Mili en La Selva

                Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am the kind of person who is always excited to go on to the next thing. Summer vacation is great, but after three months I’m ready to quit my job(s) and get back into school mode. Equally, at finals time, I’m just happy for the classes to be over, regardless of what my final grade ends up being.  Even little things like stop lights- my mom says I like to “hurry up and wait.”

                After five weeks in Merida, I was ready to go onto Kiuic. After Kiuic, I was ready to jump ship and enjoy my Spring Break. After what seemed like a month in La Selva, I was ready to get back to civilization. While I surprisingly miss Ursinus showers and even Wismer, not to mention all of the important people in my life I have had infrequent or no contact with during this trip, I’m not ready to go back yet. What do you mean I only get to spend three weeks in San Cristobol, with an amazing, accommodating host family, and most of if it, if not all of it somedays, is spent reading for Evolution? I’ll be the last to complain about the class- I love evolution. It’s a top two concept for me, right up there with multivariable calculus. However, I really wish I could have taken my host family up on more offers to explore the city, visit some cultural places or just hang out and talk when I wasn’t preoccupied with reading. To go out, regardless of how boring I find dancing, with my Ursinus classmates, might have been nice once in awhile as well. But, time flew and now time is up, not just in San Cristobol, but in Mexico as well.

                I have to say I’m not ready to go home. I am not excited to hurry up and get to Ursinus, go to my formal, hurry up and go hang out with my dad for my birthday, then hurry up and go home so I can get a job and starting sorting out the details of the next four months of my life. It’s not that I dread these things, I just feel like there is more here to see and discover. I never did get to have a solid conversation with a Zapatista- that kid at the market gave me the cold shoulder when it occurred to him that I wasn’t going on a date with him.

                So, I went to the Mexican “fair” last night, despite the fact that I am behind on my reading. After turning down my host family multiple times, I finally gave in and justified it with a cultural experience- and cultural experience it was! 

                For me, although I don’t think I have ever been to a “fair” like this one, it didn’t seem any different from what you could expect at home. There were carnival rides that looked less than safe, including a ferris wheel and a merry-go-round, among other things. There were typical unwinnable carnival games, and people who cheated the odds carrying massive Disney-character mock-ups. Mexican renditions of carnival foods were everywhere- large candy stands, cotton candy, strawberries and cream dished out in a milk-carton container, popcorn, elotes. If you can think of it, it was probably there. Mostly, though, it was just a tremendous amount of people packed together to listen to the concert, which I believe included the band Molotov, which is a band that is coming back with me to Ursinus, I think. My first impression of one of their most famous songs was not very good when I watched it on Telehit at the urging of my host sister. This is because these are the English lyrics in their otherwise, Spanish song, semi-censored:

“Don’t call me gringo/you f------ beaner/stay on your side of the goddamn river/don’t call me gringo, you beaner.”

                Now, I have a really hard time with singing, and the fact that the band was clearly mocking the way Americans speak Spanish in the first chorus made it even harder for me to catch what they were saying, but needless to say I am glad I looked up the lyrics because I was furious. As someone who lives in a border state, and deals with border-associated racism, especially because Houston is a “sanctuary city,” I flinch every time I hear someone called a “beaner.”  Fortunately, when I looked up the lyrics, they were criticizing border racism, it’s just too bad they had to use that word, however appropriate. The lyrics in Spanish are analogous “No me llamas frijolero Mr. Punetero” or “Don’t call me beaner, Mr. Masturbator.”

                So, clearly, very offensive, but they have a political edge which I appreciate, even if I have a really hard time accepting the place of any sort of ethnic slur, especially one that I grew up with like that.   These particular lyrics (translated) did make me feel a little bit better about it. They also displayed, to some extent, what I have found a more liberal Mexican-view of immigration to the U.S. to be, especially in communities where family members work in the U.S.

