My Canadian Mexican Mom

My Canadian Mexican mom moved to Germany for two months to spend time with Justin, her second born who lives in Berlin with his fiancé. I’m going to miss her dearly. Angela is originally from Toronto but has lived in Querétaro and raised her family there for the last 35 years. Angela has taught me a number of different recipes, such as a baked fish with jitomates, cebolla, calabazas, and papas. And a salsa verde with tomatillos and chiles. The one I hope to master are her black beans. I don’t know what she does to those legumes but they are damn delightful! She starts by making frijoles de la olla (whole black beans cooked over the stove top), and then after a couple days she will mash them a bit into a mix of whole bean and refried. And the last day she turns them all into refried. It is the most wonderful cycle of black beans that is delicious at each stage.

When we were heading into winter and Jamai had just left from his first visit and I wouldn’t see him for a couple months until New Years, Angela taught me to knit. She suggested it’d be good to do something creative and told me to knit Jamai a scarf so I could think about him basically as much as I wanted and do something productive. Or watch three seasons of Scandal right in a row and not feel bad about it.

Measuring my progress with a selfie

And going into Spring, she taught me how to oil the joints of her old, steel, Singer, lace it up with some hilo and load up the bobina. She instructed me in starting an apron as my first project and once the cloth was cut, told me to “just bang it out”. I passed all of my free time over two days in the sewing room until I walked out wearing my delantal, with a bright red border and two carefully placed pockets.

 

Angela worked as the director of a bilingual program at a school in Querétaro for 30 years and constantly helped me navigate working in a Mexican educational institution. She also taught English for many years and helped me plan lessons for a pretty challenging class I taught in the late fall.

She invited me into her home and made me a part of her wonderful family. I am forever grateful for having had the opportunity to know her and am excited for her on her German adventure.

Things I have taught

In January I started teaching in Jaime’s Saturday afternoon English class. Once he asked me to teach a class on the present simple tense and daily activities. The first thing that came to mind was Atmosphere’s song Like Today. It was one of those wonderful moments in teaching when the entire lesson comes to you at once. And here is how it goes:

Set-up:

1.) Write a bunch of daily activities on a bunch of strips of paper, like “make coffee”, “read”, “listen to music”, “people watch”, “put on [leave space to insert pronoun] shoes”, “hit on a man/woman”, etc.

2.) write a bunch of “s” and “es” on other little strips of paper

3.) Write whatever pronouns you will need (i.e. he, his) and a bunch of others to be confusing (i.e. theirs, she, ours, us, her, they, we, etc.)

3.) tape them all to the white board

Warm up:

1.) Read through all the strips of daily activities together

2.) Students ask for clarification of new words and pronunciation

Lesson:

1.) Hand out lyrics of Atmosphere’s Like Today to all students with a few present simple verbs left blank

2.) Play song twice and have students fill in blanks with missing verbs

3.) Go through missing verbs together as a whole class

4.) Have whole class use the word strips to list the things he does in the song in the correct order

5.) While arranging word strips, read actions out loud and ask if anything needs to be changed. Students will tell you to add “s” or “es” to conjugate for the third person singular, i.e. he listens to music

6.) Model adding in linking words like “first”, “next”, “after that” and then have students suggest what to add.

7.) Students talk to partners about their perfect day.

Assessment:

Many students knew to add the “s” from the very beginning and knew when to add “s” and when to add “es”. The “s” sound in the third person single is really hard for many English learners so this lesson was meant to emphasize it and practice using it. The class has a mix of levels so the higher level students led the way on the whole group work but I think it was good for the lower level students to listen to their peers make corrections and use new vocabulary. When listening to pair conversations, there was a good level of fluency amongst most students and they all were very descriptive about what their perfect day would look like, using a wide range of vocabulary. Grammar still needs some work.

Reflection:

I’m not too sure how to correctly conjugate “people watch”… do we say “he people watches”? Is it a verb we conjugate or only use in the infinitive? Students really loved learning “people watch” and “hit on a man/woman”, I got a good chuckle out of them for those two. Had to heavily scaffold the word strip activity. The song is pretty tough because it has some slang and uses descriptive language that is subtle and hard to interpret. 

Vocab list

My favorite word that I’ve learned this year is “enchilarse” (en-chee- LAR- say). It means to over do it with the chile. Me enchilé, I say nearly every other day, I over chile-ed myself. Eyes watering, sucking in thin tubes of air to cool off my mouth. Waving my hand near my face because that helps the most. 

