My final day in the office was also my final full day in Mexico.  After wrapping things up with my work, my coworkers held a potluck lunch in the office patio.  The great food was followed by some tequila and a guitar sing-along (video here).

I’ll mostly remember this as a fun adventure and happy period.  But it wasn’t completely.  There was an underlying uneasiness in almost every situation – a sense of not belonging there even if people went out of their way to make me feel welcome.  Unfortunately, after being away for 2 years I feel a little bit that way here in the US too.  I plan to spend the summer re-adjusting and taking in the things I’ve missed:  time with family & friends, public water fountains, live rock/blues, small talk, parks, and comfort foods.

There are many things that I didn’t write about over the course of the past 2 years but could have and probably should have:  a Mexican girlfriend and her family, canyoning at Matacanes, camping at timber line, drug violence and immigration, eating/drinking strange new things (ant eggs, pig skin tacos, grasshoppers, corn fungus, fermented maguey juice), black market animal trade, OLPC in Mexico, cross-cultural weddings and much more.

My Peace Corps experience started with a change of career, country, and culture.  It was not easy so I understand why a lot fewer people do it than think about doing it.  But, it has been a great experience and was absolutely worth it.  On the other hand, I admire and can even be jealous of the friends I left behind who settled down with new families.  Maybe the grass is always greener on the other side of the border fence.

• 30% – Food contradictions. Sopa seca (dry soup) … quesadillas without cheese … these things exist!
• 68% – Lack of concern / awareness / belief in food refrigeration. First, meat and dairy – they understand that it needs to be refrigerated to keep it for a longer time … which means meat that’s refrigerated could be older … and older = less fresh.  So, meat and cheese that’s never been frozen and is sitting out is a sign that it’s fresh (assuming it’s not detectably rotting).   I can see some logic in that.  Then there are the condiments – I see things like opened mayo sitting out unrefrigerated all the time … sometimes in the sun.  It says “Refrigerate After Opening” … in Spanish even.
• 85% – Tacos. They’re ubiquitous so it’s best not to fight it.  I have a particularly soft spot (gut) for Puebla’s tacos arabes.  But if I ever want late night food that’s not just meat, I’m pretty much out of luck.

• 85% – Very little eye contact from strangers. The exception to this is children.  I watched a boy of about 6 years get elbowed hard by his mom for staring at me while we rode in the back of truck taxi in rural Puebla.  Then she glanced up to see if I’d noticed his staring or her reprimand.  In my experience, strangers will not make eye contact on the street unless they’re selling something.  This is especially true for women who have mastered the lookaway game to stay aloof or respectable.  If one of them does look at me, I wonder … is she super-extroverted or nontraditional … or a foreigner like me … or selling something?
• 100% – Women holding hands are just friends … or family

• 100% – Interpersonal respect. This relates to the notes above, but goes beyond my direct interactions.  Between Mexicans, I don’t see the same kinds or degrees of disrespect shown to each other as I have seen in the US.  For example, despite the cities having very unruly traffic, I don’t think road rage is the kind of phenomenon it is in the US.  I have seen some exceptions to the respect, though, such as heckling at parades (mentioned previously) and sexist treatment of women.  And this respect apparently doesn’t extend to the criminal element, judging from what I’ve heard but fortunately never personally experienced.
• 60% – A prevailing attitude of servitude. My only evidence for this is in the language and someone told me it all has colonial roots.  These are common phrases in Mexico:  mande / mándeme (order me, command me) – this is used like we would use “yes?”, “sorry?”, “come again?” in English; a sus órdenes / para servirle (at your service) – more formal but very commonly used in office introductions and by waiters or anyone else providing a service.  I think I understand the usage of these but it still feels foreign.
• 110% – Well-behaved children. I don’t know the reasons, but they just are.  I don’t cringe when I walk into a family restaurant with many children in it.  They just don’t seem like the defiant, attention demanding American kids I’m used to.
• 10% Lack of self-ordering queues. I don’t understand why this happens and I’m far from accepting it.  What happened to those well-behaved children when they grew up?  The problem is evident in disorderly traffic but also in blatant examples like approaching a cashier or ticket booth when there is no rope strung up to form a waiting line.  I don’t know if people approaching have no sense that I’m standing there for a reason … or if they don’t care.  Either way, the predictable result is that people will edge in front of me.  Sticking with my observations on respect above, maybe my American-sized personal space appears to them like a vacancy that they must fill.
• 85% – Less personal space. Communities, houses, transportation – everything is compacted allowing for MUCH less personal space than I was used to in wide open Kansas.  I’m often crammed into a combi minivan taxi with a dozen strangers and since they’re ok with it, so am I.  I’m surprised that I’ve adapted to this so easily.  I would have said “100%” except for the queuing issue above.

• 55% – Hugging near-strangers. There are some occasions that unmistakably call for this.  A birthday in my office is one of them.  Reaching a summit with a hiking group is another.  Seriously.
• 75% – Cheek kiss greeting. Mexicans do the one-cheek air kiss (if one of them is a woman … men just shake hands, unless they’re family).  I’m fine with that except that I still don’t know exactly with whom to do it.  Some hesitate because they know I’m American and it’s not my custom … which makes me hesitate.  I need a lapel button that says, “Sí, salúdame” … and maybe with “Deja me en paz” on the back side of it so I can choose depending on my mood.

