A Tale of Two Cultures
We've now been in Mexico for 8 months. In some ways it doesn't seem possible, as time has been going so quickly. But the longer we stay down here, the more we miss some of the comforts of home. Paved roads. Regular mail. Internet in our home. Not having to take a picture of signs so that Google Translate can help me decipher what they say. So many things that we took for granted back in the states. So I figured I would let this blog post share some of the cultural differences we have experienced here.
In the back of my mind I knew that Mexico wasn't going to be quite as "advanced" as the United States. But I honestly didn't think it was going to be quite like this. Maybe I thought that just being neighbors with the United States would somehow have helped them climb out of 3rd world status. (After all, Mexico is within easy driving distance for much of the country.) But that just isn't the case. Have I mentioned in any of my other blog posts that almost all of the roads here are dirt? The main road running north and south through Baja is paved, fortunately, but in our town I can only think of about 2-3 other streets that are partially paved. And most of the streets don't have actual street names. If I had to guess, I would guess that only about 5-10% of the streets here have names. Google maps has been my friend whenever it comes to trying to find someplace new, but it is not perfect by far! Mexican addresses are typically given by using landmarks. "Turn west at the gas station, take the 2nd right after that and the building you want is on the left with the happy face spray painted on it." (Those are fictional directions to an unknown store that I just made up right now, but that is a pretty decent example of something I would hear.) Since so many directions are given using landmarks, you are in for trouble if someone decides to repaint a building using a different color! Most of the time the dirt roads aren't too bad, but when it rains...oh my! The soil here has a lot of clay in it so where once there were roads, rivers and lakes appear because the soil can't absorb water very quickly and it turns into a muddy, muddy mess. When it dries, the roads are left with so many bumps and holes that it would ruin a small car. We are so thankful for our all wheel drive suburban and its higher clearance! God knew we were going to need something better than our 15 passenger van to drive around on these roads! As much as I hated selling our van before we moved down here, it was definitely for the best! Our area had enough rain this past winter to pull out of an 8 year drought! While the rain was definitely welcomed by all, the roads were definitely a mess for several weeks! Many roads are not even driveable following a rainstorm and people are forced to either stay at home or walk on foot to get anywhere until the road dries out. And it can take a full week for some roads to become passable again. The rainy season seems to have come to an end, however, and the main road have been grated and smoothed out again. The other roads will remain very rough unless the people who live on them decide to fill in holes on their own.
With so few streets that are actually given names, you may wonder how mail is delivered around here. Well, the short story is that it isn't. Most people don't receive mail on a regular basis, if ever. The orphanage here does have an actual address and can receive mail, but mail here is very sporadic...not an everyday thing. I am not even sure there is a post office in our town. Since it is difficult to mail things here, it is set up so that Mexicans can pay most of their bills at grocery/convenience stores. You can pay your phone, internet, and TV bills at any Oxxo (the Mexican version of a 7eleven) and most other grocery stores. Most of the Americans/Canadians that serve at the orphanage have their mail shipped to the San Clemente, CA office and it then gets shuttled down here whenever someone from up there makes the drive down. However, even that takes time to get to us. I guess they used to have a person who regularly brought deliveries to our orphanage from that office, but that was discontinued a bit before we arrived down here. Now it is at the mercy of whatever staff goes up and how much room they have in their vehicle to bring stuff back down. Some packages get here relatively quickly, other times it can sit in the San Clemente office for several weeks. And outgoing mail...if you want to mail something back to the states your best option is to talk to several people around the mission here and ask if anyone is going up to the states soon. Once you find someone, you kindly ask them to take your outgoing mail with them to drop off at a post office somewhere in the states. So yeah, it is a special day when we get mail down here!
