From Xico

A visit to IMSS

Yesterday, Jim and I went to the IMSS offices in Xalapa to sign up for Mexican health insurance. IMSS stands for Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social. In Mexico, Social Security doesn't just cover retierment (actually, it covers more in the US, too) but covers health care, worker protecton, long term coverage for problems associated with work, retirment and child welfare. Started in 1943, it has idealistic goals but exists in a poor country. While it is designed for workers and their families, too many people can't find work with employers that are willing to pay for it if they can find regular work at all. Nonetheless, it is a pretty amazing effort, I suspect unique in less-well-off countries, to provide national health insurance as well as the other benefits mentioned above. According to the IMSS web page, it is "the largest social security institution in Latin America, fundamental pillar of the individual and collective well-being of Mexican society and principle redistributor of wealth in Mexico. It is undoubtedly one of the institutions most beloved by Mexicans." In a population of more or less 100 million people, close to 47 million people are covered by the government health insurance program. This is not to deny the huge problems of the poor in this country. The fact that cervical cancer is the fourth largest killer of women in Mexico alone speaks to the deficiencies. But still, the effort is remarkable, all the more so because the coverage actually does mean that close to half the population has access to decent if not fancy care. For people from the US, routine care is so inexpensive that it is practically under the radar for our US insurance deductible. If costs actually exceeded our deductible, our US policy would cover some portion of them. However, when we reach 65 and (hopefully) are covered by Medicare, Medicare will not cover treatment in foreign countries. So we paid $550 for the year for both of us. For the first two years, not everything is covered. But the third year, it is. Thus, if we need extensive treatment here, we will be able to pay for it. As I said it is more basic, but it is generally pretty good. We have friends from the US who have successfully had bypass surgery, been treated after a severe heartattack and been diagnosed and so far successfully treated for cancer, as well as for numerous less threatening conditions. For something requiring extensive and longer-term care, I'd probably want to go be near family in the states, but it is good to know there is decent care available here in case of immediate need.

There is kind of a standard procedure for getting permits, etc. here, and at first it is a bit annoying, but then you start to appreciate it -- and the fact that it actually represents a government efficiency. As for everything else we've had to apply for, you go to the relevant office, in this case IMSS, demonstrate your eligibility and get the first parts of your paperwork. Then you go to the bank, a private bank, to pay for the service. Then you go to the copy-making people, private again, in this case a couple of people with copying machines at the front of a little tienda selling sodas, etc, and get your copies, then you go back upstairs, fill out the rest of your forms and get your card or car sticker or whatever. Note that the banking and the xeroxing is "outsourced." Especially in the cae of the xeroxing, think how enormously efficient this is, how much it saves the government in copy machine costs, paper, bureaucracy associated with government equipment, etc. AND it provides jobs for people who don't have to go through civil service bureaucracy! Plus, they also get IMSS (Jim is going to say, are you sure? I haven't verified it, but I suspect being right across from IMSS, they do. The rates employers pay for workers are different from those expats pay.)

So anyway, we wandered out of the IMSS office into a very disturbing exhibition of paintings in the Carlos Fuentes Library -- main branch of the Xalapa public library. The exhibition was called "Migra" and I wish folks in the US could see it. The artist, extraordinarily skillful, uses a superrealist style -- with exaggeration and surrealist touches -- to portray just what migration to the US costs Mexican workers and their families. It was extremely disturbing. I will try to get some photos.

Photos, by the way will have to wait till next week since John our neighbor and Satellite Dish God is leaving for el campo for four or five days and taking our access to high speed with him. Pictures are impossibly slow to load on dial up.

After this exhibit, we walked across the street on the way to the car and stopped in the gallery under the Agora, the delightful cultural center in the main city park, where we saw what I have to call a whimsical and charming Frida Kahlo-Diego Rivera show which begins outside with two life-sized stuffed figures of the couple sitting on a bench at the entrance. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera might at this point seem "been there, done that," but this exhibit had some early and uncharacteristic work from both of them as well as a lovely history-via-personal photos. Frida's bed was hanging at a cockeyed angle from the high ceiling.

Today we have our second group Spanish lesson, this time at our house, with Jim and Mindy and Alberto and Jo. Have to go get ready!

Notes from a coffee addict

As you know, we live in the heart of Coffee Country. Right now the coffee plants are heavy with beans. The ones that make the best coffee are bright red when they are ripe, and there are plenty of those. The coffee harvest lasts from late October through March, with beans ripening continuously throughout these months. For best flavor, they have to be picked within a few days of full ripening. Actually, I think to be any good at all they have to be picked fast. Jim and I and Guillermo bought 70 coffee plants last summer and Guillermo did the very hard work of planting them all on our steep hillside. These new plants won't be ready to harvest for another two and a half years. But there were already a bunch of mature ones. Pete, the former owner, worshipped the view to the extent of lopping off everything that obscured it, but he didn't kill everything so a number of the coffee plants have been reborn (it is the habit to lop off coffee trees, especially fat old ones after harvest anyway). And Guillermo is harvesting for us and he and Jero are shelling and drying -- the first stage. The beans will have to have yet another layer removed. Our beans thus far are a beautiful, shiny red, like cranberries. We had thought we might have enough for a couple of pots, but it seems we will actually have enough for several kilos, spread out over the coming months!

Which leads me to the fact that we have found another good place to buy coffee, this one in Teocelo (check out the map on Part I of our 8 hours in... post). I had mentioned that the organic coffee available in Coátepec was not as good as coffee from La Onza which is very fine shade grown coffee with very little use of chemicals, if any. I haven't asked directly, but it is important to realize that a lot of stuff here is close to organic: it is just incredibly difficult and expensive to get an organic certification. The owners of La Onza are warm and gracious and very willing to talk about coffee and everything connected to it.

