Epilogue

I’m not sure how many people will even notice this entry, but I think I need to put it up for personal closure.

Here are some keywords and phrases for our last week:

Monday/Tuesday: hideous, lap of luxury, virgin drinks, I love the Burnetts.
Wednesday: mountain, bike, fleshwound, jungle, crepe.
Thursday: lazy, copious forks.
Friday: parting is such sweet sorrow.
Saturday: the heartland.

After Brandon left us last Monday, Matt, Angela, and I were left to our own devices for several hours before our red-eye bus ride to Puerto Vallarta. Left homeless by the Hotel K’sa’s checkout time, we amused ourselves with such endeavors as finding the craziest (or ugliest) outfit at the boutique on the corner. (Documentation of this extravaganza to be found below.) The bus left around 10:30pm and arrived at the bus station in Puerto Vallarta at 7:30am. Although we couldn’t check in until early afternoon, the Canto del Sol resort let us leave our bags there in the meantime. Let me note, at this point, that this is probably the nicest place I have ever stayed in my life, not to mention to the all-inclusive package (three meals a day plus an open bar—I love virgin piña coladas). All of this comfort is completely due to the generosity of Angela’s parents, who donated some time share credit to us. If Brother and Sister Burnett read this, thank you so much!

Our keywords for Wednesday are: mountain, bike, fleshwound, jungle. What do these words have in common? Answer: Angela. Actually, Matt and I participated in all of them except the fleshwound bit. We rented bikes and headed off up a mountain on a dirt road. Not too far into the ride, a rapid mountain goat (read: bicycle gear) attacked Angela and she fell off her bike having incurred a nasty gash on her ankle. Angela cleaned the gravel out while Matt looked for bandaging material and I cringed. And if you don’t think I was carrying my weight, you can ask Angela; apparently she found the cringing comforting (not joking about that). Despite this mishap, we made it up to the end of the trail and back down. The scenery was beautiful and probably as different from the villages as possible. After returning our bikes, I discovered a crepe stand and we enjoyed an amazingly authentic crepe on a Mexican boardwalk.

Thursday we pretty much did nothing all day until that evening. Part of this super-awesome all-inclusive package was vouchers for one night at one of three nice restaurants. We chose the Italian option, and made our reservations for 6:00. I don’t think I’d ever eaten at a restaurant that actually sets out three forks and two glasses at every place. The food was good, and we actually did use all the forks we were given.

On Friday, Matt and Angela came to Guadalajara (my departure city) with me instead of going straight to Mexico City (their departure city). They stayed long enough to get dinner and shower, and then took another overnight bus on to the D.F. I was sort of lonely after they left, and half expected one or the other to come knock on the door at any moment, but of course that didn’t happen.

Fortunately I didn’t have too long to brood in my sorrow, as I myself spent less than 12 hours in the hotel before leaving again for the airport. I landed in Iowa around 3:00 on Saturday afternoon, and I’ve been enjoying the homey, freezing, Iowa goodness ever since.


Me in the ugliest dress I've ever tried on, my t-shirt (because that portion of the dress is sort of see-through), and some sort of tube top over it all. And Matt to accessorize the whole thing.


On the way to our mountain biking adventure.


On the trail up the mountain.


Matt and Angela by the beach on Friday morning before we left (the Cantol del Sol is in the background).

The end

What can I write about my last week in the ranchos that would do it justice? It was a week of embroidery, crocheting, new foods, and (host) family bonding time.

This week Matt and I learned how to embroider napkins. It is apparently the season for napkin-making, which was very fortunate for Matt since he wanted to make a napkin for a class assignment. I jumped on the bandwagon because my feminine nature inherently attracts me to things like embroidery. Maybe it’s not my feminine nature, but I do like having something to do with my hands. Matt finished embroidering his napkin (which turned out really well) and Martina put the crocheted border on it. I started embroidering mine, and then had Martina show me how to crochet the border so I would have something to do during our traveling of the next couple weeks. All the other women in our household have been pulling out napkins to work on, so I’ve enjoyed several peaceful hours on the patio with them.

On Monday we brought back an extra-large batch of groceries, including ingredients for a few new dishes they wanted us to try. Monday afternoon we had this really nice spaghetti dish with sliced avocado, tomato, and onion. Later in the week they gave us redondas, which seem identical to gorditas as far as I can tell. They’re made from the same stuff as tortillas, but not ground as finely, and shaped into smaller, fatter patties. Those are then fried and stuffed with whatever (cheese, potatoes, chicarrón, etc.). I like the usual beans, eggs, fideo, or potatoes, but it’s nice to mix it up sometimes.

On Thursday morning Matt and I went with Lola to the river to try our hand at washing laundry there. There are a few flat rocks in different places along the river bank which are about the size and dimensions of a lavandero, and that’s where they scrub their clothes. It takes some skill not to remove all the skin on one’s knuckles on the rocks, but it’s a strangely satisfying way of washing clothes.