For the first 7 months, we did not have internet to call our own. When we first arrived, we were told that the local internet provider was not supplying any more lines to the mission complex. There are a few places around here we could go for internet, but leaving our home and sitting around somewhere else is not always convenient when we have several kids in tow. A neighboring duplex has internet and we could sometimes pick that signal up, but it is not what we would call reliable. At best we would have 1 or 2 bars of wifi. Browsing websites online here in that manner reminded me of dial up internet in regards to the speed. Everything is painstakingly slow to load. We picked up a wifi extender over Christmas break to put in the neighboring duplex and that had proven to be somewhat helpful in increasing our signal strength, but sometimes we will have full bars from the network, but the internet itself would not always be working. My husband got very good at making dinosaurs jump (for those of you who are familiar with internet issues while using Chrome, you will know what I mean.) We were recently told that the internet provider down here was allowing some new lines at our complex and so we jumped at the opportunity to have our own wifi. I personally went to the Telnor office to inquire about whether or not we could get internet and I was told it was possible. It took over a month (and several more trips to the office to try and figure out what was going on) for our internet service to be activated, but we finally have internet in our own duplex. It is nice to be able to stream music and load web pages with more ease, although it is still slower and less reliable than what we had in the States. This whole experience has made us appreciate even the worst of service back in the States. We Americans have a tendency to complain about technology when it isn't working as well as we would like, not realizing that others don't even have that technology available to them. I am learning to be grateful for many things that I have taken for granted back home!
This past week we have been able to see some additional cultural differences that aren't as easy to joke about or make light of. Our school is on Spring Break this week and next, so we are trying to take advantage of this time to experience other parts of FFHM's ministry here, beyond just the children's home. Earlier this week we went to the new daycare center in San Quintin. About 6 months ago, FFHM was able to start a new daycare program about 30 minutes south of our town. In a miraculous story, the large building was built by the Mexican government for this purpose, but FFHM was asked if they would be willing to take this "free" building and run a daycare out of it. It now provides a safe place for over 100 kids to be during the day. You see, the parents of those kids are out working in the fields all day long and still only making about $8 a day. The life of a day laborer is hard, and they can't afford much when it comes to providing for a family (even though the cost of living down here is quite a bit less, it's not THAT much less!) Kids are left by themselves during the day. It is not uncommon for a 5 yr old to be left in charge of his 2 yr old sibling for an entire day while the parents are out working. Even if they didn't have younger siblings to care for, most of those school age kids can't go to school because they can't afford the costs of attending school. The schools here require uniforms and uniforms are not cheap. So they don't go to school. They don't receive an education. And then all they can do for work when they grow up is work as a day laborer. And it is unfortunately allowed by the government much of the time. There are too many kids living like this for the government to make it a priority to remove kids from those situations unless there is something else like addiction or abuse happening within the family as well. The new daycare center that recently opened up takes kids up to about age 12. They are trying to teach these kids their letters and numbers. Teaching basic reading and math skills. Letting kids be kids. Feeding them two meals a day. It may not be school, but it is a much better alternative than staying home. Most of the kids don't want to go home at the end of the day.
One cultural difference here that I actually see as a perk is coastal access. By law in Mexico, all the beaches are public. If you have a vehicle that can get you to a beach, you can enjoy that beach without worry that you are trespassing on someone's private property. With so much public beach access, beaches aren't crowded here the way they tend to be back in the States. Of course, that means that no specific entity is in charge of maintaining a beach, so some areas are not very clean. But we have been able to find several different beach areas that are usually clean and quiet. For our family, going to the beach and keeping track of all our kids is SO much easier when we aren't fighting crowds of people!
One amazing thing about cultural differences though, is that they can be overcome when it comes to playing with children. When we engage a child in an activity, even the language barriers can appear less. We are trying to be much more intentional with our time nowadays. So much, in fact, that we have chosen a sibling set of 3 girls to officially sponsor. Andrea is the oldest, followed by Laura and Rosa. We have the freedom to take them out and around town, and so we are trying to invite them to come with us when we do things like go to the beach or out to eat. Today, Laura and Rosa made cookies at our house with Gabe. It's kind of amusing, because those two girls don't speak a whole lot of English and they are some of the fastest Spanish speakers I have ever heard! (Andrea understands and speaks a little bit more English at least.) It just reminds us to keep working on our Spanish! But despite the trauma of their past, they are sweet girls and we will be praying that they find healing here. We are so excited to be able to start this sponsorship while we are present in Mexico, as it is all the sweeter when the children here get to actually know the people supporting them. We couldn't do this without our own wonderful supporters, so thanks to all of you for your financial gifts and prayers.