I bought a book at La Onza called "Tomando Café, Manual del Catador." A catador is a coffee taster, and that is exactly what the author, Ramón Aguilar Ruíz was for many, many years. As it says on the back cover, "You, gentle reader, will find the bases for becoming an expert coffee taster." Along the way, it provides a lot of information in a slender volume about coffee growing, harvesting, etc.

But we have, as I said, found another place for buying coffee that may have us hooked. There are, you have to realize, a huge number of coffee stores, particularly in Coátepec which is both the center of the business of coffee growing in the region and a tourist town as well. Teocelo is not yet much of a tourist town. Jim and I first went there quite a number of years ago. We parked alongside the small town park and walked around feeling like we were definitely strangers. Now of course we live here and everything feels different. Anyway, Jim and Mindy, whom I think I've mentioned, are the only Gringos who live in Teocelo, and they told us about this coffee store, so of course we went. Jo and Alberto were with us -- we had just finished the first Spanish lesson the six of us are having together, this time at Jim and Mindy's. (I am sort of writing up the lessons, Alberto is really great with pronunciation lessons and with introducing us to considerably more awareness of everyday speech patterns and enhancing vocabulary, etc. etc.)

The name of the place is La Mesa. It sells café orgánico, calidad exportación. Now calidad exportación is an interesting concept because it is the highest quality coffee that goes to Europe, but Americans by and large actually seem to prefer lower quality and that's what we get in the US! American blend coffee uses less than rosy beans and definitely is roasted less (the roasting is usually done in the States). La Mesa coffee is sold in a store in an old colonial building that is just another one-story pitch-roofed colonial building on a stone-paved street. The front doors open into a high-ceilinged entryway with a bell with a clapper that you have to ring. The owner opens the store only when a customer shows up because he and his wife live in the large room on the other side of the store and there's no need to leave the door ajar. He is an older man, maybe in his late seventies, trim, elegant in a casual sort of way. Elegant is a way of being I think. There is a kind of elegance that quite a number of people rich and not so rich, young and old have here. The jaw specialist Jim went to has elegance in spades.

The owner whose name I have unfortunately forgotten brought us into the store, a fairly simple room, but ample and cheerful. He explained that they have three roasts: expresso, European and American, each in its own big, covered barrel. The coffee comes from his family's coffee finca nearby. As we chatted, his wife came in, a somewhat younger woman, very energetic. She explained that although she seemed energetic, she preferred the slower pace of the country where she was from. She loved going back to the finca and did not like the pace of the city, the city being Teocelo which of course from our perspective didn't seem to have a city pace at all. I'm not sure of the population but I would imagine it couldn't have more than ten thousand people in it. We asked the owner if Teocelo had gotten a lot busier in recent years. He said, maybe a little.

There is a railroad museum in Teocelo, and the owner is the founder and curator. We are hoping to visit it soon: he'll open it for us if we give him a call. In the late nineteenth century, a railroad was built by a private company, US if I remember correctly, which went between Xalapa and Teocelo. It was supposed to go to Córdoba, but the terrain proved too difficult. I can believe that! Until the 1920's it ran successfully between Teocelo and Xalapa. In the early twenties, there was a strike -- possibly part of the Revolution but I don't know -- and the railroad was turned over to the workers who ran it as a cooperative venture until I think maybe the thirties when the federal government took it over (I'll have to check all this). In any event, by the late forties, roads had been constructed and buses and trucks provided much faster transportation so the train was shut down. The museum is in the old train station which the owner of La Mesa rescued from doom and destruction. I am looking forward to learning more.

The owner and his wife live, as I said, in the very large room adjoining the store. The hall, the store and their living quarters are in a line, all facing the street, all with very tall windows. The living quarters are ample, if one room. The walls are painted blue and rose -- that washed kind of look common in Mexico -- and look lovely. As seems fitting, the furniture is heavy, dark classical Mexican looking with brocade covers. And there is a very up-to-date exercycle.

We bought coffee en grano (in bean form) media kilo Europeo, media kilo espreso. It cost 40 pesos per media kilo, or a little less than four dollars for a little more than a pound.

In Mexico, folk medicine blends into everyday life for everyone. It's actually wrong to call it folk -- maybe traditional is better -- even that sounds wrong. It's just that long before US producers started touting health claims for their verious processed products, Mexicans were aware of possible health benefits in various things they ate and drank. Much of it is true, I think. There are all kinds of teas and herbs and tree leaves and fruits good for the stomach, for coughs, for treating injuries, for fevers. Anyway, they've incorporated modern claims along with the old ones, some of which may be new wives' tales.

Here are the claims for coffee on the pamphlet that comes with La Mesa coffee.

Brain and nervous system: Inhibits depression, promotes short term memory retention, reduces or eliminates migraine headaches, lifts the spirits.

Heart and circulatory system: Allows a bigger quantity of oxygenated blood to reach the muscles. Helps move the greasy acids which are in the blood.

Respiratory system: protects agains asthma, opens bronchial passages.

Stomach: Favors the production of salivary and gastric juices, stimulates the secretion of bile.

Liver: Reduces up to 80% the risk of cirrhosis of the liver in consumers of alcohol. Reduces the risk of bile stones.

Kidneys: reduces 10% kidney stones.

Regarding cancer: Neutralizes the chemicals causing cancer owing to the polyphenols (?) which coffee contains.