Zihuatanejo

After my Fulbright reunion in January, Allie and I hopped the overnight bus to Zihuatanejo. We arrived at 9am and metup with our Couch Surfing Host, Jai, a Portugese scuba diving instructor that would turn out to be one of the most generous people I have ever met. He let us stay in the spare bedroom of his perfectly central apartment for five entire days. Jai greeted us at the basketball court when we got out of our taxi and showed us around town. We first stopped at a Vegan farmers market on the white sand beach where we tried raw food wraps and bought a bottle of home-brewed kombucha. Allie has her master’s in biology and has since become very interested in fermented foods and is a major home-brewer of kombucha herself, so this was a pretty magic moment to say the least.

Zihuatanejo is a cute, super-laid back beach town next to the resort-filled Ixtapa and just a bit north of Acapulco. There are a number of U.S. Americans and Canadians from my parents’ generation hanging out for a few months at a time. The woman who brews the kombucha is an American who has been living in Zihua for about 12 years. She invited us to her house to get some bulgaros (water kefir cultures). Used to brew a probiotic drink) and check out her kombucha setup. While there, she taught us how to hang upside down in her yoga hammocks and stretch it out. We walked home a bit in awe of this ex-pat yogi.

Jai also brought us to a beach a bit off the beaten path, Playa Larga, where we ordered fresh fish, swam in the ocean, and played with his greyhound mutt pup, Ellie. We snorkeled at Las Gatas and stayed in the water until our faces hurt from our snorkel masks and then went in later to find the stone Jesus statue hidden in the water. On our fourth day, Jai offered to take us out on the boat with him and his scuba class so we could snorkel off shore by some giant rocks. It was like the day before but magnified. Gentle waves pushing the groups of vibrant blue fish back and forth, the hint of fear that you’re way far out in the ocean, and endless little corners to peek into. 

           After snorkeling, Jai took us to our fourth and final beach, Playa del Ropa. A group of mariachis approached us and I told them I go through the Mexican side of customs in the airport and would they give us a deal on two songs por favor? Allie didn’t think it was worth it at first, but once they started to play she got up and didn’t stop dancing until the very last note was played. She learned the important life lesson that mariachis on the beach are always a good idea. After some chips and guacamole, Jai went back to work and Allie and I continued swimming in the ocean and sipping on our coconuts. We finally had to leave to get some dinner (sushi for a second time that trip) before we took our separate overnight buses to our separate cities of Querétaro and Pachuca. Hugging and promising to see each other soon, she left first. I took some Dramamine and waited for my turn to head home.

Fulbright Mid-Year Reunion

 In January, the 23 remaining Mexico ETA Fulbrighters (we lost two) made our way to the Holiday Inn Express in Mexico City where we met the two ETAs from The Dominican Republic, the five ETAs from Ecuador, and the two ETAs from Venezuela.

We spent our first day at the Benjamin Franklin Library in Mexico City. The library is part of the U.S. Embassy and offers many English language services and counseling opportunities for those that wants to study in the U.S.

After the first day in Mexico City, we moved to a charming little city in the smallest state in the republic, Tlaxcala.

The week was long and full, everyone presented in groups of three about their experiences working in their respective schools.

The Teacher's Lounge, featuring Angela, Meredith, and Mariah

It was fascinating to see how different the teaching situations are between each country and to compare similarities and differences between each country. Venezuela stood out in it's cultural and political differences. Venezuela is going through a significant shift since Hugo Chavez's death. The exchange rate is volatile and the imports are unstable, causing shortages of basic goods like toilet paper and chicken. Dara, one of the Venezuela ETAs, showed me a photo of her local grocery store in which all of the shelves were empty, except for one that had bottles of bleach. Bolivares (the Venezuelan currency) aren't sold outside of the country because of the constantly shifting exchange rate due to the constantly growing inflation, so they are paid in U.S. dollars to their American bank accounts and then have to figure out for themselves how to get Bolivares. Although they face constant instability, both ETAs are enjoying their year. They love their schools and social communities, they like their work, and they know they are living in Venezuela during an incredibly important moment in history. They must follow the news every day because an announcement made on Monday will directly effect daily life on Tuesday. They watch both the state controlled news and follow Twitter, often the most honest source of news in many countries (including Mexico). Unfortunately, in recent weeks, protests against the government have erupted all over the country and the situation has become increasingly unstable. Basic goods are even harder to find, road blocks are sprouting up throughout cities and towns making it impossible to move around, and spouts of violence have killed over a dozen people. Dara wrote on her blog about trying to decide if she should stay or if it's time to go.