Now I wish I had a dime for every single time
I’ve gotten stared down for being in the wrong side of town
And a rich man I’d be if I had that kind of chips
Lately I wanna smack the mouths of these racists
Can you imagine yourself
As a Mexican crossing the border
Thinking of your family while you cross
Leaving all you know behind
What if you had to dodge bullets
Of some gringo ranchers
Would you keep saying “good for nothing wetback?”
If you had to start from scratch?
Now why don’t you look down to
Where your feet are planted
That U.S. soil that makes you take shit for granted
If not for Santa Ana, just to let you know
That where your feet are planted would be Mexico
Correcto!

                        Anyway, Molotov aside, the experience was really positive for me. I found myself looking to identify which Mayan group each of the traditionally-dressed Mayan woman were from, and because I didn’t hear Molotov singing “Frijolero,” I was thinking in Spanish. This helped me speak Spanish better and successfully brush off a very intoxicated guy who was trying to get me to dance with him. No thanks. It was also nice to participate in the non-religious side of Semana Santa. Going to mass is just too much to ask of me.

It’s awkward at school when you’re on the verge of being late for class, or when you’re driving to work and some moralizer on Longwood Trace insists on going 29 in a 30 and not even 1mph over, forcing you to go several under. You don’t want to be that asshole who speeds past, but you’re in a hurry! So, you just make your way through in the least rude manner as possible, and hope they don’t remember, don’t know you, or don’t care.

                It’s a little tougher here just to plow through a group of people on a narrow and high sidewalk. In addition to the physical difficulty, there is also the subtle implication of a not-so-distant past. Less than ten years ago, San Cristobol citizens of indigenous ancestry were not permitted to walk on the sidewalks- they had to walk in the street instead. I, as a result, definitely don’t want to be the one they clear the way for. I usually slip into the street as just another rude American.

                I have had few discussions about racism in Mexico. In fact, the only person willing to admit that it exists has been Hugo. The topic has the same status as it does in the United States- it is ignored, perpetuated secretly, or people pretend like it doesn’t exist anymore because some minor reconciliation in a history of persecution makes things better.  I remember having a discussion with one of my co-workers, who insisted that black people were no longer at a disadvantage in our country and that modern racism was just a fiction to perpetuate white guilt and suck more out of the system.  He said, “We gave them the right to vote, they can sit in front of the bus, they can eat my tax dollars in food stamps and get into college preferentially over me, what else do they want?”

                Interestingly, a similar attitude exists here in Mexico. “No hay racismo.” I hear it over and over again. Classism, everyone is willing to admit to, though. While I’ll be the first one to target class status as the best predictor of future success, it still remains that it is easier to be a white impoverished person, or a ladino impoverished person, than an ethnic or indigenous one. Just because Chamulans can feel free to walk on the sidewalk doesn’t mean the issue has been put to rest.  The evidence for this is always easy to pick out in hiring decisions. According to Hugo, darker skin, Mayan names- these things destine you to be a laborer who spends the day in the sun. In the United States, a black man is more disproportionately and statistically significantly more likely to be asked about his punctuality than a white man with the same qualifications. Imagine how much harder it must be for someone to get a job who citizenship or loyalty is up for debate. Some of the things I have witnessed and heard, especially after 9/11 and in the heat of the immigration debate make my absent soul sick.

                While I have been disappointed to miss the primary season, complete with crappy CNN commentary, out-of-context soundbites and repeated, finger-pointing, substanceless discussions about racism no one wants to admit to, I don’t feel like I have entirely missed out on the experience. I have just been living in a different spectrum of it- a more nascent, less violent version of what my mom grew up, starring Commandante Marco as a socialist, but silent Martin Luther King with Mexican radio as my source instead of a black  and white or Technicolor television. We’re a long way from Darfur, where racial violence is explicit, but we’re still far from resolving the problem. Continuing to proclaim that “No hay racism” only perpetuates it. You can turn on CNN and see that for yourself if you don’t believe me. I have a nice view from my window.