A couple of other notes from the pamphlet:

It is recommended that children have a cup of coffee with milk in the morning to improve their scholarly performance.

Coffee is not just caffeine: it contains substances which are advantageous for the organism such as chlorogenics, mineral salts, aminoacids, lipids, niacine, etc.

This information, by the way, was obtained from a Mexican Coffee Council article.

Here's how to prepare tradicional coffee on the stove:

In a clean pot put on the fire only the water necessary for the number of cups to be consumed.
When the water begins to boil, wait a minute and pour in a soup spoon of coffee for each cup you are going to prepare.

Cover the pot and let it rest a few minutes. Wait till it settles, strain and serve.

Here in our neighborhood, people put the sugar -- lots of it -- in with the coffee. It's kind of like drinking syrup.

Anyway, enjoy your coffee and don't forget to buy Mexican shade-grown coffee, preferably from Veracruz.

Within twelve miles of home Part II

(THe first part of this post is right below this one)

Remember you can click on a picture to make it bigger.

As you know, I am deeply moved by many of the shrines and altars and churches in our part of Mexico. You can understand, if only viscerally, how faith comforts and strengthens the poorest of the poor.

Matlalapa has two churches. I took some pictures of the smaller one at the top, far end of town.

Outside the church

And then, inside, filled with light and loveliness.

The niches have figures dressed in real clothes made for parishioners for various feast days. The clothes are changed throughout the year.

And the altar:

http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/post?__mode=insert_image&blog_id=128923
Insert Image

A few more photos from between Matlalapa and Xico Viejo that we took on our way home.


An extemely long line of laundry.

When we got back to Xico, we drove past La Iglesia de Cristo Rey which was being readied for its fiesta which took place yesterday (I'm writing this on Monday.)
Here are some pictures, including a couple showing the large portal they put in front of the front door for feast days. Each church makes its own; each is different. As you can see, Cristos Rey is a more prosperous church than the one in Matlalapa. IT is in a new neighborhood where some pretty prosperous looking houses are going up. You can also see two of the nicho figures.

And here is Christo Rey in front of the altar for His feast day.

It had been a long day and we were hungry. We stopped at a little restaurant on a side street and had wonderful chiles rellenos in a lovely, spicey broth. You will have to come and join us one day.

There's more: a hike down a cliff to a beautiful waterfall. But that'll have to wait. Just remember, it was all within the eight hour time frame, though!

Be sure to check out John Calypso's blog for an account of why we were all awakened with what sounded like bomb blasts at 3 or so on Sunday morning (in the AM, that is). www.vivaveracruz.com/blog.

Within twelve miles of home, Part I

The NYTimes has a column called "36 hours in...." We could call the following couple of posts "8 hours in uplands Veracruz". Everything you see is within twelve miles of our house along a route that pretty much goes out and back. We drove from our house to Xico to Xico Viejo to Matlalapa and back, taking small detours here and there. As you'll notice, a lot of the pictures make the weather look cold and gray. It WAS cold and gray. Jacket weather. When we got back to Xico for an early supper/late lunch, we and everyone else ate in our jackets. There is no central heating here.

One of our games here is to see how many backroads to the main bulk of Cofre de Perote we can find. Below is a link to a map of our area. You can find Xalapa, Coatepec, and Xico on it, and if you veer west a bit, you can see Cofre de Perote. But the other places we went which lie in the folds of Cofre are not shown. You can get a good idea of our route, though, if you go to Xico and let your finger wander sort of south and southwest just a tiny bit. As the title of this post says, we were never more than twelve miles from home. It was quite a trip though we found no route to Cofre de Perote via Xico Viejo y Matlalapa.

Download map_of_veracruz.doc

At the top of Xico -- the far end from where we live -- we stopped to take a picture of the sign that lists the towns beyond.

Don't even try to pronounce the names unless you are Mexican, except maybe Cruz Blanca. The man at the left was waiting for the bus to Xico Viejo, the man on the right for family to come give him a ride. We gave the man on the left a ride. His name is Vicente. He turned out to be an abogado, a lawyer, who dealt in property issues which makes him a Notary Public, here a somewhat fancier lawyer. He was on his way to his cabañita in Xico Viejo from Xalapa where he and his family live. He was bringing wood stain for the people working for him When we got to his place, we parked and went to see his place. To get to it, we crossed the property of a trucha farmer who also owned a little restaurant. Here's the front of the restaurant:

This is the very, very narrow footbridge you need to cross to get to Vicente's. Rita wouldn't get on it until Jim was in front of her and I behind. She did go back over it by herself when we left.

Here are pictures of Vicente talking to his head albañil or construction worker and of his house as well as a view from his property.

Vicente told us "this is your house". He told his workmen not to challenge us if we stopped by when he wasn't there, that we could visit any time we wanted. If we buy property in and around that area, we will contact him. You might notice that he is diverting the stream for a short distance. He wants to stock a couple of trout (trucha) ponds. Pretty soon the area will be drowning in trout ponds: the government has been pushing it as a means for local folks to make some money, and it is, but there is not an endless market for trout. As you may have read on John Calypso's blog, www.vivaveracruz.com/blog, there are five trout farms right around our house here in Colonia Ursulo Galván. The basic assumption I think is a good one: this is a fertile area, excellent for small-scale agricultural projects of a specialized nature such as high quality organic coffee, fruits, dairy products and trucha. However, someone needs to do some planning! This leads me to this whole microfinancing fad. There is an article about it in The New Yorker on October 30 (I just got the issue last week). Not a bad idea as one tool, but, good grief, what an unexamined thing to be doing all over the place! Probably I will not be able to resist saying more about this later.