Oh in case you’re curious, all of the statistics given above and in the rest of this series of posts are accurate to within my blog’s strict margin of error.  Please don’t ask what that is lest I make up yet another number.

Musician behind us in a bus from Tepic to San Blas. We’re sitting on a suitcase in the aisle because we jumped on mid-route. It's a touch blurry but not bad for being taken by the driver! (His idea, not mine.)

Many city bus drivers and small restaurant managers will let musicians play a few songs for tips.  I almost never know the songs but have almost never been annoyed by horrible music, either … except for a recent lunch in a tiny restaurant with a flutist who was loud and BAD.  If they have any talent at all I usually tip about 5 pesos because at least they’re working at something.  Besides, my coworker Martín said that he used to play on the buses before he got his job at SEMARNAT.  Now he plays in bars or for private events just as a hobby.  When I saw him at the place pictured below he agreed to sing something in his native Zapoteco language if I sang a bit in English.

I’ve had a change of work priorities as the end of my service nears.  Many months back I had shown my supervisor and coworkers some results of forest change analysis using satellite imagery.  I visually overlaid a slew of data showing particularly the areas where forestry permits had been issued over the past 10 years to help interpret some places with apparent forest loss.  My presentation showed some strengths and weaknesses of the analysis process, but what made a much bigger impression on them was seeing the collection of forestry management programs on a map.  It was a mess!  There were properties on top of properties inside of other properties….  The geographic data for those forestry programs was submitted by licensed contractors most of whom collected/approximated the coordinates in ways that were imprecise at best.  And the vast majority of that data was accepted by the office before it was using any mapping software (aka GIS) to verify that the data was accurate or at least sensible … like located in the right municipality or even state.  As a result, this collection of unverified geographic data was full of undiscovered errors.  It had sat on the shelves for years being completely unused before my predecessor, Christian, laboriously pulled it all from paper and put it into ArcGIS which allowed them to finally see it and use it.

The red in both images are "problems" - overlapping forest management data.

My coworkers urgently wanted to know what data was right and what was wrong.  You can imagine how alarming it would be to discover that some forestry programs are truly overlapped – 2  communities or land owners laying claim to the same forest and BOTH having permits from our office authorizing them to harvest it.  There are messy legal implications and there could even be violent conflict (not unheard of in Mexico).

Now that my time here is limited, my supervisor is keen on having me correct as many of these errors as possible in their budding GIS before I leave.  So, that has become my main focus over the past month and will be for at least the next couple weeks.  I fixed some errors on my own by reviewing the original documents and finding mistakes made by the contractors – a typo usually makes a coordinate muy muy incorrecto.  But the majority of cases require going back to the contractors for the correct data.   We met 3 weeks ago with a group of roughly 20 of the contractors to show them how bad the situation is.  I generated reports of the property conflicts for them and am now waiting on them to send corrections so I can incorporate them in the GIS.  Some corrections have come in already but we’ll need a LOT more before we can call this a success.

This task isn’t glamorous nor highly technical.  I could easily train someone else here to do it if there were someone available …  and in fact, we’ll need to do that soon one way or another.  But, it’s nice doing a project that has some immediate importance for my office.  My group really needs this and they will immediately benefit from it.

My forest change detection project (satellite image analysis) is idle right now due to this new activity but also because of a big limitation:  the imagery coverage available to our office through Landsat (L5 doesn’t have recent coverage here and gap-filled L7 SLC-off scenes aren’t usable) and SPOT don’t allow for a complete and ongoing study of Puebla’s forest.  It’s also pretty clear that there won’t be anyone available in my office to learn and repeat the process in the future, either.  Bummer.

In any case, I’m getting to know the lay of the land better via my maps of the state and I get to practice pronouncing local place names from Náhuatl.  (That’s Mexico’s most widely spoken pre-Hispanic language and which gave the world delicious words like “guacamole”, “jalapeño” “tomato”, “chocolate”, “mesquite” and … well, “México”.)  Try these out loud:  Ocoyohualulco,  Cuautelolulco, Mexcalcuautla, Xocotehuaxtla, Talpitzahuayan, Eloxochitlán, y Tepoxcuautla.

I had the fortune of hosting friend & departing PC volunteer, Kurt, and spending 5 de mayo here in Puebla before his flight back to the US.  Since this minor holiday celebrates Mexico’s victory over France in the battle of Puebla, this is the only city in Mexico that celebrates it in a formal way.  The main event was a large parade on the Boulevard 5 de Mayo full of military, school, and civil services entrants mixed with floats commemorating Mexican history.  Most people here had the day off in Puebla for 5 de mayo, so there were a LOT of people lining the street for the parade.

Yes, those are real people on the float!