Woo is the term I use for non-traditional medicine. It is not necessary disrespectful, but it is meant to imply the fragile nature of its credibility.  Today, I was given a woo treatment for my not-so-mysterious illness. Yesterday morning, I started to feel the onset the sporadic, violent and short-lived Montezuma’s revenge that I have been experiencing the entire trip. By mid-evening, it was near intolerable, especially after suffering through what would have otherwise been an enjoyable birthday party for my host families grandmother/mother. More on that later. By the time I went to sleep, I had also acquired significant nausea, a headache, and disorientation. In the early morning, these last three symptoms were going strong and I decided to scar my otherwise perfect attendance to avoid throwing up in class, assuming the disorientation and the headache allowed me to pay attention. At this point, my host mother was kind and gave me tea. I think manzanilla means chamomile, but the tea didn’t remotely resemble it so who knows. Either way, tea makes me feel better whether or not there is any scientific basis. When I woke up several hours later, I was given watery oatmeal in a mug, several pieces of bread and told these two would make me feel better. Since I no longer felt like I was going to throw up and my blood sugar was low, I just went with it. What I wasn’t so keen on but accepted as an act of sincere desire to make me feel better on their part, was the egg.

                Apparently, I felt strange because a lot of eyes were on my yesterday at the party. It’s true- I got a lot of attention. It’s hard for my blond hair not to stick out in a sea of stark black, not to mention I was also the only non-kin in the room. The way to resolve this was to take the illness or the eyes out of me with an egg. My host mother rubbed it all over my head, my chest and my stomach to “suck out” what was bad. I was grateful because I thought she was going to crack it in my hair! Then she cracked the egg in water, and some of the egg white streamed to the top- that was my illness. She told me by mid-afternoon, they would try again and it wouldn’t be there because I would feel better.

                I’ll be really honest, my family is fairly conservative, at least in their Catholic beliefs and I didn’t expect this from them. When she told me the egg would take the ojos away from me, I thought she was pulling my leg. While I have been subject to a couple of “home-remedies” for illnesses by my host families here in Mexico, and even at home, these don’t necessarily arise my suspicion because they are usually some sort of food or drink item associated with comfort. When you’re sick, whether or not you associate that particular thing with comfort, if you think it will make you feel better, you go for it. This egg business is a little stranger- the suspicion behind it makes it categorically different than dry toast, watery oatmeal and manzanilla tea.  Just as long as it doesn’t become a substitute for real medical care, which I didn’t need, I suppose there is no harm in it. If anything, it made them feel better, and I experienced one of their family traditions. Me? I still feel like crap, but I’ll be able to go to class tomorrow.

    A couple days ago, we visited the twin towns of Chamula and Zinacantan. While they are ethnically similar, they have diverged into two very different and distinct towns, despite the few miles that separate them. Their divergence occurs with a signal event during the conquest: to cooperate, or to resist.

                Chamula is a fairly large town of resisters who specialize in wool production. Although as Chamula Indian may not be Catholic, and in fact are considerably likely to be Evangelical Protestant,, to live in Chamula, as a Chamulan, you must be a member of their Catholic Church with its idiosyncratic hierarchies and traditions. While I am sure there is more to it than just the church, the main divergence for me, appeared there.  The outside is colorfully decorated with various Mayan symbols. Inside the church, the saints line the walls in boxes decorated with symbolic flowers and tokens. There are no pews- instead, there are tables with candles on them, each with a different meaning according to their color. When the candles have taken over the tables, people pray on the floor, with specific numbers and colors of candles according to their prayer surrounded by a thick layer of pine needles that covers the church floor. Sometimes, healers with accompany them, or give them directions on how to cure an illness in the family, or misfortune. I saw one woman swinging a bag of eggs over the candles she had placed on the floor.