From Vicente's, we wended our way towards Matlalapa. Here are some photos from that stretch:

These crosses are on the side of the road facing down the valley towards Xalapa.

Just another view (she said, tongue in cheek)

A pretty entrance to a house in a pueblita along the way.

A pretty little store.

Matlalapa is almost at the end of a winding dirt and rock road that stretches all the way from Xico. It is small and very poor. Here you can see a view of the main church. IN front are some orange I think school buildings, and along the road a little white-painted wood house. Most of the houses are like this: wood slat houses with dirt floors. It was gray and cold there: winter has come early.

In this view of a small homestead in Matlalapa you can see several horses in the foreground. I doubt you can tell, but they have wooden saddles typical of the area. The horses are well-fed. They are essential.

If you click on this link, you will see a picture I stole from a local newspaper which shows some women in Matlalapa gathered around a fogón, a wood stove for heating, in one of the houses. Download women_inside_a_fairly_typical_house_in_matlalapa_around_a_wood_stove.doc

Although they do get freezing temperatures in December in Matlalapa, this year it arrived in November. As you can see, you have to stay pretty close to the stove to get any warmth since the wind rushes through the spaces between the planks in the wooden walls.

Here is a bit of translation of the article that accompanies the picture: (From EL SOL DE IRAPUATO, Nov 16 2006)

"AT night, everybody gets into bed together, husband, wife and kids, and whoever else is living with them to stay warm...To warm the bed, they put a pot of boiling water at the foot before getting in. ...

"For a woman here, this how the day goes: you wake up at dawn to light the stove to make tortillas and warm the coffee and in the process, get yourself warm. Then you send the kids to school while you continue doing your own chores.

"And while you do your stuff, this is what the weather does: in the morning, there is dense fog, at midday, it dissipates a bit, and then during the afternoon, it begins to descend from the mountains covering trees and houses equally.

"On the road, a young girl and her little brother, both carrying red backpacks. Their knowledge of Russia is only what they know fromt heir textbook, but they are pretty sure that the climate in Russia must be like that in their own pueblo at the times when ice has caused the death of various animals and even some people.

"En Matlalapa the men awaken between four and five in the morning, have a cup of coffee and eat some tortillas and frijoles. Then they go to their fields, worried that the low temperatures may have killed some of their corn, chile and bean crops...."

You may wonder how chiles survive such a climate. The chiles at higher altitudes are called extranjeros and are different from those at lower altitudes. They have black seeds and are fairly large and roundish, mostly yellow and red when ripe. Jim is trying to grow some here, but it may be too warm.

Around Matlalapa, the crops grow at crazy angles as you can see in the picture below of a dead cornfield just below a towering cliff.

The newspaper article goes on: "'The children for their part ,'says Señora Juárez, grandmother of twelve, 'are accustomed to a harsh life and they keep playing in spite of everthing. Near her, a number of children seem to affirm her words. While some tumble around her playing among themselves and laughing, others wipe their dripping noses, red from the cold. In the next room, the youngest grand child sleeps enveloped in several blankets.

"Concerning the low temperature, Sra Juárez says, 'This is the way it is year after year. So we just wrap ourselves up to keep warm.'

"The women...have to put up with the freezing water which runs through the river where every third day they go to wash their clothes. They do it near middy when for a short while, the son sends out some rays dispelling the mist.

"The old people are accustomed to pas the day sitting very close to the stoves in their kitchens, as close as they can get so they can warm their tired and sick bodies."

When Jim and I were on our way out of Matlalapa, we started down the long, cobbled main street. Maybe fifty feet ahead of us, a small girl at the side of the road turned at the noise of our car and panicked. She is not accustomed to strange traffic. She tore full speed across the road and fell flat on her face. She got up and made it to the other side, where she stood huddled, facing away from us. We stopped to see if she was all right. The look of sheer terror on her face convinced us that we should not even get out. We drove a bit further and looked back to make sure she was okay. Sure enough, someone had come out to help her.

THis is all for now. More on the next post on this trip.

Xalapa Thanksgiving

Jim and I often look at each other and shake our heads in wonderment at how much our lives have changed since we got here. For one thing, here in Veracruz, friends and family are more important than being exactly on time. Thus, when friends knock on the gate, we have them in for coffee or drinks or whatever and get back to what we were doing a bit later. I am late with posters for Pronatura and I confessed this to Norma with some embarasment because I used to pride myself on being really prompt with work stuff. But she said not to worry, they still weren't ready to put them up at the nature center in Chichixatle -- they wouldn't be until the end of November: a two month delay after other delays. I do have to add that this is a very unusually long delay due to a complicated set of circumstances related in part to funding sources in the US. This is okay, you learn, because things that have to happen (medical procedures, for instance) do happen right on time. School starts on time. Buses come on time. The Birding group leaves on time for its hikes even when it is 6:00 am. And I still get my indexing jobs in on time, to this day following my friend Diane's advice of several years ago to get them in midday or so even if they're not due till five. Of course those are US bosses I do the indexes for. But on the other hand...how long have you had to wait in the US for the plumber to show up?

