From Xico

Jim Goes to School

Yesterday I dropped Jim off at his new school. It is called Las Cañadas and is about an hour and a half south
of Coátepec. Once a cattle ranch, in 1995 or so it was converted into an agroecological farm devoted to teaching and experimenting in methods of farming that would enhance the possibilities for local people to farm in harmony with their land and not need to go to the US. It makes money for its projects through ecotourism and through classes like the one Jim is taking. Check out its website.

Jim is there for a class in learning how to build things with bamboo. Bamboo is considered a good renewable resource here because it grows easily and fast. Jim would like to learn how to build with it so he could make some (I suspect building-sized) mathematically-based models, among other things.

The place is as environmentally sound as it practical, I suspect, from the use of LEDs to composting toilets. One plug I'd like to get in here: being environmentally sound, sustainable, growing things for local consumption: this isn't going back to the dark ages as some people I know think, but rather using our most advanced knowledge wisely.

Jim said, before we left, I bet they have composting toilets. I said, I bet they do. We looked at their site, and they do. And when we got there, we saw that for sure they do. Very attractive ones, too. Jim and I have been struggling with this issue, not with each other, but philosophically and from a practical perspective. Like most Americans, both of us had drilled into us in different ways certain attitudes about ummm how icky the poop we produce is. My dad the doctor (and, for you remaining battered Freudians) was, to put it mildly, insistent on how filthy it was, how it had to be gotten rid of FAST, how you should wash your hands THOROUGHLY immediately. I remember enormous discomfort when we hiked and camped some years ago in Yosemite and it was incumbent upon us to dig it up and bring it out. Yuk!

Anyway, speaking for myself, I have relaxed somewhat, probably owing to the fact that we don't flush our toilet paper here in much of Mexico, but rather put it in a separate container. I have gotten so used to this that it seems really rude to flush it when I go home.

So now that I've gotten all of you repelled and attracted, check out this PDF that Las Cañadas offers on why use composting toilets. It's actually got a lot of humor. It is in Spanish, but pretty self-explanatory.Download cacofobia.pdf

Anyway, even though our neighbors Juan and Anita who are way ahead of us in this game don't know it, we have been concerned about our own sewage problems. We join the bulk of the colonia (and, if you look at the document above, you'll see, most of the developing world) in letting our sewage run right into the river which arrives here in not such bad shape, but leaves it in filthy shape. There are little holding traps which break things down a bit, but nowhere near enough. So Jim and I have had an architect out, but it turns out that all our sewage runs together: the laundry, the bath, the sinks and the toilets, and it would take quite a system of holding tanks to get it to the point of being usable. We'd essentially have to tear up the whole front yard. And then we could plant on top, but not edible stuff. We have friends with a much bigger yard who've done this.

So basically, we're working our way towards composting toilets. This is overcoming my deepest prejudice, I think. It's hard work. But I look at the hillsides around us and imagine, what if someday they got turned into sustainable forest/farm land and the colonia produced the compost for it.

So we have the name of someone who makes the things and when Jim comes back, maybe we will show the courage of our convictions.

Anyway, back to the school. (I bet you didn't think this post was going to be about toilets, did you?)

Jim will have to write about what it was like to take the course. Here I can show you some pictures of the buildings, clustered together in a little campus in a style you could call Gaudí rústico.

The kitchen-dining room building:

Jim and Giaco and Rita admiring the columns. Rita and Giaco came along to keep me company on the way home and for a beautiful walk along a ridge at Las Cañadas.

The kitchen:

The classrooms (I think):

The front end of the dormitory, called the hotelito and made up of a row of small rooms with a set of bunkbeds in each.

Looking down the portico of the dormitory:

Jim on his lower bunk bed awaiting his first class.

And the bathrooms. The johns and the showers are inside the scallops. In the center is a large pool of water with a counter and cutouts for reaching into the water.

Anyway, I miss Jim, but I bet he's having a really good and interesting time.

Morality of Immigration

A very interesting perspective herehere on the morality (or lack thereof) of limiting immigration.