                In addition to their different church customs, the Chamulans also have a mayordomos. To be a mayordomo is a great honor, because it is indicative of the fact that the elected person is a spiritual leader in the community.  When you are chosen, you are responsible for buying all of the drinks and food for every major celebration in the community: weddings, baptisms, funerals, etc. They, like the rest of the Chamulans, also have a distinct costume, which I have put into a picture to the left. The traditional clothing of a Chamulan is usually a white or black wood tunic for men, and for a women, a woolen black skirt and a white blouse. I have seen very few Chamulan women wearing  their hair in anything other than braids, although I have seen girls running around with their hair behind them.

                Zinacantan means “Land of Bats” in the Nauhatl language of the Aztecs with whom they traded extensively with in pre-Colombian times. When the Spanish arrived, they were more gracious to their invaders than the Chamulans, and have thus acquired a better reputation that continues today. To call someone a “Zinacantan” means nothing, but calling someone a “Chamulan” is a racial slur. Through my eyes, the people of Zinacantan dress similiarly to the people of Chamula, only they tend to appear more wealthy because of their more colorful clothing. Traditionally, the men wear a more colorful tunic and the women wear indigo skirts, a white blouse and/or an indigo shawl embroidered with elaborate flowers. This is because the Zincantans are responsible for a lot of the tropical flowers shipped throughout surrounding Mexican states and the flowers have thus became important to their culture as their means of prosperity.

                While the Zinacantans have adapted Catholicism similarly to the Chamulans, they are less notable because they just seem happier. Maybe it’s because no one mentioned mandatory expulsion if they abandoned their specific brand of Catholicism? Perhaps it because they seemed to have means of acquiring money other than farming on poor land and hawking goods to the tourists? For me, although I was exposed to more intimate aspects of their lives- a traditional Zinacantan house, weaving of their clothing, delicious tortillas filled with ground pumpkin seed…they struck me less. I was interested, but I found my curiousity sparked more by the people who were more often sticking their hands, empty or full of pulseras in my face while I was sitting down at a restaurant.

If the discussion of how civilization began isn’t at the head of the line when history class begins, it’s definitely somewhere in the front. This proved to be just as true in Mayan class as it has in Mr. Dennis’ Simpsons-riddled U.S. History. This discussion is inextricable from the rise of agriculture, usually the domestication of corn. This leap is the modern “discovery of fire,” because it permitted us to settle into groups and perpetuate a more extreme division of labor that characterizes our society today. It should be no surprise, then, that corn, or maize, would continue to be one of the integral aspects of our society more than 7,000 years later. In the U.S., our dependency on corn is staggering, and the situation, compounded by the effects of globalization, is no different here in Mexico, or in any other place in the Americas.

The rise of corn in Mexico began with the nixmal process which combined lime and corn to create a complete set of amino acids and prevented protein deficiency. It’s not small wonder that these are the two most prevalent food items in Mexico, and the tortillas (originally tamales) they are made into and lime are served with every meal, whether you feel that they are necessary or not. In fact, I have never seen a flour tortilla in Mexico. Instead of the dry, super-processed pieces of wheat-derived cardboard I have grown accustomed to in Tex-Mex restaurants, I have been treated to smooth, soft corn tortillas. They may  have been had pressed in my view by a tortilla maker or pressed through a machine owned q small tiendas. Either way, they are delicious, and probably have fewer food miles and less processing than anything we can get at home because they are so pervasive. It pays to make them locally, especially in San Cristobol.

In addition to tortillas, corn is on almost every street corner in one of three forms: elotes y esquinas (most common), elote ice cream, or popcorn (least common). In fact, roaming around near the Mercado de Artesanias and Dulces last night, I encountered the corn trifecta. The elote is basically corn on the cob, and prepared the way my host family likes it, slathered in mayonnaise instead of butter, rolled in cheese and given a generous squirt of chile. While I am not a particularly big fan of this preparation (mayonnaise!!), I am a big fan of elote ice cream, which puts vanilla to shame, just as long as it isn’t textured with corn kernels.