But human relationships (what an unattractive descriptive phrase for such critical and wonderful things) trump just about everything, or so it seems to this as yet novice. I remember (and I'm sure I've told some of you this) standing in line for a car sticker at the border in Nuevo Laredo behind some US businessmen awaiting the same. One guy commented on how slow things seemed and how kind of rund down and wouldn't Mexicans ever learn....The other guy said he thought they were learning. The next step, he thought, was to break them of the habit of having two hour lunches. In northern Mexico, in Monterrey, many people don't have two hour lunches anymore. Here it is still the norm for many people. But people work from 10am till 2pm and then from 4 till 8 so they get in an eight hour day! The two hour lunches mean that meals are shared, appreciated, and people get a bit of rest and time to do errands. The main meal of the day is the comida, between two and four, and having been eating this way now for awhile, I like it. For one thing, I think it's a good way to diet: A meal mid-afternoon does not leave you very hungry for a big supper, so I've been eating less and losing weight and not really trying to (though I should have been).

Anyway, you can read about one of our unexpected get togethers on our neighbor's blog at www.vivaveracruz.com/blog where you will also learn that Mindy and Jim have a blog from Teocelo. I made some veggie dishes for our Thanksgiving Day feast on and off while we were gathered on Wednesday night.

Below are some pictures from our Thanksgiving meal. We went to Xalapa to Dorothy and David's house. I've mentioned them before. Dorothy was a caterer-chef for many years in San Miguel and Guanajuato so not to many people turn down the chance to eat at her house. For Thanksgiving she provided the turkey, gravy and stuffing and SIX pies. The maybe twenty guests all brought the side dishes.

Here are some photos of the guests:

Dorothy is in the middle. On the left, Gloria is a biographer and former secretary to the Govenor of Veracruz. On the right is Edgar, a glorious pianist. His father recently retired as first violinist for the Xalapa Orquesta. The members of the Orquesta and their families turn up everywhere in Xalapa. Edgar teaches piano at one of the big universities and performs as well. He is Jewish, a member of the small Mexican Jewish community here.

This is Esteban and a friend of Dorothy and David's, I think a former student who lived with them.

THis is Ken. He actually was mayor of San Marcos, Texas at one time. We know San Marcos! He is also a former tennis pro who owns one of the most beautiful pieces of property around. He has gotten it into his head that he wants to go to Thailand, so he is trying to sell it.

THis kid is a piano prodigy. He is sixteen (today is his birthday) and he plays with sparkling technique. He can make up pieces "in the style of...." upon request. He loves to show off. He is every bit a teenager, not tthe least bit rarified. He is one of the students who lives with Dorothy and David. He is technically marvellous. He has to live a little I suspect to have the soul to put in his music the way Edgar does.

This is Jo and Alberto. They live near us in Coátepec. Jo is a highly skilled ceramicist who did a series of masks that were recently shown at the University of Veracruz. They recently returned from a trip to Indianapolis to attend to some personal matters. They were gone long enough that we were afraid they wouldn't come back. Boy, were we glad to see them!

This is Ross and (as he says) friend. Ross is from Baltimore where he spends the winter with his grandkids. He will be leaving Sunday, coming back in May. He went to Berkeley in the 1950's. He's a good old labor Democrat, smart and funny.

Jesus teaches piano at Universidad Veracruzana (the biggest one in Xalapa, maybe second best in Mexico). Here he is playing for us. Incidentally, the music department of UV is right across the street from Dorothy and David's place.

ANd this is my old man.

And that's enough for this blog. We had a great time and did all the regular stuff: ate too much, drank too much. But instead of watching football, we heard Jesus, Edgar and the Boy Genius play piano after dinner and heard Elaine sing. Wonderful.

Yesterday the ants came marching on. Thousands and thousands streaming from somewhere around the back of the woodpile, across the driveway, around the bodega, some drifting towards our back door and disappearing in the flower beds. I sprinkled generous doses of cinammon across the threshold of the backdoor, but they weren't particularly interested in coming in: other creatures were, caterpillars especially, to escape. Jim took a photo of an ant attacking the leg of a slender, long-legged creature. Jero came and we asked her what to do. "Leave them," she said. "They'll go away soon." And they did, as if they had never been there. Later that morning Anita and John, our neighbors, came home from their weekend in "el campo". They have a little house up above Xico where they get away from the crowds here in Col. Ursulo Galván. You have to realize John and Anita live in Colorado, literally miles and miles from their nearest neighbor. Anyway, their yard was swarming. The ants must have marched over to their house. Anita, who hates using pesticides, was about ready to dump clouds of them on the invading armies. We passed on Jero's advice to wait. They must have because we haven't heard any bad news about the ants since.

Jim has become captivated by insects here. It's hard not to. For everything that we humans have managed to invent, create, build, knit, sculpt, whatever, it's hard to find anything, not just insects, that competes with what is here without our input for complexity, delicacy, beauty, intricacy, funcionality, etc, etc. This is not to knock human inventiveness and creativity, just to say it is truly humbling to see what we did not do. Of course it is our human eye that appreciates these things and our art and photography that allow us to perpetuate the images and reenvision them. Anyway, Jim has put some of his insects on flickr. I take snapshots. Jim makes art. You can see some bugs as well as some other wonderful photos of his at www.flickr.com/photos/jbuddenh . Check it out. You won't regret the time spent.

This morning the clouds have departed. I woke up to a clear sky streaked with rosy shreds of cloud. Mist was coming off the waterfall. It is, for us, cold. You can see your breath.

