Story Slam ~ Momentos of Home

I got slammed, friends.

I was selected as one of eight contestants to stand before the Busboys and Poets audience and a panel of judges and tell my story of home.

It was a packed house, and many supportive friends had come to cheer me on. My hair was looking pretty good despite the humidity. I wore my colorful Mexican camisa. I had the sound guy play a song by my favorite huapangero, Guillermo Velazquez y los Leones de la Sierra de Xichu, as they announced my name and I danced up to the stage.

But it was not easy to compete with homeboy stories about the ‘Mayor for Life’ and rants about endless, senseless murder in the hood. How about the fellow who opined about Metro? The problem is not lack of funding, he told us, but lack of love.

These stories, so close to home, DC, USA, were told extemporaneously, limbs and lips loose, while I, the gringa, stood still, shielding my eyes from the spotlight, and carefully read my well-edited words from the typed page. Mine was a story of a different home, not found here, in a place, but in fleeting moments, on my journey through Mexico.

Momentos of Home

It’s another day fighting Mexico. On the Vencedor bus with the backed-up bathroom, we all hold our breath anytime someone ventures in. Seven hours traveling in the driving rain from my pueblito in the high plains desert has me squirming in my seat. But I welcome the deluge, like a baptism, after endless months of dust and burning sun. I plug-in my headphones and close my eyes to block out the noise: the crying baby behind me, videos overhead blaring violence in Spanish, the restless niños across the aisle. The guru whispers her wisdom in my ear: ' You’re going to die and I’m going to die and we have these moments together.'

I sink into the seat, lazily crack open my eyes, and notice the little boys are playing with their tongues. I blink and pull-out my ear buds, curious what they are doing.

‘Su len-gua se si-en-ta co-mo un car-a-col,’ the little one says with perfect diction. Your tongue feels like a snail? I grin at their discovery and my comprehension of it.

It’s the older brother’s turn. ‘Ahh-bra,’ he says, ordering his little hermano to open wider, grabbing the tongue and pulling on it. ‘Ewwwe,’ the older boy cries, an exclamatory that requires no translation.
The mother beside them sleeps right through: It’s the only way she gets a break. But my seatmate and I are riveted. Strangers, we bond through our mutual eavesdropping.

For all the alone time I’ve had, the lone gringa in my rural village, divided by language and culture and a subtlety of small-town suspicion, I feel an instant kinship to this señora. The expectation to do or fix, develop or improve that has defined my Peace Corps service is non-existent on this bus. It’s a relief to just be.

The bus pulls-off at a muddy truck stop. There’s a long line at the toilet. I pull papery rectangles from a napkin dispenser and wait my turn. Inside it’s dark. My eyes adjust. I suspend myself over the hole in the ground then flush with a bucket of water I fish from an oil drum.

Outside, the smell of coffee and cinnamon, exhaust and pork fat, hangs on the wet night air. Men in splattered aprons chop barbacoa on a greasy woodblock, piling stringy meat into double layers of tortilla. We stand around the plywood table, spoon guac sauce and chile verde, runny, green and super spicy, onto our tacos. I slosh back into the bus with raindrops on my head and chile on my tongue.
When we land at Terminal Central, my seat mate and I turn to each other and smile. I wonder if we’ll part ways with Mexican cheek kisses, but instead we bid a polite buen vieje and shake, the American way. I watch as the niños, like barrel of monkeys, are pulled through the station by their mama, around the corner, then out of site.

