Beyond Evanston

Update: grateful wallet-owner dropped by gift. Thank you wallet owner!

It's 6:30 am, I haven't slept, I'm leaving for Michocoan (state west of Mexico City) at around 9 in the morning. I think.

I decided not to go to Acapulco, and I am rather pleased with myself. Instead I'm going by myself to two colonial cities in Michocoan to look at old churches and lakes and handicrafts and just generally feel superior for not being at the beach.

Tonight I'm staying in Patzcuaro, Sunday night in Morelia. Here are some links, I am too tired to remember how to link these in html. http://www.semarnat.gob.mx/regiones/patzcuaro/index.shtml, http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morelia

I am also hoping that this weekend will be something of a retreat. I need - well, not a break exactly - I need a weekend of reflection. I need to let my brain get worn out enough again to be able to hear God. I need to be without television, the internet or other English speakers.

Ah, OK, so tonight: both my NU roommates had left for Acapulco, so I went home and passed out at 8:00 pm, but then woke up at 10:30 and was persuaded to go out with my two Texas A&M roommates, my new Canadian roommate, and ten other Texans. Whooo. Uneventual except for the ride home (relatively early - it's 6:56 and the Texans still haven't returned). A friend of my roommates gave us a ride, along with his best friend who was completely passed out drunk in the backseat. He had to be propped up with the arm rest so that my roommate could sit on the other side. I was sitting in the driver's seat and the driver was telling me how he met this guy in prison when they were both 12 - "and he was that night just like he is now - that's why I am almost like crying when I'm telling you this!" "Beto - Beto, wake up man, there are ladies!" [To my roommate in the backseat as passed out guy collapses again onto her lap] "I'm sorry, I'm sorry - are you OK? You can just pet him if you want - he's very how you say? Very docile."

Very tired. Going to sleep now.

This one goes out to James Kath:
Today during Spanish class we learned about how to express conjecture and supposition, like “I wonder… I suppose… what could be…” To demonstrate, our teacher brought in a sealed cardboard box and had us guess what was inside, using the future and conditional tenses and all that. So everybody was like, “Cuantos pesará?” [how much does it weigh?] “Será muerte?” [Is it dead?] Then in a flash of inspiration I raised my hand and asked, “Será el gato de Schroedinger?” And then I spent five minutes trying to explain Schroedinger’s cat and relativity, in Spanish, to a room full of totally unimpressed premeds and my Spanish teacher. It’s my feeling that these concepts should be more widely known.

Several tidbits:

Wednesday: roommates & I went out with Marilu (the guide/friend of my roommates and I) for coffee and lots of instruction in Mexican/US slang.

Thursday afternoon: went with friend in search of photography exhibit in the city square. Failed to find it but ended up at another weird art thing, listened to the communists/Lopez Obrador (the losing presidential candidate who wants all the votes recounted) supporters in the square. Felt very chic and urban.

Thursday night: went out with Marilu, some of her friends and the roommates. Went to club. Dancing, people singing along to band in Spanish. One of Marilu's friends asked us if we were "springbreakers" and then told us about all his adventures in Cancun. Guess what: not all Americans in Mexico are "springbreakers".

Saturday afternoon: went out in search of a certain coffeeshop/bookstore. Got horribly lost, por supuesto. Witnessed a mugging.
Rather: as I was walking a guy ran past me super fast and my first thought was "I bet he stole something" and then my second & third thoughts were full of self-recrimination for jumping to conclusions. Then half a block later I found a wallet with its contents scattered all over the ground, and a day-planner covered with mud. A street vendor wandered over too and helped me collect the various credit cards (only $2 cash left - the guy must have dumped it and left). I asked the street vendor to use my cellphone to call some of the numbers in the day-planner, but none worked, so I just took the wallet to the coffeeshop with me and stared at it for a while. Read some Aztec mourning poems, felt sad (this was for class.) (reading, not feeling sad.) When I got home I asked Adrian (my host dad) to call for me. He got in touch with the guy's secretary, and he came by later to pick it up. (Didn't get to meet him though.) He is grateful and supposedly was going to drop off a "surprise" for me but didn't.