Monday was a national holiday (again). This time, 20th of November which marks the day that Francisco Madero and his men forced the resignation of Porfirio Díaz. I think I said that before. All the towns big and small have parades of schoolchildren. For me this may have been one parade too many, not because I don't like parades, but because none of the schoolkids participating in our neighborhood parade looked particularly happy to be in it, and because it cost the parents thirty bucks a kid to put them in their parade uniforms. Granted, here thirty bucks wouldn't even buy two books, they're so expensive. But it would have bought a lot of other stuff for people on highly limited incomes. Jero makes thirty bucks for twenty hours' (más o menos) work a week. I was reminded of my public school years. Some one would get the the idea the schools had to rush into in some such activity and the parents would have to buy the requisites. I have one vivid memory (a nice one, actually, though my mother was, along with a lot of other mothers, miffed at the expense) of going to the campus at Fordham University in the Bronx where we lived to take part in a maypole dancing contest for which we had rehearsed endless hours. Each competing school's teams had a maypole with many ribbons dangling -- maybe it was all the girls in the sixth grade, something like that. A lot us. We each held a ribbon and did some steps or other to music to braid the ribbons around the pole. We each had to wear a white dotted swiss dress. I remember the parents complaining that they had to pay for these dresses (I loved mine, with its puffy skirt and puffy sleeves) which were not cheap and of course were WHITE. I remember my mother and her friends clucking: How many eleven year old girls had a lo of use for white dotted swiss dresses? How many could even keep them clean? What parent would deny his daughter? I lived in a very mixed neighborhood in those days, incomes varying from maybe upper middle class to definitely poor. The pressures were intense to make sure your daughter had her dress.

Anyway, here are a few pictures from the parade in the Colonia.

Winter and stuff

"Winter" has arrived. We have been told ever since we got here that it can be cold in November, December and January, and in fact is cold more often than not in these months. Jim and I have lived in warm climates long enough so that we have to agree that when they say cold, they mean cold. You folks in Missouri and Massachusetts and Connecticut may not think it is, but we were driven to light a fire in our living room stove. The stove is some fancy thing from Sweden and it works terrifically well. We took time off from our snug living room last night to go have pizza at Halágos in Coátepec. Halágos is not heated, but it has one of those giant torches -- like a huge gas burner -- to take the edge off. I think I will resist sending you photos of Halágos. Some of these places you should just be surprised by when you come. Halágos is owned by a couple from Mexico City. Lots of people in our area our refugees from Mexico City as I think I've mentioned before. The restaurant is a wonderful example of the less is more philosophy. On the side of a large courtyard, it is elegant with the original walls and rails and floors. Lighting is minimal and romantic. And the food is delicious and made mostly of local stuff.

Which leads me to reporting that last night I mentioned to my son that we never had so many people dropping in on us in our lives Before Mexico. I don't know quite what he thinks about our lives here, but I suspect he is worried about them. He commented that people must be bored if they're dropping in on each other all the time. He of course is non-stop busy as is Gillian. As are other people who say things like, when do you get the time to read? Partly, it's because Jim is retired and I only am doing indexing part-time. But partly it's because people here spend time with each other as a matter of choice.

I think our lives should offer hope to those of you who feel overwhelmed: this is what life is like when you don't contribute so much to global warming. No guilt for reading, talking, enjoying each other's company. No giant flat-screened TVs, no dishwashers, etc. No room for giant cars. Lots of stuff is in the neighborhood so we don't hop in the car to go shopping that often. We buy probably ninety percent of our food locally and fresh and we can't feel self-righteous about it because it's easier and tastier than going to the supermarket. We park and walk in town because just like it wasn't fun in NYC when I was a kid, trying to drive in Coátepec and Xalapa is not fun...but it IS fun to walk down busy streets and peek in shop windows and stop to chat to people and smell the food cooking in restaurants and know the lady selling me chicken and so on -- much more fun than parking in a giant asphalt parking lot and making your way through a box store or a mall (I do confess to loving to go to Costco here).

Of course we do live a charmed life. Life IS harder for most Mexicans than for most Americans. As I mentioned before, a lot of men in our neighborhood work at the local Coca Cola plant, the local Gamesa plant (Mexican equivalent of Nabisco), the giant Nestle plant six days a week, ten hours a day for $1.05 an hour. These are good jobs. Many others work six days a week -- 800 am to 600 pm -- in construction, or work part time as maids and gardeners or try to make some change selling groceries, etc (abarrotes) out of their houses. Some are coffee farmers. We have a neighborhood processing plant for coffee. With these jobs, people have to think twice before deciding spend the money to take the bus five miles into Coátepec.

People don't have access to good dentistry, for instance. When a tooth goes bad, it's yanked out. Period. So you will notice that Guillermo won't smile in a photo even though, missing teeth and all, he has a gorgeous smile. Medical care is a problem, though people here do get some kind of reasonable care even if they don't have the state insurance. (I have to find out more about that. I do know for people with even a low US sized income, good medical care is cheap without insurance at all. ) I suspect here in our Colonia, though, just as a tooth is yanked rather than treated, so the medical treatment does what is most expedient. And, in cold weather, they don't have fancy wood stoves (a whole other issue: our stove burns wood efficiently. Deforestation is a big problem)But living here what I think I have been learning is just how far afield we've gone in the US, thinking we need to be caught up in that giant engine of endless activity. Here you see right in front of your face the consequences of the global economy's emphasis on making, selling and buying stuff as the way to keep itself going around. You see it not only in the pain of extremely low wages and long hours, the rise in diabetes with the rise in consumption of processed sugar, the towns without men, but also in the hillsides scraped for large-scale industrialized agriculture, a growing use of feedlots, erosion of huge quantities of the rich soil of our region, smoky air from burning hundreds of acres of sugar cane.