The Hottest, Dryest Month

You can click on all illustrations to get a bigger image.

We had a fairly dry and warm winter, and now we are having a very hot, dry May. The air is always hazy, dusty. Most of this pollution is due to forest fires. Yucatan, Chiapas, Veracruz and Guatemala have many. On this snippet of map from TERRA/NASA, if you squint and look hard, hopefully you can see all the red dots which mark their centers. I believe TERRA/NASA has added the dots.

Here is the link to the original photo. It is spectacular. And for sure here you can see the red dots.

Here is a snippet of a map which includes our area, Yucatan, Chiapas, Guatemala and a bit more of Central America.
so you can find where we are relative to the fires. Look for Xalapa, then a little bit south.

There was an article in Friday's "La Jornada" describing the fires in Veracruz. Apparently already the number of acres burned is equal to all the damage of 2007. As you can see on the fire map, there are burns on Perote, near us, and Pico de Orizaba, a little further away, as well as to the north. The danger is elevated by the extreme heat and drought, but the government says immediate causes are "illegal forestry practices and inadequate agriculture practices." Many people here still burn their fields, and sugar cane fields are always torched, and this can get out of control. I suspect but don't know that the illegal forestry practices are the dropping of not quite out cigarettes during activities of cutting down trees in protected areas, or maybe sparks from saws. Ironically, there is an area of central Yucatan, according to a listero on the Aztlan listserv which has gotten so much rain they haven't been able to burn their fields at all.

* * *
My good ole Toyota RAV 4 spent six weeks in the Toyota repair shop awaiting parts from Los Angeles, but Friday we finally recovered it, welcomed it home with open arms and took off in it yesterday on a welcome home trip. We didn't want to go too far till we had confidence in its post-surgery self. Our friend Cay has gotten us curious about how Cortés might have gone from Xico to Ixhuacán de los Reyes which he is supposed to have done. It's probably impossible to find a small section of trail used five hundred years ago, but as Cay says, let's look for what makes sense: where were there people, where would passage for a bunch of soldiers, horses, baggage and guides be possible. This is fun, especially since we have such glorious countryside to muddle through.

Jim had spotted on Google Earth the possibility of a route that might indeed go from Xico to Ixhuacán de los Reyes. Jim thought it best to start from Ixhuacan and head towards Xico via Tlalchi rather than the other way around because if it turned out not to be passable, that way, we'd at least be covering some new ground. We pretty well know what's around Xico. We didn't know if there was passable road on the Ixhuacan side of Tlalchi.

Here is a Google map courtesy of Jim's efforts showing our route from our house in the very upper right hand corner to Ixhuacan de los Reyes in the lower left quadrant. You can't see the roads very well, but they are there and pretty good.

We drove to Ixhuacán via Teocelo. The road from Teocelo has been paved all the way to its end at Cozautlan, and parts of the road that turns off for Ixhuacan have been repaired as well, making for a faster, smoother ride: less aventura, more convenience. Lots of roads in the area, as I may have mentioned, are being upgraded to some extent. The State of Veracruz puts up big, colorful banners to announce the progress. Unfortunately, the wind has blown some of them down.

From Ixhuacán we followed a winding road up the steep sides of the surrounding mountains and finally found ourselves at a fork where a new roadcut bypassed what looked like the old, crumbly route and seemed to promise passage. A teenage boy came walking round the bend of the third prong. He told us that in fact there was no way to drive to Tlalchi, that we could only go a bit further and we'd have to stop and walk the rest of the way. He came from the small town up on the ridge called Buena Vista, quite appropriately, because from it there wasn't an unspectacular view in any direction. So we drove up into and through Buena Vista.

This was a very odd scene. Everywhere there were new road starts, but the roads didn't go anywhere except to the town or into each other or into a dead end. A mystery. And a blight, too, since quite a lot of land had been scraped up and carved out. We stopped and talked to a man and his wife who stood amidst a flock of children, mostly not theirs. They were quite helpful and very friendly and amused to find a couple in a Texas-plated car up at their dead end. The man said that some bikers from Xalapa had biked all the way once, but that strangers were few and far between. Suddenly, his cell phone rang. Someone was text messaging him. He laughed and showed it to his wife. Jim and I thought maybe it was a neighbor asking who those nuts in the car with the Texas plates were.

