FAMILY PHOTO

God, this is awkward. And just for the record, lest the expressions on their faces lead you to think otherwise, THEY were the ones who wanted a photo. And that guy on the left, no idea who he is.

LA CASA

So here're a few shots of the home I stayed in this summer. It's Espana house is made of up of three different buildings around a patio. The first (and coolest) is where I stayed (you might recognize my worn-daily plaid shirt hung over a chair), which was right beside the senora's in-house restaurant.



The second building is where the great-aunt Matilde slept. Notice it has no doors. This 92-year-old lady just slept out in the open; tough old bird. This is the same room where they store the corn and coffee.



Here's where the family lives.



And here's where one bathes, washes clothes and does the dishes.



I think I'm going to miss bathing outdoors.

CLOSE-UP

Follow-up to "PIZZA NIGHT" post where I wrote:

(If you look carefully in the cabinet in the background, you’ll see the postcard of the Twin Towers I sit beside every morning at breakfast… the Señor España sent back home in the early ‘90s when he was working in upstate New York. Honestly, this world.)

JUST TO MAKE GRANDMA JEALOUS

Wanted to include this photo of my typical breakfast: cup of coffee with a roll that’s remarkably similar to a Moravian lovefeast bun.

WHAT GOES UP HAS TO GO DOWN… RIGHT?

This past Sunday, Yolanda and Jesus were kind enough to take me on a mega hike. Our plan was to hike all the way to the top of the highest mountain that looms over Buenavista, and well, we almost made it. If it weren’t for trails that more than once misled us into thinking they led back down to the main road only to subitously turn back up the mountain, banging knees on boulders, and the overhang has obviously cut for people who measure under five feet, we would have made it. Regardless, it was still a rewarding hike, and we got some great photos to boot.

If you had any doubt about how remote Buenavista is, this photo’s for you:


On the top of the second-highest mountain in Buenavista, there sits this cornfield. Pretty good real estate.


A photo of the trail.

PIZZA NIGHT

On the night before Berta (the youngest daughter of my host family) goes back to college, she made good on her promise to make me homemade pizza. “Pizza” is an understatement, when you look at the size of the pies she made. (And when I asked her how she learned to make pizzas, she replied that she “has a cousin that works for McDonald’s.” … gotcha.)

The pizzas, regardless of their undecipherable origin and the fact that they were baked in an oven made from a converted metal oil drum, were delicious and a great taste of home, and moreover, another warm night spent with the España family in the kitchen.

Señora España warming up the oven.


Berta preparing the pizza with cut-up hotdogs, ground chorizo, quesillo, and chiles for pizza toppings.



The final product! (If you look carefully in the cabinet in the background, you’ll see the postcard of the Twin Towers I sit beside every morning at breakfast… the Señor España sent back home in the early ‘90s when he was working in upstate New York. Honestly, this world.)

SCARY MEXICAN DOLL-BABY

PROPS TO THE PASTRY LADIES

The company that's made it possible for me to teach English here in Buenavista also has several other projects they're working on, one of which is a local bakery. And today the pastry ladies baked and iced their first cake today. Eyo!

(In the pic below is Karen who's been my contact for everything this summer. None of this would even have been feasible without her.)

PHOTO FUN-TIME

During breaktime from today's class.

(L-to-R) Flor, Yolanda, and Maria Concepcion.

ROOSTER

This guy likes to poke his head in our class every once in a while, just checking in on things, I suppose.

LOCAL CELEBRITY

Recent sighting in downtown Buenavista.

HOME-ROASTED COFFEE

The family I'm staying with roasts the coffee they grow down the mountain (and at the moment, they're the only roasters in Buenavista). The process begins with green, raw coffee beans which funnel into the oven (in the pic below, it's the part that looks like a train engine) and after the designated time, they're dumped out into the round cooling bin below, where churching arms keeps the beans cooling at an even rate to prevent scorching.

CHURCH IN BUENAVISTA

Sitting on the highest point in Buenavista, the land for this church was donated by a previous generation of the España family (who I'm staying with). Inside there are all sort of mysterious symbols carved in the walls, including a eye-in-pyramid. The Illuminati are everywhere. (Or is that the Masons?)

NOT TO RUB IT IN, BUT...

... this is the road I walk to get to the internet. It might take 45 minutes to get there, but at least it's a nice walk.



And, after a month of solid rain, the skies are finally clearing enough that one can see Buenavista from a distance.

MIXTEC FOLKLORE

Last summer, I got the chance with the inimitable Dr. Stephanie Wood from the University of Oregon in Eugene. She studies indigenous culture in Oaxaca, and along with others, she's creating a virtual library of native Mixtec-speakers telling stories. This is especially important because fewer and fewer people are learning how to speak Mixtec, opting for Spanish as their first language. A video library ensures that Mixtec will get captured for the future should one day it cease to be a spoken language.

Working in a Mixtec community this summer, I have the opportunity to help add to this research effort by making similar recordings and posting them on youtube. Here's my first contribution, in which one of my English students tells a story about a mysterious fire that can be seen on top of Pregnant Woman Mountain every December 31 here in Buenavista.

MAKING TORTILLAS

While I was eating my breakfast this morning, the Señora was busy making tortillas from corn her family's grown on their land down the mountain. It's a criollo (local variety) corn, so that's why it's a darker color than most of the tortillas we're used to. She also makes them out a really dark corn, what we called "Indian corn" back in North Carolina, and those tortillas come out nearly purple.



She cooks them in a wood-burning oven, which keeps the kitchen smelling cozy and "hearthy" (for lack of a better word). And you look in that same picture of the oven, you'll see a black pot full of home-grown, home-roasted coffee, which the Señora keeps ready all day long. It's a really clean, full-flavored coffee. If you're lucky, I'll bring you a bag back to the U.S.