You’re going to die and I’m going to die y tenemos estos momentos conjuntos.

 ~~~

O’Hare Airport is decked out for Independence Day. American flags hang regally from the rafters of the shiny concourses. Embarrassed by the touch of patriotism, I snap a few photos when no one’s looking. It’s Saturday night in Chicago and I’ve got some time to kill, a three-hour delay to DCA. But Mexico’s taught me something about patience.

I find a bar playing the baseball game, and Julio from Jalisco serves me a tall Blue Moon with a bright wedge of lemon. We speak Spanish because now I can, and I feel a little bit proud. He’s proud too: he’s lived in the US for 24 years, he tells me. And I’m living in his country, for the last year, I say, and one more to go. We laugh about this cambio de casas, trading places.

My beer costs 10 US dollars including tip, a lucky Mexican’s daily wage. I take a final precious gulp and head for the baños. I’m awed by the granite countertops and polished marble floor, toilet seats with protectors that rotate to a clean place when you press the button. Whiiir. Endless rolls of toilet-paper and automatic flush. Full-length mirrors for primping, soft peach light that makes you look like a movie star (though I’m playing a raggedy traveler), soap in the dispensers and your choice of hand-blowers or towels for drying.

At the gate the children sit quietly reading books and tapping Ipad screens. Airport TV hums overhead reporting go-local organic markets, heirloom tomatoes and artisan cheeses. The AC purrs, the laptops click, the air hostess smiles, English is spoken.

America makes it all look so easy, smooth, in-control. It’s not fair.

The flight is announced and we line-up by zone. As I file down the jet way I feel both drawn and repelled, straddling two worlds, two homes, the orderly and spontaneous, the haves and have-nots, divided by a thin line that is thickly fortified. And I get to enter. 

What IS Success? Pondering my First PCV Trimester Report & 'Small Wins' with the Consejo on Sustainability Rioverde

I’m completing my first trimester report as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I’ve filled in the Java screens with my actions, results, challenges, checked the accomplishment boxes, and calculated activity headcounts. I’m taking this system seriously; I know we have to justify our existence in the work of peace and friendship. But I’ve left the Success Story screen blank. I have to let that one stew.

What is success after three months on-site in Green River?

A municipio of 88,000 situated in the Zona Media of San Luis Potosi, it is a pueblo caught in-between: between the bustling capital and the lush Huesteca; between 263 rural ejido communities and the bourgeois urban center; between dependency on their government and the US. One young campesino I met in an early foro in El Capulin community told us Peace Corps Volunteers that if he didn’t get the muni’s help (apoyo para el campo) to make the land workable again, he was going back to Estados Unidos. A threat, a Plan B, a reality.

This new Consejo de Sustentabilidad Rioverde, with whom I’ve been assigned to work, seems sandwiched in-between too. Citizens representing each of six sectors (ecologia, agricultura, emprezas, academia, social y gobierno), they’ve been selected by the mayor’s office to serve as a much-needed link between the Government and the People. They’ve been sworn-in in Cabildo, and are tasked with setting the standard for sustainability in the municipality, encouraging and creating development projects that “meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” (Bruntland Commission, Rio Accords, 1987)

This is not small order – especially given the fact that it’s an all-volunteer board, and they’ve been given no budget or official authority or ability to raise and manage funds of their own.

So what is success for them?

As a Peace Corps volunteer doing the work of development, I am meant to create sustainable projects – changes that outlast my two-year term of service. And with this board that has sustainability in its name, it seems obvious, our work together should create an organization and initiative that outlives them too. Having a coincidence of intentions is a pretty good place to start.

So I set out to formulate our ‘primera meta’ and present this to the Consejo at our first meeting:

Crear un Consejo de Sustentabilidad eficaz y eficiente, con una misión, visión y papeles claros, con un proceso colaborativa, y con herramientas y conocimiento para continuar y crecer Agenda 21 para el largo plazo.

In other words (borrowing from one my heroes), be the sustainability we hope to create in Rioverde.

I’m tapping into my 15 years of organization development consulting experience, using my SeeChange participatory tools to create something concrete the group can react to, revise, buy-into. But instead, I hear doubts – conversation swirling around the table and going nowhere – caught between hopes for change in their pueblo, a sustainable future for their children, a government that’s participatory and transparent…and their complaints about the system, the impossibility of their task, ni modo refrains that fill the time and space and keep them sandwiched comfortably in the status quo.