Thursday night I accidentally spent the night in one of the family’s bedrooms. The electricity had gone out earlier, so we were relying on candlelight. Matt and I were enjoying ramen cups with everyone. Next thing I knew, I was waking up. I was sort of disoriented, and started to put on my shoes to leave, but Martín told me to go back to sleep. They had all rearranged themselves, stuffing themselves into two beds with Beatriz on a petate on the floor—this despite Matt’s assurances that I wouldn’t mind if they used the bed I usually sleep in, or if one of the girls shared with me. The next day I apologized for taking their bed, but no one seemed at all bothered by it.

This morning we had to say all our goodbyes. Chepe, who’s sort of a crabby little kid at times, was none too pleased to see us leaving. He’s overdramatic about everything, but it was sort of depressing to see him weeping disconsolately on the ground. Everyone gathered to say goodbye and to see us off on the bus, which was nice and hard at the same time.

All in all, it’s been a pretty amazing semester. I know I’ve enjoyed reading about it, and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about it. Maybe if you’re lucky I’ll tack on a postscript about my vacation to Puerto Vallarta this week…


Emily embroidering...

Matt embroidering...

Amazing spaghetti dish

Alina and Jovani wearing clothes that my amazing mother sent them (Mom, Lola and Mina loved the clothes, they fit perfectly, and they told me a million times to tell you thank you).

Beata, me, Martina, Martìn


Martìn and Alina

I love this picture. Here you have Beata, me, Dani holding Lupita, Flor, Matt, Martina, and Mina.

A week of learning

Questions asked and/or answered this week:

Is mariachi attire the new vogue for LDS high councilmen?
Has Brandon been bitten by a lethal spider?
What does esquincle (spelling uncertain) mean?
Does Angela wear diapers?
Who gave the four-year-old the knife?

Answers to the above questions:

Is Mariachi attire the new vogue for LDS high councilmen?

Perhaps. More likely, the high councilman that visited our ward last week also happens to be a mariachi musician (which would explain why he was carrying a violin with him). I halfway expected the fluffy white bow at his collar, short coat, and gold lacing up the sides up his pants to be an object lesson, but I guess it’s probably just his work attire, and he had a performance after the meeting block.

Has Brandon been bitten by a lethal spider?

No. Matt and I met Brandon and Angela in la Estancia on Wednesday with the intention of playing basketball and frisbee. However, upon arriving we discovered that Brandon had been bitten by some unidentified bug on his arm. He said it didn’t hurt, but the area of the bite had increased to an inch or two in diameter, and there was a reddish line running from the bite up his arm. Angela thought that lines heading for the heart from a poisonous bite might be a bad sign, so we went back to Santa Rosa to ask Martina (who is some sort of medical authority who villagers come to for medical advice and treatment). She, and the rest of the family, immediately said it was just a wasp sting, and wasn’t dangerous. The spider option would have been more exciting, but I guess it’s just as well…

What does esquincle mean?

It means kid, or maybe child. I heard Maira, my student Ramona’s daughter, use it while we were teaching Ramona on Thursday. Her newborn was inside, and she said she was going to go check on the esquincla. I understood by the context that she was talking about her baby, but the word was definitely new. I’m planning on popularizing it when I get back to the U.S. You can all feel very cutting edge with the new slang when it catches fire and goes into common use.

Does Angela wear diapers?

No. And yes, this question was actually asked, but not by me. Angela went into the city on Thursday with her host mom, Audelia. Audelia likes to take advantage of the toilets when she goes into the city, so she uses them everywhere she goes. Having just done so at a relative’s house, she suggested Angela should do the same. Despite the fact that Angela didn’t particularly need the bathroom, Audelia kept after it. Nearby, Audelia’s mother assured Angela that the bathroom was clean. When she still declined to use it, the relative asked if she was wearing a diaper, staring pointedly in the direction of the theoretical diaper. Why that would be a more logical explanation than Angela’s simply not needing to use the bathroom, we may never know.

Who gave the four-year-old the knife?

Her mother. On Friday, Matt and I went to Comederito to celebrate Audelia’s daughter Andrea’s birthday. To address the question first, a relative (el padrino del pastel, or the godfather of the cake) had brought a fairly sizeable cake. Andrea blew out her four candles and took the traditional first bite (at which point the custom is to shove the birthday girl/boy’s face in the cake, but we skipped that step due to her age). The next thing I knew, she had been handed the knife (which was large) and was standing over the cake preparing to divvy it up. Apparently it’s also traditional for the birthday-ee to cut his or her own cake. Andrea made a few scratches at the frosting, and then Audelia took back over (thank goodness). There was also a piñata as part of the festivities. At some points, I thought bodily harm to some guest was imminent as the stick-wielding child lost all sense of where the piñata was and started swinging willy-nilly at the onlookers.