Anyway, it turns out we can go from Ixhuacan to Xico via a somewhat different route. The man wrote down the names of the towns we should look for, and from where we stood we could look down and see the road winding through them.

We did drive to the fork in the road and then as far as we could on the way to Tlalchi before we had to turn back. We found ourselves on a saddle with a few houses and a view of the path curling away.

The map below shows you the route we drove from Ixhuacán to Buena Vista and then to the place where the road turned into a path and you couldn't drive any further. A man who lived at that spot pointed out Tlalchi down in the valley, probably a mile from where we stood. By the way, the turnaround at the left is the absolute and complete end of roads out of Buena Vista...no footpaths in evidence, the turnaround at the right is the end of the drivable road on the way to Tlalchi.

I didn't take pictures the whole drive up because the air was so heavy and ugly and god forbid you should see it in this state. It would certainly be the wrong impression because for eleven months of the year it is not this way.

But then I thought, aw heck, and so here's a picture from the road down from Buena Vista looking across Ixhuacán de los Reyes.

Here's a picture of a shrine created right in the hillside.

This is one of the several churches in Ixhuacan seen from the road out of town.

We drove a little further up the main road which leads ultimately to the town of Perote and also to the turn-off back to Xico via the route the man told us about. We came to the town of Ayahualulco, which is very brightly colored and pretty.

Looking across the park:

The doors on the main church.

An old church in ruins on the way out of town.

And a roof-top truck.

The road we took up to Buena Vista didn't seem a likely route for Cortés, but we did notice a couple of passes he and his gang might have used.

Our New Bridge

Our new bridge is a great success. Construction people spent some time moving speed bumps, or topes and cebollas (topes are strips of pavement that go straight across the road, cebollas are pretty high metal hemispheres that make a row across the road) from place to place to find the most effective spots. Now it all functions very well. This picture is looking down the hill from the main street in San Marcos. We turn at the yellow building at the left side of the picture to go down the street to our road.

This is the picture of that street we take to get to our road.

There are pictures on the blog of the road that I took when it was crowded with cars making the detour caused by the bridge collapse. Look under Around Ursulo Galvan. Now that road has returned to its very quiet normal country self.

Getting Kids to Eat Better

As I'm sure most of you realize, the omnipresence of junk food and junk beverages in our area drives me nuts. In our colonia it is especially tragic because we live among fertile hills in the hands of peope who live here that could produce vegetables instead of coffee or instead of nothing if only it provided some kind of livelihood, and because even now you can just take a walk and pick fresh fruit that has fallen to the ground. And the local pre-junk cuisine is delicious and nutritious to the max. Yet as far as I can tell, there is no local produce in the local tiendas, only the stuff delivered by wholesalers who pick it up at the same giant produce market that everyone from the supermarkets to the town markets to the tiendas buys it. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing because it is produce and much of it is Mexican. But with inflation it is increasingly expensive. And the junk crowds the shelves in its shiny, colorful packaging. I swear, they put some addictive substance in those potato chips.

I am sure that people here still eat a lot more fresh stuff than in many places in the States. There are, in the U.S. now places called food deserts where little is available besides junk. Here is a post with maps showing some of these deserts.

Anyway, as I mentioned in an earlier post (I think), there is a move on to improve diet in our state. And one very interesting new effort is in the schools. An article in El Diario de Xalapa, one of our local papers, describes a project directed to "change the food habits of school children." People from the University of Veracruz and from the Council of Science and Technology are involved in an effort to replace junk food available in or near schools with "intelligent" foods in order to provide for healthy growth and a better quality of life. At the same time that they are going to work to develop local businesses which can locally produce healthier foods which is a really good and interesting idea.

And I should note that even in our Colonia, part of the attraction of junk food is that both parents often work long hours and as in the Stats, junk food is what tired parents resort to, especially if they don't know all the pitfalls. And the state is planning to work on education.