And you see the consequences in the growing piles of garbage. Especially the rich and the foreigners complain about litter in Mexico. First, I have to say that in their personal and community space, Mexicans put Americans to shame. Then I have to say that the litter that exists is the litter from soda bottles and junk food wrappers and other over-packaging. This occurs I believe because there's no easy way to keep it out of sight. In the US, we hide our litter from ourselves, all the while adding to the garbage stream. We may recycle some stuff (this is expensive, too, and not the best way to deal with excess consumption). But we depend on garbage services to put it somewhere else. And that's what is done: it's put somewhere else. Squashed, maybe, so it doesn't take up so much room, but heaped. Here it is expensive to have your garbage picked up if you don't have much money. So people recycle and reuse a huge amount, but there is always some left over. And it is the stuff that results from the global economy depending on people to buy stuff they don't need and that often isn't good for them and that is wrapped in gobs and gobs of plastic and paper and foil that provides the visible litter in Mexico.

I don't think humans CAN be completely happy and satisfied as mortals, at least not yet. We haven't evolved to that point, and maybe it's good that we keep tossing and turning with questions and regrets and doubts and yearnings. It keeps at least some folks adventurous and curious. It keeps us compassionate. Because of the way we are, I don't think we even can know what a perfect society would look like let alone how to get to it.
but I do know that efforts to "green" the US while encouraging it to continue to consume ever more stuff are doomed to bring disaster on us all.

Anyway, I have to go -- I want to see the kids passing by. They're practicing for the parade on Monday. After that, there's the Fiesta of La Virgén de Guadalupe, then Posadas and Christmas.....

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood

Well, we were all geared up for the trip to Puerto Angel. The night before last we all met and made all the arrangements: picked a really neat hotel for $23.00 a night, learned something about the birds we'd be looking for, plotted the route, and left full of enthusiasm. Last night we took the car to Noe´s garage to be checked out, went to the vet to get Louie el Gato's vaccinations updated, etc. etc. And came home to find messages from Bob, the orgnaizer that the trip was off. Tropical Storm Sergio had decided to become a hurricane -- an unusual event this late in the season -- and thus would be stirring up the seas so that we wouldn't be able to go out on boats and possibly not even to go to the beach. Alas and alack. And alack and alas. However, there are Events in the Neighborhood this weekend: a fiesta and a parade to celebrate 20 de noviembre, the anniversary of the overthrow of the hated Porfirio Diaz which started the second Mexican Revolution. Incidentally, a study of the regime of Porfirio Díaz would give you all interesting insights not only into Mexican history, but into the U.S. in a philosophical way: that is, how bad things happen to good ideas. Díaz started out as a progressivist, a rationalist. He saw modernization as the way to a wonderful new Mexico but ended up selling Mexico's birthright to the very rich at home and abroad.

Anyway, I leave it to you to look him and his government up.

Yesterday afternoon was beautiful and warm and I had papers to deliver to The English Gardener, so Jim and I took a walk to his house. Here are some pictures from the walk.

Here you are looking back at our wall on the right and our neighborhood store on the left.

A new house being built on Miguel Alemán. It is going to be two stories.

This sign is right at the entrance to the soccer field.
The sign says, no tying up or grazing animals in this spot. Anyone caught in the act will be turned over to the municipal authorities. You can see La Perrita Rita in the lower right corner with her nose down, but she is just sniffing, not grazing.

Here is a view of the mountains from the edge of the soccer field at the top of our street.

Some people ahead of us on the road to Pauls:
Rita is looking for another good place to smell. There are plenty.

A bull in front of an unfinished house at Paul's crossroads.

After visiting Paul, we continued in the same direction to make our walk a loop home. Here are some more cows.

Jim, Rita and a neighborhood horse.

Stream from the bridge taking us back into the Colonia.

After our walk, we came home to find that a couple of USAers who live in Teocelo had stopped by to visit our neighbors who were out. We invited them in. You can read about them on John's blog -- Mindy and Jim. We had never met them and are glad we now have. Shortly thereaftr, John and Anita came home and came by. I had to kick them out because we had to take the car in to be checked for our trip which we still thought we were going on. Shortly thereafter, a terrific storm blew in. Here is what it looked like from our balcony just after it passed.

Guillemo has harvested our first bunch of coffee from what we all jokingly call our finquitita, or very tiny little farm.

Trip to Puerto Angel

We are planning to go to Puerto Angel this weekend -- leaving Thursday afternoon. W're going with the bird watchers and planning to go out to sea to see sea birds. (hmmm. That's alliteration, right?) Puerto Angel is on the Pacific coast in the state of Oaxaca. This isn't the city of Oaxaca and we will be going on major roads so I am pretty sure all will be fine. I'm ambivalent about going not because it's to Oaxaca but because I am always uneasy about going on trips before hand.

If you have been reading about Oaxaca in the papers and seeing/hearing about it in the news, you are both wrong and right to have concerns. You don't need to have any about us. At least not too many. (I told you, I'm always worried about trips before I start on them.) The concerns for Oaxaca are actually concerns about the whole country. I am going to try not to spend a lot of time on sociopolitical issues in this blog/letter to family and friends, but I will mention here that Mexico in a way is a microcosm of globalization as well as a crossroads between first and third-world countries. As well it is at a crossroads with choices to be made for the future: will it be dominated (and some say destroyed) by trying to follow the Chinese model or will it try a different tack and take innovative steps to develop its natural endowments in a sustainable way on behalf of more of its citizens. Many years ago when Nixon was President of the U.S. he decided to inflict pomp and circumstance on the country and dressed up various branches of the armed services in fancy suits and so on. I barely remember anymore. Maybe it's still the same and has just drifted out of my awareness. But in those days, people said he was making the USA look like a banana republic. Banana republic implied then as now gaudy dictatorships in horribly unequal societies a few, very rich and powerful usually white people on top; very, very poor and of course seemingly powerless and darker people on the bottom. And dictators. Although with the press reporting the democratization of Latin America talking about Banana Republics has gone out of style, Mexico (and the US) is in danger of becoming a full-fledged banana republic. We have been used to hearing about the democratization of Latin America, but we are being fooled. Globalization, free markets, do not in anyway guarrantee democracy, much less economic well-being for a substantial number of people.