Unfortunately, corn production in Mexico is rife with strikes for political oppression and environmental damage. The primary mode of agriculture here is slash and burn and while yields twice the land use here in Chiapas than in the Yucatan, it comes at the cost of releasing considerable amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and the destruction of forests. Moreover, the milpa farmers are traditionally poor indigenous Indians, who are oppressed through a variety of ways, not in the least the eminent-domain seizure of their land.  These farmers are also to struggle to keep up with cheap imports from the United States, fueled by NAFTA, and they are forced to sell their crop, non-genetically modified, at costs that approach exploitation. They are, fortunately, not defenseless- they have Zapatistas at their back, for better or worse.

NAFTA does not supply our only impact on Mexican corn culture. The entirety of own corn culture is so monolithic as to be entitled a cornarchy by food activists, such as myself. I challenge anyone who doesn’t believe me to find me a processed food item in the interior of the grocery store, freezer shelves included, that contains no remnants of corn. Even if you find something, the time it takes is convincing of how pervasive it is. High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is particularly ubiquitous in processed foods, and its these foods that are shipped globally- things like soda, candy, bread (I’m not talking about pastries), and “just-add water” meals, among many, many other items.

Corn isn’t just food for people, though. In the U.S., there are four routes for corn to go: food for people, food for cows, ethanol and exports. Consider the environmental and economic impact of thousands of industrial corn farms that are producing feed for cows, who in turn produce their own devastating impact in terms of worker treatment, waste and its chemical components that infiltrate our water supply, and the carbon byproducts of cows (such as gas) that contribute to global warming.  Farming for ethanol is just as damaging. Just because ethanol is sustainable in the sense that we can grow it in the form of corn, does not mean it is environmentally friendly- it is a carbon-based fuel just like petroleum. These non-food producing fields are taking up valuable space that could be used for grass-fed, free-range livestock, that don’t need to be pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics, or pushed through a factory farm, and also for the fruits and vegetables that could reduce our national health problems and increase our diet diversity.  Finally, we arrive back at the problem of exports- individual milpa farmers, just like domestic farmers, cannot compete with industrial monocultures. And you can’t discount the cost of transport for all of these corn-derived products any more than any other resource.

If you’ll permit me to continue to make a political statement about both of our cultures dependency on corn, it’s this: everything in moderation. While some aspects of our corn-dominated societies are not inherently damaging, and can even be tasty, our dependency is just as toxic as our dependency on oil. When I came to Mexico, I naively expected to participate in a different kind of food economy than we have at home. While I have been privileged, especially here in San Cristobol, to more locally-produced food, the effects of globalization are already taking a toll here as they have in Merida. The Zapatistas can only keep Wal-Mart away for so long.

We woke up at 6:30am yesterday to get on the bus at Lacanja before 8:00, and then spent the rest of the day driving, with a short and very pretty break outside of Palenque after we dropped Rebecca off at the bus station there. We finally arrived to San Cristobol around 8:00pm to meet our host families and embark on a mini-adventure for our suitcases. While I fully expected for the real fun to begin then, in fact, there were quite a few interesting sites along the way.

Outside of Palenque, when we stopped for lunch which I felt strange eating because of all the Dramamine in my sister, we spent some time watching a very large waterfall while Hugo arranged one last meal for us. While the other waterfalls we have seen were beautiful and impressive in their own right, size does matter, and as a result, this one has trumped them all.

 Afterwards, we were driving through nothing but highland country, and as a result, we were treated to Zapatista propaganda, despite the military presence that occasionally stopped us to inspect our luggage. The letters EZLN were occasionally painted on houses, often in faded letters. Once, I saw a restaurant named “Cocinera Zapatista.”  Most exciting, however, was probably a small town center with a name I can’t recall. There was a sign that read “Autonomous Province of the Zapatistas.”  Additionally, the school was emblazoned with the EZN, decorated with men carrying arms and wearing a ninja-like costume with a red band o n their foreheads. I wish I had my camera ready when we passed by.

