demanding rights and money to support the family as well as getting more involved in base Christian communities for a liberalization of women’s roles. Her husband told her that she could choose him or the church. Her children saw her standing up for herself and for them and told her they would support her in all ways, with money and personal support. She chose to leave her husband, a radical move at the time! Now she works getting women’s rights in a base Christian community.
It helped me feel better about feeling helpless to hear about how much she had stood up for herself and for change.
After that we learned a little about how the school’s pedagogy and such. Then we were put into groups of 6 and sent off with 100 pesos and a shopping list to a market on the other side of downtown. It took us a while to get there walking, and we certainly got a little lost. I got to speak and ask for directions and things like that a little bit which was very exciting. The market was so crazy once we got there. There was so many different things going on and so many different people. They sell everything there, from shoes to dog food to spices to batteries to Jesus dolls. It was crazy. Our mission was to buy tomatoes, black beans and a newspaper and then to check the prices for tampons and a tube of toothpaste. It took a while to find what we needed, and a lot of walking by a lot of rare meet and chicken feet and everything you could imagine, those were just the most memorable. Every few feet there was a new smell, smells that were sweet and made me thirsty, smells of chamomile that reminded me of tea on the Inca trail, smells of meat, and dog food, and newspapers, and new sneakers. It was so strange and so overwhelming to have all of my senses constantly registering new things.
It was quite an experience, with quite a purpose. We were given 100 pesos, which is about ten dollars. We bought a kilo of tomatoes and a ½ a kilo of black beans for 8 pesos (about 80 cents) each and then a newspaper for 10 pesos (about a dollar). Everything seems really cheap huh? That’s what we thought and was the whole point in having us do this exercise. The minimum wage (but only half the population works in the formal economic system where it even applies) is about 47.6 pesos A DAY.. which is about 6 pesos or 60 cents an hour. So we calculated how many hours someone would have to work for each item. For tomatoes or beans it was 1.3 hours, for the paper, 1.6 hours, for tampons, 4.5 hours, for toothpaste, 2.5 hours. Then we figured out what the US price would be is a minimum wage worker in the US had to work the same amount of hours for the item. The cost of tomatoes was $8.18/ kilo as well as for ½ kilo of beans. The paper cost $10.21. The tampons $27.86, the toothpaste $15.38! It was certainly a rude awakening to how insubstantial the minimum wage is, leaving people desperate for anything they need to sustain themselves. It makes the need to immigrate just to be able to live seem much more pressing.
All of the groups had the same sort of assignment with different items. The craziest was diapers, which cost 54.90 pesos (5.50) for a package. That is about 9.5 hours of work, and the equivalent of 53.80 in the US were a minimum wage worker there to work as much as one here would have to in order to buy them.
I’m just in complete shock about all of this… just puts things in perspective for sure! Be careful when you say something is cheap… .
So, that was the long exhaustttting day. We had a good dinner and talked about all of the exciting places around here where we want to go. There’s so much to do and even though I know that I have a lot of time left, I feel like it can’t possibly be enough already!
I’m sitting here watching a movie with little Kevin. He’s actually five. He has so much energy. It’s 9 o’clock and he’s out swinging. The other night when I went out I came back at 1:30 and he was up watching a movie with Fransisco, the night guard for weekends. I don’t know how he does it…
Well, hope everyone is keeping warm up there. It sounds like it’s been a bit chilly. I’ve been thinking of everyone! Sorry these are so long, I hope everyone is finding at least parts of them interesting. It’s been a good way to unpack everything I’ve done and stop and think about it because there’s usually not time of energy when it’s first happening. There’s just so much going on! Hopefully they will get a little shorter as time goes on because there’s no way I can spend this much time writing each day… there’s too much to do. A viscious, but fabulous circle….
Buenos Noches!