This weekend for one reason or another I took eight different taxis. I am awesome! Taxis here are cheap and supposedly horribly unsafe. They are also a great opportunity to practice Spanish. Summaries of two conversations, vague translations in brackets []:

Taxi driver 1 (listening to us speak English) (slow, halting): How are you today?
Me: Fine, thank you!
TD1: [I worked in Idaho for a while, on a work visa.]
Me: [Ah! How nice!]
[pleasantries]
TD1: [You know, the United States is not like here.]
Me: [It's another world]
TD1: [Yes, it is like another world. For example, you have to follow the rules - the police are very strict.]
Me: [Not like here] (general Laughter) [They are very...] "corrupt" [also]!
TD1: [Yes, ha ha, very corrupt! Yes, in the United States, the police make you follow the rules. It is very different.]
Me: [Wait, where are we?]
Roommate 1: I think... I think we missed our street.
Me: Shoot. [I think... the street... the street is not here.]
TD1: [What?]
Me: [We passed the street. Jose Moran.]
TD1: [Oh, we will turn around.]
Various comical encounters with one-way streets, culminating in our taxi driver driving an entire city block in reverse, totally failing to observe the spirit of the (one-way-street) law.
TD1: [You see, things are very different in Mexico!]
Me: [Yes, you definitely cannot do that in the United States.]
TD1: [Ha ha, yes!]
We are dropped off several blocks from our home. We tip him but not much. We walk.

OK this post is getting long. Here is the mega-summarized version of convo number 2:
TD2: [asks where we are from, upon hearing Chicago digresses into long story about his Catholic boyhood education, in which one of the nuns knew someone who was from Chicago]
Me: [polite inquiries as to current situation, leading to]: [Do you like taxi driving?]
TD2: [It's ok, but it is very tiring, and dangerous. Mexico City is very dangerous you know!]
Me: [Cleverly retell story of mugging nearly witnessed]
TD2: [Tells his own tale of robbery.] [The city is full of thieves!] We pass poster of Lopez Obrador. [Like that one!]
Me: [Ha, ha, did you just say you think Lopez Obrador is a thief?]
TD2: [Yes, they are all the same, I think, all politicians all over the world.]
Me: [In the United States it is the same!] [Brief discussion of US politics encompassing Jeb Bush and Barack Obama]

Summarizing is convenient because I can omit how totally retarded I sound when I speak Spanish, and how many times I break my flow by saying "like" in English.

Truthfully that all sounds very exciting but I am feeling incredibly lame right now, sitting at home waiting for my roommates to return from playing pool, because I did not go because I am extremely lame to the max. Also, my roommates and everyone whom I like in the program are going to Acapulco this weekend and I again am not going for reasons that change from day to day. I keep telling myself that I need a break from being with other Americans, but maybe I am just being superuber lame. My plans for the weekend include: climbing a mountain, going to mass at the cathedral. Maybe I will paint a picture or learn to cross-stitch in preparation for my sojourn at the convalesence home.

Madeline and I on the steps of the MAS clinic, in the little village of Tlapa where we spent four days last weekend. (Madeline would be the former professional figure skater. Seriously.)

We left for Tlapa early Thursday morning. The drive was six hours, hot and bumpy and up and around mountains. Dude: mountains.

Things about mountains: being able to see the shadows of clouds. Cities, spread messily in valleys, crawling up the sides of hills, with the houses looking poorer and more unfinished as you go up. Little shops built beside the road - only there's not enough room, so they extend the roadside with a concrete foundation supported in the front by the edge of the road, and supported in the back by extremely shady-looking concrete supports.

We stayed in a "half-star" hotel which was actually quite nice except for the fact that nothing in our room (curtains, toilet, sink) worked. But hey, TV! Friday morning we were driven through the bumpy, dirty streets of Tlapa to a clinic (where the pic was taken), and promptly told to come back the next day, so we went to visit a school instead, where I personally made 20 children cry.

