One week down and 5 to go. Starting to figure out who is who and where is where. The first week is always interesting in a foreign city. Trying to memorize local landmarks, memorize names and addresses and learning the proper coloquialisms.
They've definitely kept us busy throughout this first week. Visits to local schools, visits from renowned regional scholars, excursions to ancient civilizations and a 3rd of July BBQ! Better early than never.
Still seems like we've got a good group of people. No complainers! yet
Visit to local bilingual school and interview with private and public school teachers:
We went to visit this little school right across the street where we're studying. Cute little place. They definitely put more resources and value to learning English than we do learning Spanish. There's definitely something we should learn from them. Start young and it works! The 3 women that came to talk to us about the education system were semi-combative but the interesting thing was that you could have presented the exact same argument about education in the States. Private schools for the priveleged and crowded public schools for everyone else. Not enough resources to pay teachers or to lower the student:teacher ratio. Sounds familiar! They also referred to the Sindacto (union) as the devil that has single-handedly ruined the reputation of teachers and lowered student achievement because of their political influence. Sound familiar?
Visit to Vamos: We took a trip downtown to see a small non-profit with the mission of educating and providing health care to the marginalized children and adults (mostly indigenous). We're gonna be doing some service with them throughout the trip. Great mission but lacking resources to get to everyone that needs that type of assistance. What's amazing to me is that they would be able to receive national funding except for the fact that the government puts so many regulations on the organizations they will financially support. Corruption, inefficiency and lack of trust seems to be the common sentiment based on my conversations. Sound familiar?
Migration: We had a professor, PHD, published author on migration speak to us for 2 days. He brought an interesting perspective but as a demographer he showed us graph after graph after graph. At the end we saw a touching video about a Long Island town that was the quintessential argument between ignorant fearful people who have been convinced that have been ignored by their government and hard working (usually law abiding) people that get stuck with shittiest jobs but seek the American dream. Very polarizing issue but we didn't really have anyone to play devils advocate in the discussion. Seems to me that people want an answer from their government (immigration reform is said to be on the top of Obama's platter now because of the Arizona law being passed). We tried to come up with a "solution" without any real success. I think that our job as people with personal experience/knowledge of immigrants as well as having a forum (a classroom) to educate, it is our responsibility to break stereotypes and try to de-criminalize these people and pressure the government to do what is right and create a law (as has been done multiple times in the past century) to that deals with the multiple millions of undocumented individuals and families that are in America. Any political decision will be contested but we've got to be realistic and practical and consider the people already here as well future migrants. Good Luck!
Friday Night: good times! we all went out. drinking and dancing. Gringos gone wild!
Teotiuhacan: Visited the ancient ruins of a civilization around centuries before the Aztecs. Climbed up the narrow stairs of the 3rd largest pyramid in the world. Too tired and sunburnt to write any more about that.
Will write more later. HAPPY 4TH OF JULY
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