Crazy Neighbor Package Debacle

So Tom sent me a little care package in early June, including several of my DVDs to keep me entertained in my down time here. Last year when he sent me a package it arrived within about 2 weeks. However, this year I am sadly still waiting for it to arrive, over a month later. Why the slowness? Well, apparently the Mexican federal mail can be quite slow (or things get lost (or stolen) easily) so apparently this year I got the slow end of the stick.

Complicating things is the fact that I gave Tom the wrong address. I told him a house number that is two houses down from mine. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal. You just knock on that person’s door and explain the situation to them, and ask them to put the package outside your door if they receive it. But of course this couldn’t be a “normal” situation…

First Mexican Doctor Visit!

Last week I went to my first doctor here in Mexico! Luckily it wasn’t for anything serious (just some very itchy and spreading blisters/sores on my fingers and hands) but definitely something I needed to get checked out. This doctor has a consulting office, with the doctor by himself in a little office in a residential area (actually just about a 30 second walk from my house, conveniently for me). It was my first time experiencing what many immigrants or visitors to a foreign country probably feel when they go to the doctor in that country: I pretty much had no idea what he was telling me about my problem. Claudia came with me and she helped, but since the words he was telling me were words I had never heard before (like the blisters look like some kind of bite from some sort of insect/bug, but I’m not sure what…) it was really hard to understand exactly what caused my problem (a fly, a mite, a mosquito?). Luckily I understood what he told me I needed to do to get rid of them (with a little help from pantomiming). So I left not really understanding what the bites were from and just hoping that the ointments he prescribed me would work…Luckily after a week of using the ointments things seem to be clearing up. Let’s hope my last week here is uneventful in the illness/injury department and that I don’t need a return visit!

It's All About Timing

Another trip to the field, with two weeks left here in Mexico. This was another return visit to a community I went to a few weeks ago to interview the community leader. This time the goal was to do the focus groups with people who use agaves, as well as do a night of bat/agave camera monitoring. Unfortunately, as has been characteristic of this whole summer, things didn’t go quite according to plan. Temo, Ana, and I arrived in the evening and went back to the leader’s house to meet with him and get the focus groups going. However, I had not been able to contact him ahead of time, despite numerous texts and phone calls. There is no phone reception in the community, and while he had told us on our last visit that he is in Monterrey Thursdays and Fridays, I was still not able to get in touch with him during those days. So I was just hoping that he would remember that we had a visit scheduled for these days and that I wanted to do the focus groups. That didn’t work out so well...We couldn’t find him. So we went to the house of one of Temo’s friends who lives in the community, and she took us to meet with the leader’s dad, who is one of the few people in the community who harvests agaves and makes “mezcal”. Ana and I had a great almost two-hour conversation with him while Temo and his friend drove around the area looking for flowering agaves to monitor that night. We learned all about the history of mezcal making in the community, the process to make it, a medicinal use of mezcal (when mixed with sewing machine oil it’s apparently a great thing to put on cuts, burns, etc. to promote faster healing), and the best part: we got to try some! We got to try some of his very own mezcal, as well as some of his apple wine. Mmm, both so tasty! The mezcal was definitely a lot smokier than the “destilado” one of the other communities makes. That’s because the process he uses is a bit different: he collects agua miel from the agaves and ferments it in vats (like the other community does), but instead of distilling the fermented liquid (the pulque) to make the destilado, he cooks the agave pinas in earthen ovens, chops them up, and adds them to the vat of fermenting agua miel, and lets the mixture sit like that for a few days, and THEN distills the liquid. It’s amazing how everyone has their own process, and the results are definitely different!

The Summer of Dead Cars

Wow, this sure has been the summer of dying batteries and car problems! We (Isra, Ana, and I) got back yesterday from a 2-day trip back to the community we visited earlier this week, and boy was it a production trying to arrange the trip! It all started when I found out two days before leaving that the truck isn’t working (the battery had died last week, but I thought it had been fixed…). So then I had to find another mode of transportation. Isra’s car isn’t an option (since he was in an accident a few weeks ago and his car is still out of commission) so I asked Ana if we could go in her car. Luckily she said yes. However, around 8:00pm the night before our trip, she texted me saying that her husband’s car had stopped working and he needed to use her car the next day. That left me to scramble that night to figure out what to do. I settled on renting a car. Not ideal given my budget, but I really had to make this trip (I had already arranged it with the comisariado of the community), so I sucked it up and decided to rent a car for the two days. Luckily the community we were going to is located right off the major highway and no four-wheel drive is needed, so I could get the cheapest car available.