More on that: our service project (one of the reasons we were in Tlapa, in addition to just seeing what life was like outside of Mexico City) was to check on the nutritional status of some of the children seen by the clinic. So we measured height, weight and blood iron levels. On Friday I was part of the blood-drawing team: six of us in lab coats and rubber gloves, taking blood samples from 85 extremely scared, non-English-speaking kids. Worse: we had no idea what we were doing, and there weren't enough extra supplies for us to practice on each other. The two med students from the Universidad Panamericana explained the procedure (swipe the finger clean, jab, fill capillary tube with blood, comfort child) and we got started, in teams of two (which turned into teams of 3 or 4 as the kids got progressively more freaked out and harder to handle.)

Imagine: the room filled with screaming children, being held by their mothers; us prying open clenched figures and praying under our breaths that they'd stay still long enough so we'd only have to jab once in order to get enough for the sample ; everyone speaking in broken Spanish. Top five phrases used:

1. No llores! [don't cry!]
2. No te va a pasar nada. [nothing's going to happen to you.] (this one was a good one for the kids who were dragged in by their mothers screaming "They're going to cut me!")
3. Está bien, está bien. [it's ok, it's ok.]
4. Es muy rápido. [it's very fast.]
5. Te duele un poquitito. [it's going to hurt a very, very little bit.]

It was a little traumatic (more for the kids than for us, but for us too.) I kept wondering whether I would want to do this for a living. Actually I felt pretty good about how the morning went considering the circumstances: I like panic, mayhem. I function better when everyone around me is freaking out. (I think) As in, when everyone's gloves are covered with blood and the room is filled with shrieks and we're all looking at each other stunned like, how did it all come to this?

It's this feeling that makes me wonder if I shouldn't be a doctor. Shouldn't I be a little more horrified that I am in this place, a gringa doctor with no experience, forced into this situation where I CAN'T provide the best possible care? Am I getting some kind of vicarious thrill from the panic when I should be horrified that the situation even has to be this way? After a weekend of chasing thoughts like this around in my head I got tired. My brain needs a nap.

Normally, I use other like-minded people's brains as extensions of my own, which keeps me from getting caught in the hamster wheel of myself. Even in Uganda, most of my processing was done with the help of e-mails from home, with online chats with my advisor, eventually with long car-ride discussions with my host dad. Here I haven't found a similar network of brains to use. I haven't been nearly as home-connected as I was in Uganda, partly because I need to less - it's less overwhelming, less lonely, less foreign - and partly because I don't have time. So I tend to get stuck and stop processing things at all and start to go rotten inside, like an egg.

Buuuut this happens at home too. I need to learn tricks and disciplines to help get things moving again I guess. Like mental laxatives.

I am sorry for that horrifying image.

Original Sin

Well, anyhow, it preserves us from the pride
of thinking we invented sin ourselves
by our originality, that famous modern power.
In fact, we have it from the beginning
of the world by the errors of being born,
being young, being old, causing pain
to ourselves, to others, to the world, to God
by ignorance, by knowledge, by intention,
by accident. Something is bad the matter
here, informing us of itself, handing down
its old instruction. We know it
when we see it, don't we? Innocence
would never recognize it. We need it
too, for without it we would not know
forgiveness, goodness, gratitude,
that fund of grace by which alone we live.

Wendell Berry

Oh yeah, comments are now enabled, you have to click the little pound symbol at the end of the entry, I'm really not sure how it all works.

Whoa, Blogger is in Spanish. Right now I'm creando una entrada. Anyway. A brief tale: every Mon, Tue and Wed morning from 9-12 I go to the Instituto Nacionál de las Sciencas Médicas y Nutricion to work on my research project. This involves a long, long bus-train-extravangaza into the south of the city (I leave about 7:30.) Monday was my first attempt making it alone, which went well until I got off the subway and caught a bus, which dropped me off somewhere I'd never seen before. So I went up to a woman and asked her where the Institute was, and she turned out to be going there too and asked if I wanted to come with, so I said sure and she hailed a taxi and we were there in two minutes. My first random stranger encounter: very pleasant.