After dinner we watched a movie about globalization, mostly about NGO’s using cheap labor in foreign countries. The whole concept of the movie was that third world countries (it’s PC to say that here, or so they say) are now “racing to the bottom” in order to attract foreign investment. This includes very low wage standards and also very lenient environmental standards. It was so sad to hear about the ways that these countries were being destroyed, basically by capitalism that really only benefited the occupying NGO. It was so depressing to watch and think about the ways the richest countries are basically taking advantage of the poor country’s helplessness. It made me feel so lost. There are so many little things that I can do, but there’s so much that is such a larger issue that I feel I could never have any influence on. Some things would be so easy to change, just be being human and giving people basic human rights, but the big cat (it was literally an animated cat in the movie which was strange) would loose a few cents so won’t think of it. It’s like sitting and watching something and just letting it happen because I can’t do anything.
I’m hoping that we will talk about this feeling of helplessness a little bit later. So much of what we talk about and who we talk to is so encouraging and empowering, yet so many of the facts are also so disheartening that I feel discouraged and helpless. We also talked about this after we did the market survey and just realize how bad things really are. We all had really similar feelings about feeling helpless. It was good to talk about it and I started thinking about how you really just have to accept that you can’t completely change things, but that little “tryings” can have a little bit of difference. Even that is sometimes hard though. We’ve talked a lot about sweat shops and foreign made products. It’s almost impossible not to depend on imports from places where people are being treated inhumanely. It makes me feel guilty. Hopefully all these feelings will sort themselves out as we talk about it more.
Being here is making me think about being a teacher a lot more also. There’s so much that I’ve never learned about things going on in different countries, and I don’t mean to be a downer and only mean the terrible things, though there are plenty of them. There is also really great things going on everywhere that never really get talked about, especially when talking about a “poor, suffering, terrible” third world country. That was the other thing we talked about a lot… the fact that the superpowers and all their tourists exercise even more power by making these countries insufficient and in desperate need of our help to teach them how to be like us, because that is obviously better.
We read a poem about the idea of taking photographs as a sort of exercising of that power because it does the same “oh poor people” or “oh, happy Mexicans wearing bright clothing,” basically just stereotyping of cultures. I had never thought of taking a photograph as something that could mean so much, as so much of a responsibility. So many pictures that people take, myself included, are actually for such self centered purposes… a sort of look what an adventure this is, look how brave I am, look how I am “helping.” They just affirm that power differential and play into those stereotypes. When people take pictures they may be looking for something especially interesting of unusual, but I think a lot of the time, they have an idea of a picture in their head and are just waiting to find it. I am totally guilty and it really made me think about how I want to take pictures. This is not to say not to take them, but to make sure that they tell the whole story, whether through the diversity of images or an actual written or verbal story.
So, all that made me think about teaching and how that can be my little difference. I’ve been doing much too much thinking here and though it is confusing and depressing and tiring, it is also thrilling in some ways and exciting! I am thrilled with how the program really encourages us to do so, and pushes us.
So where did I really leave off? Right… the depressing movie.
So after that I was about ready for bed. My brain had enough and was ready to shut down. Then someone brought over the Sound of Music, which I had watched a bazillion times when I was little. I also talked to Chris for a bit, who had come back from climbing. He said we should be able to go climbing sometime soon, so I’m really excited for that. He also said that a few of the people that he goes climbing with are girls so wa hoo! I watched a little more of the movie and then was off to bed.
Today was an insanely busy day and my head is just filled with new knowledge and thoughts and experiences.
First thing after breakfast we had a meeting with all of the staff that work around the house. That’s one thing that is really nice, they encourage everyone to really get to know each other and integrate the cooks and cleaning women and administrative people and maintenance people and the door man (only on thurs, fri, sat nights) and the teachers into the whole community. The people who work here are amazing people with so much more than I realized going on outside. I think they purposefully hire people that are making differences in everything we study around here.