GREEN

According to the Museo Comunitario de Yucuhiti, when the U.S. first began printing currency, they got their natural green plant dye from Mexico. The U.S. didn't buy the dye, they offered to print Mexican currency too. So if you look at the bottom of bills for many years, Mexican currency has "AMERICAN BANK CURRENCY*" (in English) printed at the bottom of each bill.



*or something like that... I forgot to write down the exact words...

PADRE REUTER, THAT'S WHO.

Who puts up a list of how much each parishioner has given to the church so far this year?

I'M SORRY BUT...

... Some Jesuses are just gross.

MEXICAN FACES

Portraits from the Museo Comunitario de Yucuhiti.

NEW YORK FASHION

Found this little gem in Putla, a bigger town about two hours away from Buenavista where I'm living.

CAN'T RESIST

These fine pups are always waiting for me outside of class. Well, okay, maybe not waiting for me, but they're there nonetheless. I'll take that.

LEARNING TO DOUBLE-CLICK

Today I taught three fifty-year-old mountain women how to plug in a computer and type a capital letter. Two out of the three women had never sat down at a computer before, and after two hours, they could plug in the laptop, turn it on, open Word, type their names (with caps AND accents) and then save the file in their own folder.

It helped me appreciate how complicated it is to use a computer. We take so much of our knowledge for-granted. For example, I hadn't planned on taking fifteen minutes to teach how to double-click, but that's where we're at. And they have questions I've never considered before, like: "Why can I hold the 'shift' button down and nothing happens, but if I hold the 'A' button down, I get a million As?"

It's interesting to watch these three ladies work, these ladies who were actually afraid of computers (afraid!) when they first sat down. They thought they'd break it with the smallest mistake. We started class in Spanish, but a lot of times there was still a communication barrier, and they began talking to each other in Mixtec, leaving me in the dust. But even then, it felt like they were really owning this experience, and making it their own.

They were so excited about how much they'd learned at the end of class that one woman even joked that, now that she was learning the computer, she was going to leave her husband and get a job in Tlaixaco, (a bigger town two hours away). On their way out, they asked if we could double-up on computer classes and skip English class altogether. Fine by me.

RAIN, RAIN

So this is what a rainy season's like. It rains here every afternoon and evening, but not necessarily on a predictable timetable. If the rain lets up even for a few minutes, I try to squeeze in a run or go for a walk, just to get out a bit. Otherwise, I might be stuck all afternoon in my 10x10 room or with the family in the kitchen right next-door.

And on top of being wet, it's chilly. Like sixty-five degrees or so.



And my clothes never fully dry. I think I'm starting to smell like the Swamp Thing.

They tell me it's gorgeous in November.

TYPICAL DAY IN CLASS

Every morning, I wake up at 9:00, have a leisurely home-grown/home-roasted cup of coffee, and then walk two minutes to the roastery-cum-classroom where we meet from 10:00 to 1:00 everyday.



It's a perfect-sized class; there are six students (you teachers out there know how nice it is to have an even number!). In the pic below, you see (L-R): Norma, Maria Concepcion, Isidro, Florentina, Jesus, and a little bit of Yolanda. We were playing a game where they had to pretend the didn't know each other and had to go around introducing themselves. Things got a little silly, as you can see.

MY GRANDMA'S EARRINGS

These flowers remind me of the snapdragons that I always associate with my grandma's house growing up, except here they're twice as big and grow on trees and they call them flor de arete (earring flowers).

PERFECT DOG

And they named him Whiskey.

WHERE'S BOONE?

So I've been in Buenavista for three days, and I felt really at home from the start; it reminds me a lot of some of those small mountain town in NC. Even the names are great: Buenavista means "Good Overlook" since it has such a nice view of the valley, and it's part of a series of communities that form a ring around the valley. Buenavista is between Paz y Progreso ("Peace and Progess"), Caballo Rucio ("Brave Horse") and Reyes Llano Grande ("Big Pasture of the Kings"). There's a dirt road that connects all the communities and I hike that for about 30 minutes from Buenavista to Reyes Llano Grande, which is where the nearest internet is. It's a great walk: lots of trees (banana, coffee, lime, orange, guayaba) and there are small cascades and creeks throughout.

*UPDATE* I just ran past a cascade this afternoon that HAS to be over three stories tall. I'll try to take a picture next time.

HARDLY WORLD-WIDE THIS WEB

To use the internet, I hike thirty minutes to the next comunidad and sit in a dark corner of this micro-corner store. It's a beautiful walk to the shop though, and normally I can wrangle in a few of my students into walking with me.

MEETING MY STUDENTS

Yesterday, I got to meet my three main students for the first time and plan out a schedule. I'll be working most closely with three folks that are trying to get their international coffee-cupping certification. They have their test in August in Mexico City (which last five days) and if they pass, they can start their business of sampling coffee, giving it a flavor evaluation and score. Of course, this has nothing directly to do with what I'm doing, but if they can get their business off the ground, then they'll need English to really take it to the next level.

Below is a pic of us on a hike they led yesterday morning.

IN BUENAVISTA... FINALLY!

Three days later than expected due to thunderstorms in Houston that made me miss my flight, here I am in Buenavista where I'll be teaching English and Computer Skills.

To get to Buenavista required:
- a five-hour bus-ride from Mexico City to Oaxaca
- a three-hour ride in a rather luxurious Suburban to Tlaxiaco
- a two-hour cab ride up the mountain to Buenavista

But I'm here!