Rolling Stones in Mexico

Yikes! Two of the Rollling Stones look like this! So old I can't tell who they are!

Anyway, according to El Diario de Xalapa where I found this picture, they are going to be recording in Mexico for a Martin Scorcese-directed documentary homage to them.

Rita the Dog's blog, check it out

Well, we brought up Rita well. We always told her she was the best dog in the world, and we still do, especially since she's been so tolerant of her new brother and sisters. She IS the best dog in the world. Also the smartest. How many dogs do YOU know who have their own blog? Check it out here. She's already got something like ten posts. We are very proud of her. It just wears her out, but she keeps on going.

Are humans an evolutionary side show?

There's been some news in the past few days that lots of animals are more capable of learning than we give them credit for but that there is such a thing as being too smart for your own good after all: thinking too much to solve a problem may just mess you up.
In his op ed piece Verlyn Klinkenborg in the New York Times yesterday commented on this idea.

Now I don't want to be anti-intellectual because I hate people being anti-intellectual. In fact, I'd really rather say that being intellectual means being thoughtful, having curiosity and interest in discovering stuff, seeking interesting and useful and creative connections. The best intellectual endeavors are tempered by humility and a touch of wisdom. But being too smart or knowing too much means mucking up the works, inventing solutions far more complex than the problem requires, having to show off you can invent such solutions. Being too smart means not caring you don't have the wisdom to temper one's cleverness, to harness it for good rather than let it run rampant for gain, for power, for meanness.

End of THAT pronouncement. It all is meant to say that perhaps human beings don't represent some kind of advanced stage of evolution, that our ability, based on our smarts to override our instincts instead of work with them, to mess things up with our big brains may wipe us out much faster than any maladaptive quirk the dinosaurs had.

La Finca de Vero y Miguel

Last blog I mentioned that we passed a little farm marked as an ecological sanctuary. I don't quite remember the words. BUT this reminded me that I have never put up the pictures of the finca of our friends and neighbors, Vero and Miguel. To get to their little finca, you actually have to pass through the gates of an old hacienda called El Trianon. Our neighbor, Juan Calypso, wrote about the finca AND El Trianon last November here and provided some very nice pictures of the hacienda.

Vero and Miguel are hoping to sell the finca to help finance their hotel project. They have already built a dare I say charming autohotel that anyone could stay in quite happily and are working on a grander project next door: a kind of conference center which looks like it will be quite elegant.

ANYWAY, I just thought I'd put up a few new pictures of the finca for you. And it too is an ecological sanctuary, meaning it is kept organically. Aside from being a very pretty piece of property, Vero and Miguel planted a ton of different kinds of fruit trees. I was most amazed in my city person way that they actually have a CINNAMON tree! I guess I thought cinnamon came in jars. Just kidding. There was a charming song in the now very old musical called Man of La Mancha about a little bird in a cinnamon tree that I still find myself humming from time to time.

ANYWAY, here are some pictures, starting, of course, with the cinnamon tree which actually smelled just like cinnamon.

Vero is from here in our Colonia and Miguel is from Germany. Their house here in the Colonia and the one at the finca are really seemless blends of German and Mexican. Here are a couple of views of the kitchen-living room area.

Here is the front of the house. It actually looks almost the same as the picture on Juan Calypso's post.

Here are pictures of Vero and Jim amidst the fruit trees and a picture of a tree bearing ugli fruit.

The property has a river along the back. Here's a view from on top, one looking up the stairs from the river, and a view of the water source. In keeping with it being an ecological kind of place, the water is pumped from a spring. It also has an environmentally sound septic system.

The other side of the property runs along the small road from El Trianon. Here's a view from the finca to the road and a picture along the road.