Piglets born the night before...the two on the left are apart because they´re the smallest and the others would crush them (so said the piglets´owner).

See that huge bale of hay? That´s a donkey. Carrying the bale of hay.

This is Matt making his super-awesome map of Santa Rosa. And my knee in the corner.

Painting the flowers.

Our second masterpiece.

T-two weeks

Dear blog,

Here are the week’s highlights:

1. I got 41 interviews done! As my good friend Brandon Baird would say, yay woo-hoo! This was quite an accomplishment for me, since I had only 35 done at the beginning of the week, and had never done more than 20 in one week prior to this week. I can honestly and sincerely say that I believe I have been the beneficiary of a minor miracle. Now I just have to get 24 more done in the next two weeks, gather a bit of side information from a couple of people, and my information gathering will be complete.

2. We played twister at our weekly meeting. It was in Spanish. That actually makes it more additionally difficult than one might expect. The instructions had a strategy section, which recommended trying to push opponents off by encroaching on their space. I found this to be highly enjoyable, although not totally effective as I was just as likely to fall over in the close quarters as my opponent.

3. Brandon and Angela came to spend the night in Santa Rosa this week, and we all walked up to the big, flat rock that Matt and I found weeks ago. We watched the sunset from there and made it back without any serious dog attacks.

4. Brandon and I spoke in church on Sunday. I did get a bit more nervous than usual because of having to do it in Spanish, but I was really glad for the opportunity. All four of us were going to speak, but the bishopric had forgotten that another speaker (a high councilor) was also scheduled. My talk was pretty short, but I felt good about it once I finished.

This is Matt teaching our student Francisca. I guess the background leaves something to be desired, but keep in mind that I have to take these pictures secretly.

Here you have Matt, Angela, and me playing twister in my room. Matt looks completely normal in 99% of the pictures ever taken of him, so I have to admit a little gleefulness on my part when I catch him looking funny.

Here´s sunset from the rock. Anyone tired of looking at the Mexican sky? I´m not...

Four friends.

El jefe

The main news this week was that our director, Brad Wilcox, visited us. He got into León on Wednesday night, and I met him in Irapuato. Unfortunately, there was some sort of tractor convention going on in Irapuato, so he had gone all the way back to León to spend the night after finding all local hotels full. They were pretty booked through Friday night, which ended up influencing our plans. We met with INEA on Thursday morning, which was a pretty productive meeting, and then headed out to the villages. I took Brad around to meet all the host families. He’s very big and jolly. Lots of hugs and compliments for everyone. We spontaneously decided to pack up and take off in his rental car that night, instead of just taking a day trip on Friday as we had planned.

Our first stop was the city of Guanajuato, which is where we went to the Cervantino festival a few weeks ago. We all wanted to go back to see some more of the city by day, instead of just the crowded, fiesta-filled streets. After spending the night there, we visited the birthplace of Diego Rivera, which had a lot of his artwork in the upper floors of the house. I’ve never really looked at any of his work besides his murals, but he experimented with a startling number of styles and media. He has a lot of depictions of Mexican campesinos, which I especially liked. We also visited an old armory (now museum), which was taken by Miguel Hidalgo and a bunch of peasant rebels in the Mexican Revolution. Hidalgo himself was ultimately beheaded, but the revolution was obviously successful. Our final stop was the Pípila, which is a statue on a hilltop with an amazing view of the city.

From there, we went on to Dolores Hidalgo to spend Friday night. We didn’t do a lot of sight-seeing there, beyond the main square and the church there. That’s the city from which Miguel Hidalgo started his revolutionary course, gathering up men to fight as he went. He started with only 700, which grew to 20,000 in just one month (that’s just a trivia side note for anyone interested).

Brad brought us back to Irapuato Saturday morning, and flew out of León that afternoon. It was nice to have a break from the routine, and to have his words of encouragement (and BYU taffies…mmmmmm). The main activity for the rest of the weekend was Stake Conference.

This is just...Mexico.

Me with Angela overlooking the beautiful city of Guanajuato. The sun was totally blinding, hence the squinty-ness.

P.S. Thank you to Matt´s various relatives for leaving me blog comments :)

More Mexico goodness

Hello my dear blog readers! Things have actually happened since last week. Here are some of the highlights (I really like the numbered-list format, so I’m going to employ it once again):

1. I cut hair for the first time. Angela hadn’t gotten a haircut for a year, and she asked if I would be willing to get rid of the split ends for her. I did disclose the fact that I had never previously cut hair, but she didn’t seem to mind. So on Wednesday when she and Brandon came to Santa Rosa for our weekly meeting, we set ourselves up outside with a chair and some scissors, and I went to work. I think it turned out pretty well. She has asked me to trim it a bit shorter, so I assume I didn’t commit any truly heinous errors on the first attempt.