When we arrived, we filed off the bus with everything we brought on it and met our host families in the language institute. I don’t have  a roommate because I have chosen to live alone, but I’m sure it’s going to be fine despite my initial trepidation about it. Already, I feel like my Spanish is improving because my host family makes an effort to gently correct me when I say things like “corporacion” instead of “corporativo,” or when my verb conjugation is a little off. They also have two children, which are fortunately pretty close to my age so I can foresee myself not wanting to kill them like I might be inclined to do with say, seven-year-olds. The oldest girl is nineteen, she goes to college is Tuxtla, the capital city not far from here, and she is studying tourism. Unfortunately, she is only home on the weekends because she lives at the university during the week. The youngest girl is fifteen, and reminds me a little bit of my sister Katie. I don’t feel like we have a lot in common, but because we will probably be spending some time together in the house, I’m sure we will find something

On a final note, before I went to work on finishing my Maya blogs and the glyph project last night, I, of course was stupid and brought up the Zapatistas because I want to know about them. It wasn’t so stupid after all because the family was happy to oblige and give me their perspective on them. Look for a post on what I have learned once I can do some outside research, and probably something about political tourism as well.

After our Maya post-final today, and the last of the ecology presentations, we visited a Mayan milpa. The visit was something out of Alice in Wonderland, with Angela, our host and white rabbit, leading us through the milpa at the mercy of Hugo, our Cheshire cat, and her small, seven-year-old-daughter, whose name means hummingbird, as our Mayan Alice. We explored strange vegetation, ate unfamiliar fruits, touched things we shouldn’t have, and did battle with ants near a stream before colliding with the Red Queen: our beloved and treacherous Coca-Cola, which tempted us on our way out.

Where to begin with yet another unique adventure? It began in a functional maize field, or milpa. In addition to the maize, they also grew several types of leafy greens and kilabasa (sp?), my favorite of the new vegetables that have entered my diet. It’s about the size of an average grapefruit, green and has a texture someone like a cooked zucchini when its boiled or in soup, which is the only way it has ever been served to me. After the milpa, we entered a zone known as acahaul, which is a second-growth milpa field inhabited by the local forest vegetation as a reforestation effort. As we passed through this area, we were shown large, black legume seeds which are used in local handicrafts. Someone special out there has a necklace waiting with one of these on it. When we were finally through the jungle, we spotted our white rabbit and the innocent Alice.

For someone who is certainly still young but our standards, Angela looked like the sun had aged her. If she had aged at all, however, it was only her skin because this woman had more energy than me! She zipped us through her backyard orchard, identifying papaya, pineapple and yerno, a kind of sweet potato, among other herbal agents and seasoning. Of the leaves I heard about included two antibacterial agents, one used in tea and another in bathing, achiote which is used in cochinita pibil, a dying agent for clothes, and a type of orange tree, which was identified only by its smell. The woman also made a point to dig several small but energetic holes in the ground, implicating a mole for making her papaya trees fall down. Additionally, we were treated to a strange red fruit, which cracked open like a hard shell of a banana and revealed a sticky, mushy white stuff in the middle with semi-large black seeds for a pod about as long as my pointer finger. I acquired a good sense for its taste because there was larvae in my sample of the many she physically shook down from the tree and collected off the ground, but it was sweet like a banana but without the distinctive banana smell.             

She led us into the forest once more so that we could examine the fruits the kinkajous favor, and additional herbal agents including an anti-coagulant, we found ourselves assaulted by a long stretch of ants which led immediately onto a two small branch/stick bridge into the season’s milpa farm. While I was not among the initial small group to fall into the hormigas vicious grip immediately by following our white rabbit innocently, I was nevertheless a victim to a few assaults even through my sneakers. After dodging through their territory, through the stick bridge faster than I intended, I arrived at the destination I expected to see when I was told about the milpa trip: more maize. Amongst the maize were landmines of chives, which we had to dutifully watch our feet to avoid trampling on, and occasional nuclear silos of squash. Our Alice led one of our unsuspecting classmates to touch one, and the white rabbit made herself available to scold Alice because the squash don’t grow if their touched.