A Sunday Walk in the Country

Sunday, we took the dogs to our favorite walking place. Instead of going straight down to the little river, though, we turned right, between two cow pastures, as we’ve been doing lately. We were in cattle country: bulls for beef and heifers for milk. The heifers seemed mostly to be the traditional Holstein, though there were some brownish ones which Jim (who knows a lot more than I do) wasn’t sure of. They may have been a local mix.*

This countryside is lyrical, like hilly farm country you might remember from the 1950s. Small farms with fairly small fields, but except for one, not overgrazed. We’ve noticed here that people move their cows from field to field as the grass is shorn. Recently I read that it is good organic practice to graze the cattle then move them, then let their manure and the rain do its work till a pasture is green again. This seems to be what these folks are doing. Of course sometimes when the bulls are moved, they are REALLY moved so they can become beef.
I think this cattle must be producing meat that if not organic is what people would at least call sustainable. The bulls aren’t neutered. I think they may be loaded for slaughter right from the fields with no final stay at a feedlot. If they did go to a feedlot, I’d expect they’d be more tender for eating. In fact, there is a very small slaughtering facility right on the edge of Xico where we sometimes see a bull or two patiently awaiting their fate. Of course this has its own problems as the blood goes right into the river. When we buy beef these days we buy it from a butcher in the Coatepec market. I am going to ask where he gets it. The beef is flavorful and tough. If you cook it right, it makes good stews and good very skinny steak-like things. It definitely is not like US meat. It takes getting used to, but you do and you like it and you feel like you are being virtuous because the animals had a nice life in a lovely setting, the environment does okay, and the meat is better for you.

We walked further than we had before and came to a plot of about twenty acres alongside the river with an official sign marking it as a private ecological sanctuary. We talked briefly to the people who owned it, a couple. The man was getting ready to leave so we didn’t ask too many questions, but next time we probably will ask a few at least. Tthe man got on his horse and rode along the trail going up the hillside. He tipped his hat to us when he said, “Hasta luego.” I would like to know more about what they are growing, etc.

We park the car to start our walk where there is still the feel of town, or at least the edge of town: still houses fairly close together. There’s been some construction at one of them, and Sunday, when the man there waved at us, he said, come get some trout! They’ve opened a trout farm and a little restaurant down the hill by the water. Trout farming is a big thing in this area, or I should say, there are a growing number of small trout farms. Trucha, in Spanish. So on the way back to the car we walked down with the dogs and bought a couple of trout. The man and his son held a net on either side of the concrete holding pond and fished out a half a dozen or so squirming, jumping trout. The dogs were straining on their leashes. We picked two. The man whopped them on the back of the head with something, weighed them on a very old scale, sliced open their bellies and then gutted them with his fingers. I told Jim we should bring the guts home with us for compost. He said I was going a little far. Hmm.

Yesterday I scaled them and cooked them. These trout don’t seem to have that much flavor, but they are succulent and with the garlic and butter and lime I baked with them, they were quite tasty. They were big trout so Jim and I shared one. Today, I fried up the leftover fish in olive oil with onions and tomatoes and roast poblano pepper and we had them on some tortillas.

Below are some pictures of the walk. They are consecutive but unfortunately my camera card filled up before we even got to the ecological place, let alone to where I could take pictures of the trout farm. Another time.

I keep thinking I'll gather my flower pictures (and some of Jim's which are better) according to the time of year we take them, and the time of year they blossom. They are forever changing. Here are two pictures of this month's bounty.

On these roads we generally see more horses and riders than cars and trucks.

A giant tree. We think it is probably a member of the genus Ceiba. Here are two shots (the second one because I couldn't resist including it) of the tree from a bit of distance and then one of its trunk.

I keep thinking all the milk we ever get comes from giant factory-style dairies, but Nestle picks some of its milk up right on these small farms. Here is the truck on the way to the farm, and next the truck at the farm.

It was pretty hot, and poor Giaco we think suffers some under his growing coat. But he was the first to find water out on this field.

A little further along, the road crossed an irrigation ditch. Here are Happy and Rita in it, and the next photo shows Cosi wallowing.

Just a view past some trees.

And the last picture I got before my camera card filled up.

* Jim informs me that I am using the word "heifer" way too loosely. We did see some heifers, but after they've had a calf and are giving milk, he told me, the proper word for them is COW.