We listened to talks by a state department diplomat and a Fulbright Distinguished Teacher grantee, went to trainings given by English Language Fellows (ELFs), and exchanged stories. We spent the majority of the each day in conference rooms but our coordinator Tim also arranged for us to explore the city and surrounding area.

We went on a tour of a government building full of murals that tell the history of Mexico and Tlaxcala:

We took a trolley tour:

We watched Oaxacan-style cheese be made:

We went to an hacienda were we watched how agua miel (honey water) is sucked out of the maguey cactus and then fermented into pulque, a traditional beverage full of amino acids and probiotics. It's one of my favorite drinks here, but definitely an acquired taste:

And finally, we went to the ruins of Cacaxtla to see some of the best preserved Mayan murals in the country:

One of the best parts about being a Fulbright grantee is meeting other Fulbright grantees. Each person in this group has a wide-range of interests and inspiring experiences. They are kind, ambitious, and really positive representatives of the U.S. They are proactive, passionate about education and building international relationships, and using their own education to positively impact the world around them. I really believe in every one of them and look forward to see what they go on to do after this year. I was so thankful to get to spend the week with them and only wish we would have the opportunity to all gather together again before we go our different ways.

Believe in Queretaro

A new year

Hello! A very belated Happy New Year!

Right before Christmas I went to Sayulita, a little fishing town turned surfer's haven just north of Puerto Vallarta. It was heaven.

It also reconfirmed how important it is for me to go to the beach. During the fall, an old roommate of mine who did a Fulbright ETA in Brazil a couple of years ago got in touch with me. When I asked her for advice about how to make the most of the experience she said "stress less, go to the beach more." It took me nearly four months to get to the coast and the moment my feet touched the sand, I felt like me again.

The fall was hard. Leaving home, adjusting to living without Jamai for the first time in 7 years, leaving behind the puppy I had spent most of the year raising just at the point when he was growing out of puppyhood, moving away the same month about 8 friends moved back to San Francisco, and saying goodbye to the friends who have been like my family for the last 7 years, it all hit like a ton of bricks once the initial newness and excitement of Mexico faded away. I also experienced culture shock more profoundly than I had expected. While studying abroad in Spain, I was surrounded by other U.S. Americans my age and we were taking classes. Here, it was just me and Robert and I was working in a professional environment.

Working in another culture was probably one of the biggest adjustments to living here. Mexicans communicate much less directly than U.S. Americans and I constantly feel confused by conversations I have and emails I receive. I usually feel like my questions were not answered and am left frustrated and unsure of what is expected of me. They are also less rigid in terms of time tables and any number of things can take much longer to do here than in a work environment at home. And all of this is ok; it's normal, and it's simply the way things are done in Mexico. Coming from a culture where we prefer to get down to business and get things done quickly and efficiently, it is hard to adjust to how another culture that is focused on personal relationships operates. When we arrived, they told us that American directness can be perceived as rude here and that it is important to spend time talking to colleagues at work, start emails by asking how the other is doing and generously express gratitude. I am getting better at all three, but at the beginning I had to literally interrupt myself as I was about to blurt out a question or request and ask how the other person was doing. I have also gotten better at turning away from my computer for a few minutes while a co-worker tells me a personal story and now enjoy these encounters instead of feeling irritated by the interruption. Slowly, it is becoming more natural, or at least less forced. I feel less self-conscious about what I am saying and how it will be perceived and sincerely engage in lengthy conversations that have nothing to do with work. It will be very interesting to see how I readjust to working in the U.S. again, if I will hold onto what I have learned here or if I'll fall back into the communication patterns I developed over the last few years.

My New Year's Resolution was to take things less seriously. I decided I am not going to worry so much about my correctness when speaking Spanish. It's my second language, always will be, and will never be perfect. I am not going to stress over communication confusion at work anymore. I would need to spend far more time in this culture to be fully fluent in the nuances and subtleties of their communication style. And I am going to go to the beach more. In fact, I just got back from 5 glorious days in Zihuatanejo, more on that to come.