We worked through the landmines, crossed the stick bridge, rebattled the hormigas and traipsed through the jungle again to return to her orchard. We took a break to rest from our lively visit before heading out, only to be tempted by Coke just when we thought we were safe. I won’t lie, I gave in. I bought a Lift (carbonation, high fructose corn syrup and apple juice!) and gummy bears, but I earned it.

We wound down our day to a bonfire and charades, saying our ceremonial goodbyes to the jungle, our semester guide Hugo, our faithful driver, Cesar, and our Mayan professor, Rebecca. It’s hard to believe that this trip can continue without them, but it will, and our next month will be as amazing as the last two, although they will surely be missed.

Another amazing day in Mexico comes to a close, and I still have to pinch myself to convince myself that I am really here, and things are really this great. I will be sad to leave.

We have spent a couple of days now at Lacanja, type of ecotouristic hotel. We are sleeping and studying in stick huts with bunk beds instead of hammocks, and my particular cabin, like the doubles, is on the river we rafted on this morning. We have class in an open-air palapa, and project onto its only stick wall. It’s surprisingly chilly here, but this is a combination of the fact that our walls are made of sticks and it has rained a lot recently.

Ecologically, we are surrounded by beautiful rainforest. This morning, I was bird watching and caught a glimpse of another Violaceous trogon, a mot-mot and a pair of squirrels within a matter of minutes. While this has been guaranteed Fer-de-lance spotting country, I have been fortunate enough to have missed out on any spotting there may be. I am positive that if I were to come across one, I would incite its aggression and be dead before I knew it. Only one more day and I will have made it home free, just as long as I don’t stumble over one when we are bird watching near San Cristobol. The reserve is also home to the Mayan city of Lancanja, which I mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, the only thing I know about it is that at one time is was subjugated by nearby Yaxchilan and that is fairly small as far as the sites we commonly see go.

 While I am ready to get back into civilization, I have definitely enjoyed our time in La Selva more than I anticipated. Yes, there are bugs.  Yes, it is sometimes intolerably hot, or surprisingly cold. I have been sunburned. I have been uncomfortable. I have been pressed for study time and stressed out as a result. Things haven’t always been perfect or pleasant, but the sum total of my experiences has been overwhelming positive. Is there another study abroad experience where I can watch Howler monkeys in the wild? Where I can white-water raft and snorkel as part of lab? How many times in your life can you see that there are Mayan ruins in your backyard? Talk about a unique experience- and one we will never get back.

Unlike in Europe, where you can hop a train to Paris from Madrid for the weekend and explore on your own, the Mexico semester provides planned fun with built-in educational opportunities. Snorkelling is a good example of this, as is hiking through a forest looking for monkeys. Today was one of those days, and we went white-water rafting. The morning was cold, as we dressed for it- packing long sleeve shirts in rainjackets, predicting that we could stay dry if we really wanted. That prospect was eliminated before we even took off down the river, when war broke out. Our boat adopted the attitude of the French, put up a weak fight initially, and then just perpetually waved our white flag and submitted to the assault.

After learning how to hold the oar correctly, follow some basic directions and duck into the boat for the waterfalls, we took off down the river with the team cameraman in tow. This paparazzi man, Ernesto, could have given Roberto a run for his money: he has some amazing footage. Unfortunately, none of it is of us because we were in his boat, and Robert has none because we were always first. Its just too bad- our less than flattering expressions will not have the opportunity to echo throughout time on the internet in pixel form.

The highlight of my boating experience was definitely my near-life experience. It’s an early waterfall and not a very big one. In fact, the entire course doesn’t even register to a ½ a point on the scale of white-water. Nevertheless, I’m a little uncomfortable due to the unfamiliarity of the situation. We paddle faster and faster towards the edge before ducking into the boat, and I grab the lifeline in what I swear is the correct position, lean back appropriately, take a deep breath and wait for us to land upright on the other side. Things don’t exactly go as planned, and fortunately or unfortunately, there are no pictures because we are the first boat.