2. Matt and I spent Thursday morning painting a house. We helped the family paint a little bit earlier in the week, and that was all the experience either of us had going into our Thursday painting extravaganza. The house in question belongs to our student Efigenia. She received the building materials and paint from a government program that provided the same to a lot of villagers, based on the quality of their current housing and the size of their families. Everyone was given two colors of paint—cream and bright pink—and required to use the pink. We showed up around 7:30am, and left five hours later, having painted the entire front of the house (see pictures below). She told us the pattern she wanted. By luck, we had already figured out how to make stars earlier in the week (I don’t know how the villagers do the whole star thing, but my way involved the sine function, Excel, and a ruler). We traced it all out, and then got to painting. She seemed really happy with the final product, which was, of course, the main goal.

3. Friday was the Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). It’s traditional to visit the graves of your dead on this holiday, so we went with our family to the panteón (the closest cemetery) in the nearby town of Aldama. There’s a pretty significant contrast between the cheapest and most expensive burial options. The upper end consists of mini houses, but the range continues down to walls of boxes stacked on top of each other, or rusty crosses or plaques stuck in the ground. We visited the graves of Martina’s mother, a child of hers that died in infancy, and one of Daniel’s children that also died only a few days after being born. That afternoon, we went back to the city so we could go celebrate with the young single adults from church. Finding a costume given our available wardrobes and budgets was a little tricky. Brandon just hiked up his pants, ruined his posture, and called himself a nerd. Matt stuffed shirts into the shirt he was wearing and tied a bandana around his head to be a bodybuilder. Angela and I got some yellow electrical tape and made a sad little attempt at being bees (a pareja de abejas, for the Spanish-speaking among you). The cheapness of the costumes didn’t inhibit our enjoyment of the party, which was a really good time.

4. On Sunday, we went to an early church before heading back to Aldama for the baby baptisms of Alina and Jovani (I discovered that “Giovani” is actually spelled “Jovani”). There was a mass before the baptisms. We didn’t actually observe the baptisms, because they closed the doors to the church right after the mass ended, and we were outside. As soon as they finished, the doors were reopened and picture-taking commenced. There were quite a few relatives hanging around, plus the godparents. All four of us were lower-tier godparents of some sort or another: Matt and I were the godparents of the medallions, while Brandon and Angela were godparents of the “colored clothing” that the babies can wear before and after the actual baptism. Having additional godparents is a tradition they have out here, and has no religious significance as far as I can tell. After picture-taking ended, we all piled into trucks and headed back to Santa Rosa. Over the course of the afternoon, a surprising number of people showed up to enjoy mole, meat, and rice. Music got started later on, lasting until about 10:00. I was actually surprised (and grateful) that it ended so early.

Me giving Angela the haircut. We´re sitting outside my host family´s houses, under a mesquite tree.

Matt and me roasting s´mores, our FHE treat for the week. The family usually puts a comal over this fire every morning to cook the daily tortillas.

Before our painting adventure....

The final product.

Stacked graves at the panteon, decked out with flowers for the Día de los muertos.

Bodybuilder (culturista), bees (pareja de abejas), and a nerd (ñoño).

This is me holding baby Alina in her baptismal dress. She looked like a very fluffy cupcake.

Not much to say...

Dear friends and family,

I’m afraid this week’s entry may be a little drab. For some reason, there was a dearth of picture-taking this week. I also used up all the Mexico City excitement last week, and the rest of the week was basically normal. After changing my survey a bit, I restarted the interviewing process; all previous interviewees have to be revisited. So far I’ve done nearly 20. My goal is still to get 100 done by the end of the semester, and I think it will be possible. I’m not going to lie, interviewing total strangers is a mixed bag. For the most part, I really do enjoy meeting new people, but sometimes it is a little awkward. I think the good experiences outweigh the bad—I’m really quite amazed by their willingness to talk to me.

Matt finally got a nickname this week (the rancheros are all about nicknames, especially our family, I think). Now they’ve started calling him Moto (which is their nickname for another Mateo in the extended family), and they usually call me Cami (which derives from Camila, which derives from Emilia), or sometimes Milo. So Moto and Cami it is. I would nominate these villages for use in the witness protection program, since they’re difficult to find and get to, have no organized record of residents, and anyone who lives there long enough will almost inevitably get a nickname that may or may not resemble their given name (examples: Luz goes by Chalino, Erminia sometimes goes by Ermes, Luis is known as el Chiquis, etc…There’s no method to the madness).

Sorry not to have more excitement to report from this week. Stay tuned for next week’s installment, in which all four of us get to be some sort of obscure godparents at the baptisms of Giovani and Alina (babies in Martín and Martina’s household).