I feel like living in the land of milk and honey: Awesome pineapples for 5-15 pesos each (30 to 80 euro cents), deep red watermelons, tangy or staggeringly sweet mangos - all for some cheap 5 pesos per kilo. It's great.
And apart, my dear friends equip me with the best delicacies from all over the world: Famous Cuban coffee directly brought back from a recent trip, original Japanese soul food like Ochazuke & miso soup... and all this with the pleasant Mexican climate - that's how I imagine a land of milk and honey (or well, of coffee and fruit as sweet as honey).
Travelling - and the privilege to do so...
Another great thing of being in Mexico is that it really never gets boring. As a foreigner of course you experience new and odd situations almost every day, even without travelling. And if time permits, the country is so huge and diverse, you could honestly be a year on the road and still discover new landscapes, customs, people, animals, etc.
Starting from next Sunday, we'll have one week off for the Holy Week and I'm planning to travel to the Yucatán peninsula in the country's south. Yesterday, when I went to the market, my fruit vendor Ventura told me that next week she will bring me some more Cherimoyas from her garden. I told her that it would be very nice, but that I'll actually be somewhere in Yucatán. What happened next really made me speechless:
"Ah, so where's that?", she asked.
I thought she had not understood due to my awkward pronounciation or whatever. So I repeated:
"Well, Yucatán, the peninsula in the South of Mexico."
She replied:
"Ah ya... hmm... well, I don't know."
I still thought there had to be some kind of misunderstanding. I mean - how can you not have at least heard of the name of a large region in your very own country? So I tried to be a bit more specific:
"You know - the peninsula right in the east of Chiapas."
And just to ensure that we were talking about the same thing, I added:
"You do know Chiapas, right?!"
Her answer:
"Hmm, ya, I've heard of it. But I don't know where it is."
You as a foreign reader probably really don't know where all these places are, so let me illustrate it:
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| Source: Google Maps |
It was so eye-opening. I really did not want to make her feeling dumb, but my explanations were made in disbelief. I just could not imagine that you don't have a clue of where some of the biggest states of your country are located.
This showed me another real problem of development aid. As I had mentioned in previous posts, I'm working on a paper about Mexico's microfinance industry. I write about things like the importance of education, so that people actually have an idea of how to handle microcredits, etc.
But at the same time I think many people working in this field, or any other area of development aid, just lack the sense for the true necessities. The abstract concept of "education" sounds nice. But you really have to immerse yourself in the world of the base of the pyramid (i.e. a population's most disadvantaged part) in order to tailor your services and actions in a way that they do cater to the actual needs of your target group. If you don't understand that "lack of education" basically means "no real education at all", then your actions won't show any positive effect.
I'm teaching a bit of German to Carmelo, one of the university's security guards. He wants his daughter to learn the language and so his idea is to get a grasp of the language's basics in order to share it with his daughter. I knew it is not very efficient, because this "indirect" approach obviously boasts some serious flaws. But now I think I probably have to change my strategy as a whole, because probably the daughter simply does not "know how to study". If she lacks the basic understanding of how to handle new information, how to efficiently embed it in her memory, etc. then she will probably never be able go beyond the very simple starters of "hello" and "how are you". While you might ask why she should learn German at all, I think any kind of education is always valuable. Especially when it comes to language learning, it can be suuuch a...
Gratifying experience.
In my opinion, studying a language is one of the most rewarding activities - if done properly. I mean, could there be any better motivation than the future ability to talk to millions of people you currently wouldn't be able to communicate with. To read awesome books and get a much better understanding of other cultures. To obtain access to a never-ending amount of knowledge. To understand movies and songs, dramas and theater plays, etc. you didn't understand before. With each new vocabulary you broaden your options. I love it. And now excuse me, I'm craving the rewards of studying Japanese.
Have a nice week and see you later!
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