Proud Member of the CEA - Part II

Mindfulness is bringing light into the darkness.  First, it’s the act of stopping.         How joyful that can be to not have the busy-ness.

               Tonight, as I sit down to comida in my Diaz Rincon, it occurs to me:  the Peace Corps has        made             me                    stop. 

               Though I keep trying to GO. 

               Biólogo Angel told me once, early-on in my service:  the government opens the door, that’s it. From there it’s up to you what you do with your time here.

               I protested: but we need more help than that. To do the work of sustainability we need engaged counterparts.  We can’t do it alone.  Real development requires partners, if we have any hope of accomplishing things…that will be sustainable… once we are gone. 

               It was a good Washingtonian argument.  But I’m not in DC anymore.  Angel didn’t say it; I filled-in the silence myself. 

               Now, a year into this journey, so many failures and disappointments under my belt, so many days like yesterday in Zamachihue, going along for the ride, snapping photos, watching as the hopes of the women are raised, knowing after just three months of payments, the engineers will disappear and so will the financial and moral support, Band-Aids on cancer, I’ve got to wonder:  Where does that door really lead? 

               I’d come for ‘something bigger than me.’  That’s the mantra that had been brewing in my brain since Cousin Jonny’s death and Grandma Lena’s and the violinist (my very first teenage sweetheart), all in the span of a year.  It was clear time was running out.  Hadn’t I spent enough time – almost 20 years –

as a management consultant in the marble halls Washington?  Wasn’t it time for something more down to earth, the dusty pueblo, people with real problems – water, education, food security – people who really deserved my help?

               A year later, I’m not sure who’s helping whom.

               The Zamachihue women sent me home with a baggy of freshly cut nopales, de-thorned them in front of me – added a handful of dried chile pequin – and rattled off their recipe – garlic, oregano, chile to taste, muy sencillo.  They said on my next visit they’d teach me to make a móle Potosino.  Maybe this is why I came.

               The Peace Corps is called a lot of things: ‘Cuerpo de Paseo,’ a government-funded vacation, albeit a rustic one, a ‘finishing school’ for recent college grads, a jobs program.  To the conspiracy theorists, it’s a clandestine CIA program to plumb info from the (potential) foreign enemy. Let’s see, what useful information have I brought them in my trimester reports?  60 hours of sustainability training for the Semillas of Esperanza; cleanup day and 4 Rs recycling program with the EcoClub of Puente del Carmen; English conversation group every Monday at Café Amore; Agenda 21 capacity-building for the citizen’s Consejo.

               But what if, in the name of global peace and understanding, our generous, forward-thinking government was paying a few lucky ones to go off and develop a relationship with themselves for two hellacious years?  What I’m saying is:  if there were a Central Enlightenment Agency (CEA), this could be it!  And that open door?  It’s really an invitation…to step OUT of life. 

               But I’m not taking it.  I’m still fighting the Mexican system, tangled up in red tape, striving to have an impact.  I don’t want to return home next December and feel like I just wasted two years of my life. (The words of fellow- volunteer during mid-service training who could have been speaking for any of us.)

               Tears. Why?  It’s too easy.  It’s too hard.

               The door is open. Bienvenidos. Adios. I’m paused at the threshold, peeking in, peeking out…beginning my second year of service and taking a few steps, cautiously.  Hola?

               I’m laughing now.  Silly me, I joined-up and have been here for a year, and I’m just now getting it?   

               I’m sitting here at my dining table stuffed pasta primavera I’ve prepared with the freshest ingredients a person could find anywhere the first of January, dead of winter – the ripest cherry tomatoes, crispest broccoli, sweetest red onions, purest white button mushrooms, dried chili pequin from Angelica’s garden, and Perla’s homemade smoked provolone grated on top. And I realize:  this is all part of the CEA plan to eat more wisely – not a single thing out of a package or can.

               I stare up at the batik hanging on my wall. It’s Cualtemoc, the Aztec leader who did not fold.  Or maybe my guy is Mayan from the Yucatan – he has the nose.  Even the fact that I know the difference is exactly what I mean. The work of the CEA is really incredible. 

               I bought the batik from an artisan working the streets of Isla Mujeres last New Year’s.  Got three of my friends to journey South of the Border to meet me for a little R&R away from DC.  And they got a taste of the beauty and complexity (and margaritas) of Mexico, not to mention the beauty and complexity of our relationships, which had gone in slightly opposing directions since I joined up.  That’s okay – all part of the CEA process. 

               Alejandro, the neighborhood carpenter, constructed a rustic frame for my batik, stained it mahogany, and strung it with istle.  And when he came to drop it off and deliver a few pieces of furniture I’d commissioned to fit the dimensions of my Peace Corp-budget apartment, Alex sat at the new dining table to test it out. He was curious about my life, I could tell.  And Jonny Copp’s poem taped to the wall caught his eye. 

               Border Country, he read aloud.  Then he proceeded to recite the poem, word for word, in measured English.  He needed help with a few tough words – penny whistle, sweetheart, cowering down.  What did that mean? 

               A hard one to define, I scratched my head.  To be scared, con miedo?  I did a duck-and-cover, my arms folded over my head. 

               Oh, he said.  This is real?

               I nodded. 

               Alex was a self-confessed wetback who’d lived in San Antonio for a few years.  That’s where he learned his English, his carpentry trade, and his worth ethic, he told me.  Anyone can work…if they want to, he’d said one day as we reviewed designs and negotiated prices.  When I gave him the specs for the medicine cabinet he told me:  I’ll make ten of them and ship them to my brother in Houston. If you like it, other gringos will.  Mexicans don’t use these things.

               Alex was a talker.  But when he finished the poem he was quiet. Maybe he was amazed he understood.  What had he understood?  That Jonny was being engulfed by the earth. 

               Es tu primo? 

               Si, era, WAS my cousin, I replied.

               Alex nodded.  And in that moment his Mexican Mask* seemed to disappear.  Maybe now he understood why I was here:  things had happened to me in my life – maybe not all part of God’s grand plan.  I had made choices, strange ones to him – no husband, no children, alone in this place in Mexico, far from home, and not for money?  But I shared something universal, something he knew: life, death, love, struggle, moments of understanding. 

               This is what I mean about the CEA.

               Sure, I’ve had my problems with HQ – red tape, paternalism, vaccines for things that don’t come near Mexico, security scares that only add to our feelings of vulnerability.  You’d think an outfit that was ABOUT enlightenment would BE enlightened.  But I guess it’s like any organization of imperfect humans.  

               I realize I’m not here for that.  I was right from the beginning:  I’m here for something bigger than me.  It’s just that that BIGness…it’s inside me.

End.

* Mexican poet/writer Octavio Paz, in his 1990 Nobel Prize-winning analysis of the Mexican character and culture, The Labyrinth of Solitude, says that the ‘equilibrium of which we [Mexicans] are so proud is only a mask, always in danger of being ripped off by a sudden explosion of our intimacy.’