Background: I actually wrote this back in 2004, but had pulled it from the blog to try to get it published. There was a reason to put it back up for a while. This was written when I was going to IUSB to get my degree in Spanish as I remembered why I wanted to learn Spanish.
It's important to remember what events changed you. When I get tired of going to school, and continually trying to wrap my head around Spanish grammar and trying to improve my accent, I try to remember the day that changed me forever. The picture above was taken on that day, that's me in the lower right corner. I know, I know, what's up with that red bandana?
In 1997 I went on my first trip to Mexico. This was my first trip outside of the USA. I was extremely nervous and did not know what to expect. I had been to two Spanish classes before the trip, so I was looking forward to getting a real workout
We were running free dental and medical clinics in the mountains of the state of Puebla. The third day we were high up in the mountains, around five thousand feet above sea level in a village called Ahuactlan. The mountains were covered with coffee plants,palms and pines with every shade of green imaginable. Every evening the fog would roll up the mountains like a blanket of white cotton candy that would melt away with the morning heat. As we drove up into the mountains in the morning from the town of Huauachinango, we passed colonial homes with fuschia Bougainvillea growing on the pastel walls guarded by wrought iron gates. The next street we passed would be a group of shacks with home-made turkey pens and skittish dogs peeking from the corners.
There was not one particular event this day that struck me, it was more like the day as a whole. Since I had more Spanish training than some of the other gringos, I was trained in doing registration. This meant I would take their blood pressure and temperature and ask them questions about their health and direct them to the doctor or dentist.
Mexicans don't seem to have that built-in tendency to line up for things, they
just crowd around and elbow in through the crowd when they want something. But they are fairly good natured about it and don't get angry, at least compared to most uptight Anglos.
For at least 5 hours I was surrounded by a sea of faces. Most of the people were Nuahtl(indigenous Mexicans). People were at my elbows, crowding around me, looking at me like I was the strangest thing they had ever seen. I'm sure they were all slightly curious about why a six foot tall gordo gringo with a crew cut was doing in their neck of the woods. The adults were very serious, but the kids were as curious as kids anywhere else in the world. What really floored me was that many of the people coming to the clinics knew about as much or even less Spanish than I did. They spoke the Nuahtl language. Many of the older people knew no Spanish and little kids would translate from Nuahtl to Spanish so we could get them registered.
During those five hours, I finally became conscious of a world I had been so sheltered for my life up to then. Its taken me a long time to be able to put it in clear words, before then it was just a non-specific raw feeling inside me. I always thought I was an empathetic guy before then, but this was a totally different feeling. I felt like I was surrounded by all of the poverty, pain, and desperation of the world at large. It was a world of babies getting sick because they can't get enough vitamins, people with a head full of rotten teeth making their head ache from morning to night, and no hope for the future or real social change because almost all authorities around them are callous to their pain.
All of your life you try to see yourself as who you really are, or where you fit into society. After these five hours I didn't know who I was anymore. My high and tight crew cut, the loud Hawaiian shirts, shiny shoes, and all those weird obsessions that I thought had defined me as unique seemed to mean nothing at that point. I couldn't be that guy anymore, his image faded in and out, like some scratchy black and white educational film from the fifties about to burn up in the borrowed projector from the AV department.
In those five hours, the world became so much bigger, and people so much more precious...
-John