In Fight Club, Jack is arguing with Tyler about why Jack wasn’t included in Project Mayhem, citing the special nature of their relationship, its outgrowth from Fight Club which they began together, and so on. Tyler is incredulous at this and wants Jack to just let go, especially after he can’t robotically produce something he wished he could do before he died. So, speeding down the highway in a car stolen from an airport parking lot by a valet who works there, Tyler lets go of the wheel. He lets go of the wheel, drifts into the lane of an incoming eighteen-wheeler and forces Jack to accept that he’s going to die, not without protest, as the car passes through incoming traffic and off of the highway where it ends in a colossal wreck. They are alive, but battered, having finally experienced something akin to near-life.

The boat flips and despite by best efforts, I am flung out of the grip of the lifeline and into the undercurrent. My first thoughts are, “So this is the undercurrent he was talking about. I should tuck and wait to come out.”  Fifteen seconds later, when I feel the oxygen in my lungs dissipating, and the strength of the current increasing, so  that I feel like I am being thrown around in a washing machine, I start to think that I am not going to make it. My life doesn’t flash before my eyes. I’m obviously a little scared because I think I am going to die, but I don’t have any dramatic thoughts. “So this is what it feels like to drown,” is one thought, and “Well, if I have to die, life hasn’t been so bad.”  Like when my plane to Pennsylvania hit a deep spot of turbulence that pushed the plane down altitude significantly, I just accept death if it’s coming because there is nothing I can do about it. So, anyway, struggling for air but doing my best not to inhale the water, I finally pop out. I swim the that I can towards Dana and Danielle, who were also tossed out of the boat and see from the opposite side of the river that it flipped, and that other boats have come down safely. I just had a near-life experience, and I’m damn resentful none of the other boats were privileged either.

For our boat, the rest of the rafting experience was relatively uneventful, but nevertheless a lot of fun. The weather was miserable- dark, cloudy, rainy and yes, cold, but this didn’t inspire our moods at all, even as we choked back water when we tried to swim individually through some rapids. I was soaked to the bone, freezing cold and having a lot of fun. One of the other boats flipped at one point, but they experience was less dramatic than ours, or maybe just less fun. Cesar, our bus driver, popped out during a waterfall, only to stand up gracefully, slip, and fall back into the water- all caught on video, by the way. In another glorious feat of acrobatics, Hugo, our perpetual guide, rolled out of the boat on a fall with incredible drama, again, caught on tape.

I was sad to reach the end of the river because I knew the weather was going to affect my mood when I did. We got out of the boat, still soaked to the bone and freezing cold, but not excited by the prospect of hiking at least 1.5km to a Mayan site, then back down, up to a waterfall where we could finally eat, and then, at least 5km after that, all through the jungle, to reach our cabins where we could acquire (hypothetically) warm showers and dry clothes. To make matters worse, we had to wear our life jackets, our helmets and carry our oars the entire way, and my shoes were not staying on. My feet slid around in them effortlessly, lubricated by water, mud, and blood from the many sticks that stabbed into them. Who would be in a good mood facing that kind of prospect?

Still, we all sucked it up. Lacanja, the Mayan site was undeniably beautiful for its setting, and as the last site we are visiting on the trip, I felt compelled to appreciate it through what I had learned this semester. After awhile, my teeth stopped chattering and things weren’t so bad. We stopped at a beautiful waterfall we were all too cold to swim in and ate a lunch of delicious cheese, watermelon, Ate de Frutas, which is a fruit-mash-pectin-gel-substance that is great and olives. Some of my classmates played the old ROPES game of passing the team through a spider web with the waterfall setting for beautiful pictures. I changed into my semi-dry clothes, relaxed, and enjoyed myself watching them have fun too. The hike back was long, but enjoyable, and I felt like Raymond K.K.K.K. Hessel after my shower- I will never feel so clean in my life again.