The parade was generally like those in the US in terms of starting late, lasting hours, being festive, and being full of marching bands.  But there were some big differences:

• It moved FAST.  It was a constant marching pace with nobody holding up the show.  It would have been way too long at the American pace.
• The style was consistently militaristic for the groups.  The schools – not just bands, but all (?) students and teachers – marched in formation with matching uniforms or suits.
• No candy thrown.
• The focus was different.  It was squarely on national & local pride … NOT on humor, political candidates, beauty queens in convertibles, nor advertisements for local businesses.  As Kurt noted, at least some Shriners’ cars would have been nice.
• Some crowd behavior stood out to me as different from the US and also out of place for Mexico.  I consider Mexicans to be very respectful individually but for some reason at parades, there’s a surprising amount of catcalling and even a little heckling.  It’s probably not shocking that the traffic cops got the brunt of the heckling and groups of women such as nursing schools and female military battalions got the most catcalls, but some cretins extended it to middle school color guards (but not for their OWN daughter’s/sister’s school, I’m sure).  The women of the crowd only got in on the act once – for the sailors of the Mexican navy whose crisp white uniforms evoked screams aplenty.  Sorry ladies, I didn’t get any good pictures of them.

Other than seeing the parade, it was a low key day.  I didn’t see any big fiesta for the holiday like I anticipated. But we did step into La Feria de Puebla (state fair) which is being held at this time also.  Compared to other fairs in Mexico, this one was tiny and not terribly interesting other than an opportunity to browse the goods of artisans from around the state of Puebla.

We connected with Cony later in the day for a couple of rare Mexican microbrews at a downtown bar.  ¡Viva la cerveza artesenal!

Next, she and I took a trip to Cuernavaca, Morelos to see sites such as the palace of conquistador Hernán Cortés which is now a history museum featuring Diego Rivera murals.

And we also had a day trip to Taxco, Guerrero which is a historic mining town famous for a boom in silver craftsmanship over the past 60 years.

William Spratling was an American architect who relocated to Taxco in 1929 while writing a book about pre-hispanic designs and culture.  He designed silver jewelry and art in Taxco incorporating traditional Mexican themes and is credited with creating the modern silver artisan industry in Taxco.  A silver shop owner gave us a driving tour of the countryside and we visited the Spratling ranch where one craftsman, Don Tomás, still works in the old shop doing custom-made pieces.  He said his next project was an order for the star broach pictured in the book.

The sun is shining in a brilliantly blue sky, everything is in bloom, (including the magnificent purple jacaranda trees), the birds are happy and the Monarch butterflies are in flight.

I want to write about the Monarch butterflies.  You probably already know all this, but it doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves about these incredible miracles of nature.  Dave and I were fortunate enough to be able to visit one of the tiny Monarch Bioreserves in Michoacan in December of 2007.  One of the miracles is that all of those Monarchs had spent their summer in Canada and the northern part of the U.S.  They migrate from there (2000+ miles), arriving to the same area (southern Mexico) and on the same day (November 1st) each year.  The amazing thing is that they’ve never been there before and in fact, are 4-5 generations removed from the Monarchs that had left Mexico the previous year. Scientists are still unclear about the mechanics of this incredible migration.  The butterflies breed in the winter here in Mexico, so a new generation is now headed north (as we speak!). This group will pause, have some fun, reproduce, die, and the next generation will continue to head north.  This continues a couple more times until they arrive in the North for the summer, completing the cycle.

As if it is not difficult enough to fly 2000 miles when you are the size of a butterfly, there are other difficulties caused by the habitat situation in these three countries.  In Mexico, the butterflies need this particular forest which is at an ideal altitude, etc.  Deforestation, soil erosion, and other issues are threatening and have reduced their wintering grounds to tiny reserves.  In the US and Canada, loss of habitat and especially the loss of the milkweed plant needed for reproduction have threatened the Monarchs. Everyone!  Plant milkweed!

The news from this winter is even worse.  Because of the above issues and the drought last summer, the number of Monarchs that arrived in Mexico this winter was at an all-time low.  Then we had the cold and rains in January which caused floods and landslides in the Bioreserve.  40 people were killed as were millions of Monarchs.  The numbers of monarchs returning north now is very low. Dr. Chip Taylor of Monarch Watch says, “We have no prior experience with such a small returning population and it is uncertain whether monarchs in such numbers could recover in one year.” He added, “My thinking now is that it will take monarchs at least two, and perhaps more, years to recover from the effects of the last breeding season and the winter of 2009-2010.”

Although not directly involved in the Monarch Bioreserves, Dave and I are working pretty hard (when we are not playing) to help preserve or reestablish forests here in Mexico.  I really believe that the interest in solar cooking is snowballing.  We have estimated that if people in the communities who cook exclusively using wood from the surrounding forests, would, instead, use the solar stoves 3-4 days per week, they would save 40-50% of their wood resources.  I have a goal of introducing solar stoves to a total of 500 families before we leave Mexico.

Recently my project was posted on the Peace Corps website in order to raise funds to help accomplish this goal.  If you would like to make a tax deductible donation (pretty please???) you can click here or go to this website and enter my last name (Greegor).  Thanks so much for any bit of help you can provide!