Interestingly enough, though Mexico was a dictatorship by party -- the PRI or Partido revolucionario institutional-- for seventy years, in some ways, more of the people were better served than, say, in Venezuela or Chile. Much, much larger percentages of the population are literate (I believe that more people are functionally literate in Mexico than in the US), had and have access to some health care, etc. etc. Also in Mexico, more people are obviously mixed: indigenous and Spanish with, especially in the East, a dash or more of African. There is a large lower-but-working (extremely hard) class and a middle class. You can see this not just in big cities but in smaller towns throughout Veracruz.

But there is severe poverty, too, stretching its fingers through rural areas and urban areas alike: poor indigenous farmers who have had land seized or who can no longer make it in the globalized market or whose land has died; formerly employed factory workers who've seen jobs go overseas; clerks, police, and teachers.

In Oaxaca, the first protest was by the teachers. Throughout Mexico teachers are paid very little and for instance here in Veracruz, they have to go to teach where they are sent by the government. They cannot afford cars and frequent bus trips are beyond their means. Here in Veracruz, teachers from Xalapa may be sent fifty or sixty miles down the road to Cardel, say, to teach. They take a room there, and on Fridays and Sundays you can see them hitching rides home or back to school.

Oaxaca is much poorer than Veracruz. I suspect most of the problems here are worse there, sometimes much worse. It is the canary in the mineshaft, if you will. It has a dictatorial (ironically, PRI) governor who, instead of attending to the teachers tried to clamp them down. He has been accused of corruption and stealing money. The Fox goverment reportedly left him alone because Fox's party, PAN needed the PRI to have any chance at the last election. THEN the Fox government moved in, rumor has it, at the governor's request when he couldn't bring things under iron-fisted control (and possibly at the urging of the US) to try with more force to put a lid on things. This failed. It also happened when, according to La Jornada, and the Catholic Church, negotiations were actually getting somewhere.

There has been very little violence on the part of the demonstrators, but the national and state police have reportedly taken a number of people prisoner without saying where they are and have killed several in crackdowns.

Anyway, I am reminded about when we would hear about brutal incidents in Uganda when we were in the Peace Corps. They would be reported in the US press and parents would panic. We often didn't know anything at all had happened until we got our very late editions of Newsweek. It's the same here. We do not feel endangered. But as Uganda was, so is Mexico as a country endangered. I might add, so are ordinary people throughout the world.

Birdwatching on Cero de las culebras

Jim has decided he really does like birdwatching. I'm aftraid I lose patience trying to spot tiny things through binoculars and telescopes. Jim's not an addict (yet) but some of the people we go with are. They can hang out for five, six, seven hours peering through binoculars and telescopes. I like the outings, but me, I'd rather look at the trees and plants and the scenery or, if necessary, read a book. And take pictures of the birdwatchers instead of taking pictures of the birds.

My impression of our birdwatching friends is that they are much more friendly than birdwatchers in the US, less competitive. They share what they see with each other and maintain a joint tally. They all get excited together. That part I like. But as for the birdwatching, at this point, my favorite way to birdwatch is to sit on our balcony with my feet on the railing and a cup of coffee in one hand so I can say in a lazy voice, "Oh, look, a hawk." And I don't need binoculars to see it. Not to knock the quality of birdwatching from our balcony: without binoculars and with very little effort we see not just a variety of hawks but vultures which are glorious in flight and cattle egrets and humming birds and social flycatchers and of course grackles and on and on.

Last Saturday we went on a birdwalking hike up Cero de las Culebras, the hill of snakes, on the north side of Xico. It is an ecological preserve right in the town. Here is a list of the birds the group spotted in just an hour or so:

Here is a list of the names of some of the birds people saw on this trip:

Azure crowned humming bird, ruby-crowned kinglet, black throated green warbler, social flycatcher, blue-grey tanenger, grey cat bird, yellow throated euphonia, rufus crowned warbler, brown jay, lesser goldfinch, colibris, white winged tanenger, spot breasted wren, blue gray gnat chatcer, lesser goldfinch, baltimore oriole, kingbird, calandria, yellow olive flycatcher, banded black wren, yellow wingd tanenger, blackheaded saltavor, rosy sparrow, various buntings, red-headed gray bodied woodpecker, and roadside hawk.

The group has a ritual of sorts: a bird walk isn't considered really a good one if you don't see a roadside hawk.

Please forgive spellings and capitalization problems. Bird watchers have rules for capitalization in particular that I don't quite follow.

I have to add that I am not ho-humming birds. They are glorious. But so are the butterfllies, the bugs, the plants, the animals and everything else around here. A wonderful and I think the ultimate book of birds in Mexico is called "A Guide to the Birds of Mexico and North America" by Steve N.G. Howell and Sophie Webb. Oxford University Press. It has stunning plates. ALMOST makes me want to be a better birdwatcher.

Below are some pictures not of birds but of birdwatchers and views from last Saturday's trip. You can spot Jim among them and by himself. Remember, you can click on them to make them bigger.

Here is a view of the Coàtepec Mercado from Cero de las Culebras:

Here is a view of the Cathedral and the Government Palace and a few other things around the plaza.

Here is a view of Xalapa in the distance.