Then I went up to the lab. The doctor I'm working with most directly had clinical duties that morning so I followed him to a little conference room where he and about five interns discussed all the patients in that ward, in very rapid Spanish, for about three hours. I felt like a total idiot: my Spanish was especially bad because I hadn't spoken much that weekend (spent much of it hanging with my roommates, and even the church we found was English-speaking). So the doctor asked me what year of medical school I was in and I was like, "Uh... no soy... I am not in medical school." So then he was like, oh that's why you don't know anything (well I imagine he was like that) and he benignly ignored me for the rest of the morning.

There was a brief, exciting emergency: as we were sitting around a nurse came in and said "something something something!" and all six doctors (and me trailing behind) got up and ran down the hall. Whoa! Exciting! One of the patients was kind of freaking out. He was a huge, bald, tattooed* man with a long cut down his chest - I found out later that they'd just removed a lung tumor.

*I didn't get close enough to confirm this, but I'm pretty sure his knuckles were tattooed with R O C K.

He was trying to get out of bed and saying "Por favor! Por favor! Me voy a morir! [I'm going to die!] No quiero matar! [I don't want to kill!*]" All the doctors were gathered around the bed, saying Tranquilate [calm down] and trying to figure out what his problem was. He kept begging for oxygen, which makes sense because he had a lung tumor, but didn't make sense because the whole time he had an oxygen mask strapped to his face. At one point one of the doctors detached the tube from the mask to see if he'd even notice (he didn't); the escaping oxygen plumed in the air like the exhaust of a truck.

**at which point I was like, whoa, de acuerdo dude.

So, they took some blood and then we all left and we went back to discussing acronyms that I did not understand.

In other news, yesterday night I hemmed my pants and ate stewed cactus fruit (not good.)

OK, so Mexico City is awesome, but Mexico City also bites. It’s hard to be away from home, friends, church and have to make/not make friends with 30 new students (and those are just the people from Northwestern.) It’s easy to feel lonely, even though I’m so much less alone than I was in Uganda – I mean, there’s a friendly English speaker sleeping four feet away from me. (Of course she might not appreciate it if I woke her up.) (BadumCRASH – ok that didn’t really deserve a rimshot.) In Uganda, I would look forward to talking with other Americans all week, at least until I made deeper friendships with likeminded Ugandans. Here, I’m surrounded by them, and I still have the awkward, lost feeling of New Student Week as a freshman. I don’t know where I fit in, and I don’t like being at the don’t-know-where-I-fit-in stage at this point in my life. Doesn’t it end at some point?

So I'm in Mexico City. What? Yeah, I know, I only update when I'm out of the US. I don't know why. Part of it is that Roz & I don't have internet in the apartment anymore, part of it is that my life in the US is boring.

Similarities & differences between Mexico City & Uganda for your reading pleasure:

Can’t drink the water from the tap U&MC

1 mile above sea level MC

Election going on at time of my arrival U&MC

Same president for 20+ years U

Will never elect a president for more than one term MC

Spanish-speaking MC

People calling out to you on the streets U>MC

People walking between cars selling things U&MC

Performance artists walking between cars juggling/pretending to eat broken glass MC

Upper-class, good-looking, terrible-American-music-listening youth U&MC

Terrible music listened to: “Thong Song” by Sisqo (sp?) U

“Hey Mickey” by some 1980s band MC

Cheap public transportation U&MC

Cheap public transportation on which you can watch a pirated DVD of the movie Cars MC

Cereals made in Mexico by American companies such as Special K or Zucaritas (frosted flakes): M

Cereals made in Kenya by companies with names closely imitating American companies (like Proctor & Randall for example): U

People named Emmanuel U&MC

Other Americans MC>>>U

Mexicans MC>>>U

Ugandans U>>>MC