Pax Gaea Human Rights World Post

Musings From A Mexican Pizza Parlor Philosopher

Well, at long last we finally have Internet. It is nice to know that the issues we have in the states with respect to coordinating with the cable guy seems to be universal everywhere. I woke early this morning to run a very large load of mildewed laundry to the lavadaria. As we were short on baggage space we had to load a lot of our winter clothes into seabags which were stored on the roof rack. With all the rain we had on the trip and the daily downpours here in the mountains those clothes were fairly ripe. I ran back to wait for the cable guy who popped in around 9:30 but he had to run back to the office when the network went down. He tried his best to communicate this in Spanish to us and told us to call in one hour.

We gave him about two hours with no sign of an Internet signal and then we attempted to contact Telecable, our provider. While Telmex, the national telephone company, is also the national Internet and cable company, it appears that if you don’t want a phone line, which can take up to three years to have installed, you may work with one of the few independent suppliers. We were fortunate that our landlord showed up just as we were failing in our attempt to communicate, and she happily translated the information from the operator at Telecable. Apparently, it appeared our technician wasn’t coming back but we were instructed to just keep trying the Internet and, hopefully, eventually, it will begin working. We took the afternoon straightening up around the house and tearing into our voluminous reading list. Our much need delivery of bottled water likewise arrived and it was nice to actually have gallons of drinkable water rather than having to constantly purchase 600-ml bottles every day just to get by. It’s amazing how much water you drink everyday and how much you appreciate it when you have to rely on a pre-packaged source. Every half-hour or so I would check the connection, confirm we still had no Internet and return back to my book. We resolved that if by 4:30 we had not established an Internet connection, we’d head off and knock down our list of errands and try again tomorrow.

At 4:00, I tried the connection again and, to my pleasant surprise, we were once again connected to the Internet. I would equate the feeling to being lost at sea in a lifeboat and then suddenly seeing a luxury cruise liner heading your way. We were saved, and I dove into my blogs and sorted through the hundreds of unread e-mails. I confess that I got caught up in finally establishing contact with home and, after much cajoling, we headed out at 5:30 to do errands.

We picked up the huge stack of clothes I had dropped off earlier and found them wonderfully fresh smelling and clean. We then headed into Patzcuaro Centro to hunt down the numerous miscellaneous items we need to make the house more of a home. One of the pleasant, albeit inconvenient, differences between Patzcuaro and Wilmington is that we have no Wal-Mart to contend with, so we had to negotiate our way through dozens of little stores, each specializing in a few items. I had hoped to pick up one of those tasty open fire cooked chickens to bring home for dinner, but our shopping ran longer than expected and we had to settle for pizza. I sat and chatted with the young fellow who had taken my to-go order, and we had a totally bi-lingual conversation, me in English and he in Spanish, and yet we really seemed to be communicating. We talked about how it seemed strange that, in Europe Germans may be Germans, Spanish may be Spanish, English may be English and Italians may be Italians but they are also, always, proudly Europeans. In his view though, while people in the United States consider themselves to be Americans, everyone else on these two continents we call America, don’t seem to have the right to claim the title of American. He seemed to be disturbed by the notion that gringos don’t seem to recognize that there are hundreds of millions of Americans whom they marginalize as non-American. This was, perhaps, why they had such a visceral reaction to immigration from the south. That though they were Americans, they were Latin Americans and thus, alien. While Europeans may speak more languages and enjoy distinctive cultures from country to country, they were likewise united in their pride of being Europeans. So why, he seemed to ask, can’t we all take pride in being Americans? Why can’t we be like Europe and open our borders and co-mingle our languages and cultures like they do? Why are Americans afraid of their fellow Americans?

These were great questions to ponder as I handed the girls their Pepsis in a plastic bag. In an effort to cut down on trash and minimize the health hazards of broken glass, Mexico has made the deposit costs of glass bottles so outrageous that restaurants no longer release their glass bottles. As the pizza parlor had no plastic or Styrofoam cups, the waiter poured the Pepsi into plastic bags, inserted a straw and tied a watertight knot on the bag. The girls were surprised but we likewise marveled at the innovation. We came home, enjoyed pizza and sodas (and for me a glass bottled Negro Modelo with a deposit higher than the beer itself) and I put Abi to work on her first blog (look for that sometime tomorrow at http://www.paxgaea.com ).

It is a nice change of pace to once again be able to stream Air America on-line as we pull together our various on-line and library elements and prepare to begin writing Thatcher. Tomorrow we begin falling into our daily routine to accommodate our daily walks to town to shop for lunch and dinner, coffee and crema at one of our favorite coffee shops, home schooling for the girls and language classes for all of us, blogging and, after the girls go to bed, four to six hours of writing nightly. We have a goal to finish the first draft by the first of November, so we’ve much to do to keep us busy between now and Dia De La Muerta, the Day of the Dead… a fitting deadline for our first draft.

Keep the e-mails and messages coming. We thrive on your encouragement.

posted by Dave Carroll @ 8/18/2006 12:10:00 AM