We broke off into small groups at one point to have a conversation with one of the staff members to get to know them better personally and ask them anything we wanted about them or the area or Mexico in general. I was in a group with a woman, whose name I don’t remember, who works in the kitchen. Religion and family were very very close to her heart, in ways both good and bad so she wanted to talk about that. She told us how more than 30 years ago she became very involved in the church and how she read the bible to give her and her children rights. At that time she and her children only ate beans and didn’t have any rights in the house while her husband would go out drinking to the cantina. She started demanding rights and money to support the family as well as getting more involved in base Christian communities for a liberalization of women’s roles. Her husband told her that she could choose him or the church. Her children saw her standing up for herself and for them and told her they would support her in all ways, with money and personal support. She chose to leave her husband, a radical move at the time! Now she works getting women’s rights in a base Christian community.
It helped me feel better about feeling helpless to hear about how much she had stood up for herself and for change.
After that we learned a little about how the school’s pedagogy and such. Then we were put into groups of 6 and sent off with 100 pesos and a shopping list to a market on the other side of downtown. It took us a while to get there walking, and we certainly got a little lost. I got to speak and ask for directions and things like that a little bit which was very exciting. The market was so crazy once we got there. There was so many different things going on and so many different people. They sell everything there, from shoes to dog food to spices to batteries to Jesus dolls. It was crazy. Our mission was to buy tomatoes, black beans and a newspaper and then to check the prices for tampons and a tube of toothpaste. It took a while to find what we needed, and a lot of walking by a lot of rare meet and chicken feet and everything you could imagine, those were just the most memorable. Every few feet there was a new smell, smells that were sweet and made me thirsty, smells of chamomile that reminded me of tea on the Inca trail, smells of meat, and dog food, and newspapers, and new sneakers. It was so strange and so overwhelming to have all of my senses constantly registering new things.
It was quite an experience, with quite a purpose. We were given 100 pesos, which is about ten dollars. We bought a kilo of tomatoes and a ½ a kilo of black beans for 8 pesos (about 80 cents) each and then a newspaper for 10 pesos (about a dollar). Everything seems really cheap huh? That’s what we thought and was the whole point in having us do this exercise. The minimum wage (but only half the population works in the formal economic system where it even applies) is about 47.6 pesos A DAY.. which is about 6 pesos or 60 cents an hour. So we calculated how many hours someone would have to work for each item. For tomatoes or beans it was 1.3 hours, for the paper, 1.6 hours, for tampons, 4.5 hours, for toothpaste, 2.5 hours. Then we figured out what the US price would be is a minimum wage worker in the US had to work the same amount of hours for the item. The cost of tomatoes was $8.18/ kilo as well as for ½ kilo of beans. The paper cost $10.21. The tampons $27.86, the toothpaste $15.38! It was certainly a rude awakening to how insubstantial the minimum wage is, leaving people desperate for anything they need to sustain themselves. It makes the need to immigrate just to be able to live seem much more pressing.
All of the groups had the same sort of assignment with different items. The craziest was diapers, which cost 54.90 pesos (5.50) for a package. That is about 9.5 hours of work, and the equivalent of 53.80 in the US were a minimum wage worker there to work as much as one here would have to in order to buy them.
I’m just in complete shock about all of this… just puts things in perspective for sure! Be careful when you say something is cheap… .
So, that was the long exhaustttting day. We had a good dinner and talked about all of the exciting places around here where we want to go. There’s so much to do and even though I know that I have a lot of time left, I feel like it can’t possibly be enough already!
I’m sitting here watching a movie with little Kevin. He’s actually five. He has so much energy. It’s 9 o’clock and he’s out swinging. The other night when I went out I came back at 1:30 and he was up watching a movie with Fransisco, the night guard for weekends. I don’t know how he does it…
Well, hope everyone is keeping warm up there. It sounds like it’s been a bit chilly. I’ve been thinking of everyone! Sorry these are so long, I hope everyone is finding at least parts of them interesting. It’s been a good way to unpack everything I’ve done and stop and think about it because there’s usually not time of energy when it’s first happening. There’s just so much going on! Hopefully they will get a little shorter as time goes on because there’s no way I can spend this much time writing each day… there’s too much to do. A viscious, but fabulous circle….
Buenos Noches!
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