I want them to discuss this first goal, believe in it, and move forward as a team to realize it. But that’s not happening. They’re avoiding it, looking outward, not inward, going off in their own directions, forgetting their aspiration to be a ‘different kind of Consejo.’

And I feel the frustration building, my own gringa desires for progress and productivity butting up against reality, my ‘just do it’ cultural programming butting up against mañana. After a couple weeks of this ‘going nowhere,’ I begin to question myself, my approach, my work with the Consejo and my reason for being here in Rioverde (maybe my energy would be better spent with la gente in the Campo), even my decision to join the Peace Corps and come to Mexico in the first place!

Luckily I recognize this is what the Buddhist’s call dukkha – the worry, doubt, second-guessing, and piling-on we do when things aren’t going how we planned. So I take a step back, breathe, take some time from the business of planning and doing and reacting to investigate my own role in the process – how my own desires for change and to have an impact might be effecting them.

Perhaps this pause and reflection is my first small ‘success.’ Because suddenly from this distance, my lens focusing in, I see: They are at the very beginning of their change journey. And so am I!

I pull out my handy Human Change Curve to remind myself – it’s a process. And the first stage is Denial – not just a river in Egypt – but a time when things are so new it’s easy to pretend they’re aren’t – to just float along like nothing’s changed and nothing’s going to. And this can be a dangerous place to get stuck because, in fact, it will prevent evolution. For the Consejo and me, it will block any hope for work together on the path toward a sustainable Rioverde – and realizing our own personal dreams.

So what is needed to get past Denial? Information.

The truth is the Consejo members don’t really know me, don’t yet trust me. Why should they? New to Mexico, to Rioverde, an outsider, here in my sitio less than two months – learning and improving as fast as I can, but still fumbling with their language, the customs, still adjusting to the extreme temperatures and the Vitamina T intake, tacos, tamales, tostadas, tortas, tamborcitos, experiencing periodic bouts of Montezuma’s revenge – and discovering the inner workings of the bureaucracy, the players, their challenges and agendas.

I need to share with the Consejo information about who I am, my background and experience as an entrepreneur, my life and interests, my hopes and fears, my ideas about participation and innovation, why I am here in their country – why I left the comforts of Washington DC and my established consulting life…for something bigger than me. Ah, and for the Comida Mexicana!

Most important (and difficult), I realize I need to let go of my game plan altogether. Perhaps the Consejo wants or even needs to work on its own, confronting their challenges, making their own discoveries, experiencing possible successes, even failure – without my involvement. This is not a comfortable realization to make. I hear the little voice inside me saying: It’s not fair, I came to help. And I find myself quickly concocting Plan B and C – how to make my life meaningful, myself useful, in the Peace Corps.

But I move forward, with my PCV partner, to hold a special meeting of the Consejo, presenting our experience and ideas and outlining the process of capacity-building and planning – and then letting go. Asking if they are in agreement to involve us – explaining it’s their decision: we cannot be effective unless they are open and ready to learn and share with us.

We go around the table then, sure to hear every voice – what are their desires, thoughts, concerns? And one by one, I hear agreement: yes they do want and need the help – several of them say, in fact, they joined this Consejo in order to learn and create a new model.

I am relieved, in truth. And beneath the agreement, I hear Resistance: impatience from a few voices, ‘vamos adalente’. We don’t want to waste time. We are busy. And tiny complaints: do we have to make it a weekend retreat? Even sarcasm: Look, we are not Americans. We are not going to applaud the idea.

Okay, fair enough.

But perhaps, nevertheless, a tiny victory. Moving out of the muddy Denial stage into wilds of Resistance is progress; certainly something to include on the Success Story page of my first trimester report.

And now, with this acuerdo, I don’t have to explore a Peace Corps Plan B – at least for now. I can dive into preparing a survey of the Consejo and creating the best teambuilding workshop I can – bringing all my experience, skills, tools, energy, even love, to the table – putting all of that into the PowerPoints and translations and participatory exercises – then letting go of the result.

Ojala…I’ll have (even) more ‘small success’ to report next quarter.