Return of the Roach

This past weekend, I was just thinking how I hadn’t seen the big cockroaches in awhile (not even outside on the building walls at night), and that it has been really nice not to have to deal with them. I spoke too soon...

They’re BAAACK!!! On a night like any other, I wandered up the stairs half-asleep to hit the hay, and there he was. The big cockroach. On the steps between me and my bedroom. He was looking right in my direction, so I didn’t want to walk up the stairs and risk spooking him (aka risk him flying at me). So I got a big Tupperware container and threw it at him, hoping it would land over him and trap him. Unfortunately, all it did was the thing I didn’t want to happen: he spooked and flew haphazardly directly at me. I scrambled down the stairs and he landed on the bottom one. He was kind of close to the door so I thought maybe I could use the broom to push him out. When I tried that, he ran quickly across the living room floor, and somehow I managed to throw the Tupperware and this time trap him. I was tired and wanted to go to bed, so he got to sleep in the Tupperware that night.

Destilado and Seedlings and Quiotes, Oh My!

I spent my 4^th of July in the ejido in Coahuila that I first visited this summer to do an interview with the comisariado (leader), this time to do my first focus groups. However, I ended up doing a sort of impromptu interview and ejido tour with the comisariado and the man in charge of their new agave program, as well going with them to visit another nearby ejido that is participating in the new agave program. Not exactly what I had planned, but during our over two-hour conversation I learned a lot about the agave program. They have received funding from the Mexican federal government to plant agaves for making agua miel and “destilado” (basically mezcal that can’t be called “mezcal” given that the state of Coahuila is not within the Denomination of Origin for mezcal and therefore producers in this state are not legally allowed to sell their distilled agave product as “mezcal”). Through this program they recently built a new distillery for making the destilado. There are several other ejidos in the area that also harvest agaves and bring them to this distillery to make the product. They will be exporting their product to other countries, including the US. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any available to try, but I hope I’ll be able to buy a bottle once they start selling!

 The first bottle of "destilado" made as part of the 

ejido's new agave program. They will be sending it

to a university laboratory to have the contents tested

so they can establish a standard for their product.

Cultural and Linguistics Adjustments

Thought it was time to share some of my more recent thoughts on the language and culture barrier!

There have been quite a few times when I have not known a phrase or common expression, and therefore end up sounding weird. For example, when getting up from the dinner table to go to the bathroom recently, I realized that I didn’t know how to say “Be right back”, so I ended up saying “I will return”. Weird, right?

I can’t multitask and still listen to people (or half-listen) like I can in English. Like in English I can half-watch TV and half-listen (and understand) conversations around me. Here I can’t do that. I have to give it (listening/understanding) my FULL attention, and even then I often still get lost. It sucks when I’m not listening to a conversation (from either being lost in the conversation, from mental exhaustion, or from thinking about something else) and I hear my name in the conversation. Suddenly all eyes turn to me or someone laughs, and I have no idea how to respond or what to say since I don’t know why they said my name. I usually default to saying “Yes” or “No” and laughing hesitantly, which has gotten me a reputation for always saying “No” to certain people in our group, and “Yes” to others. It’s now a joke among us, with more than a little bit of truth to it...

Bats and Kristen Feeding on Agave Nectar!

More success in the bat department! Last weekend Gehu, his friend Cynthia, and I headed back to Ejido Estanque de Norias and the area near Rosillo Cave (a suspected maternity cave for the Mexican long-nosed bat where females give birth to their pups) for another night of bat/agave monitoring with the infrared cameras. Last visit we only saw one bat briefly fly by one of the two focal agaves, and I’m not sure whether it was checking out the flowers to feed from or if it was swooping by to pick of the insects that swarm near the flowers. However, this time I saw several bats visit the flowers of one focal agave, with no doubt that they were feeding on the nectar! There were at least two individual bats and probably over 40 visits to the flowers of the focal agave in the “best” patch in the area (that is, the patch with the highest density of flowering agaves). I have to go back through the recording to confirm the number of visits and to try to identify the species of bat (it could be either the Mexican long-nosed bat, or the Mexican long-tongued bat, which is listed as Threatened by the Mexican federal government), but either way these bats are in need of conservation efforts so this is good information. I’m beyond thrilled that I finally saw some definite visits to the agaves, and in the way that I expected (with more visits at the focal agave in the “best” patch than at the focal agave in the “worst” patch).