12  Mexico

Later in high school, my grandmother’s death left our family with some extra money that my mother thought would be well-spent on forcing me to do even more with Spanish. She enrolled me in a missionary trip to Mexico during the summer after my sophomore year, and this trip opened my eyes to the world of languages and foreign countries in ways that were as impossible for me to appreciate at the time as I now recognize it was important for my future.

The trip was organized by some missionaries who were associated with a church in Madison Wisconsin. It was to be a whole collection of firsts for me. My first jet airplane ride, my first view of the ocean (of the Gulf of Mexico, which I saw through the window), and of course my first visit to a country where people didn’t speak English.

I turned out to be one of the few trip attendees with a basic knowledge of Spanish. Other than the missionary himself, who had lived there for many years, most of the team didn’t know any Spanish at all, so it was fun for me even with my limited ability to count or enunciate a few basic thoughts.

One of the adults, a middle-aged man with an impressive handlebar mustache, was one of the first people I’d ever met who had a PhD. Somehow perhaps he was taken with me because I remember him giving me some side advice: remember that you can go to a good school and come out without losing your religion. At that moment he became somewhat of an influence on me, both because he left me with some curiosity about his warning (why on earth would you think I might lose my religion?) and some assurance that it was possible to turn out fine, like him.

After arriving in Mexico, we did some sightseeing in Mexico City and I saw for the first time a truly, terribly polluted city. Back in the 1970s, there wasn’t as much air pollution as today, but even then we thought it was horrible. We travelled on the subway, visited markets and shopped for trinkets.

Later we took a series of minibuses up into the countryside, through some mountains, down some rugged roads to the town of San Luis Potosi, and I loved it. Everything was foreign and new to me. Until then, the biggest city I’d ever visited was Minneapolis, and really that was just the suburbs. I’d never travelled on a subway (or for that matter, any kind of mass transit including a bus). All of this was for the first time.

Until this trip, I had exactly two experiences with “Mexican” food. The first was at a church-related function at a friend’s house long ago, when the hostess made “tacos”: ground beef served in a home-made wrapper that resembled a pancake more than a tortilla. My second experience was at an Eau Claire fast food restaurant called Taco John’s, an early imitation of the Taco Bell chain that was just becoming established in other parts of the country. So when, at our hotel, I had freshly-made tortillas for breakfast, and later we were served pork-filled “flautas” and more for our meals – the fresh flavors were heavenly.

We were surrounded of course by the Spanish language, and to my surprise I found myself able to get around even with my basic vocabulary. All those words I’d learned in class were suddenly useful! But I also drank a large dose of humility upon realizing how different this was from the classroom. No matter how great I thought I had been as a student, I was nearly unable to understand the important things around me, and expressing myself was even harder. So although it didn’t seem as easy as I had naively believed before coming, I was able to see that through some effort, learning a foreign language was something that would be doable and enjoyable.

Part of our experience was going door-to-door, visiting every home as missionaries. Divided into teams of three, we were issued tape recorders with a short Spanish-language message, and I was assigned the role of memorizing a Spanish phrase that meant “Would you like to listen to an important message on this tape recorder?”

The villagers were generally pretty friendly, and we were often invited into people’s homes, though I realize now that this was probably more their curiosity of seeing American teenagers than it was out of a particular interest in our message. Still, the experience brought us into contact with the real lives of ordinary Mexicans, as we were welcomed into the tiny kitchens and one-room homes of the villagers. In one house, I held my tongue as a small rat rushed past, right behind the girl in my team, a city girl who if she had known what was happening would no doubt have begun screaming right there.

We were traveling in a part of Mexico in the mountains far from the coast, but it was hurricane season and during part of the trip it began to rain heavily, with ferocious winds. A piece of patio furniture in our hotel was thrown so hard across the patio that it shattered the window of one of our rooms.

The streets became flooded, waist deep in ways I’d never seen before, and we wondered why that would be: how could a Mexican town have streets filled with so much water that the sewage system couldn’t handle the load? This was something that never happened in even the smallest, most seemingly disorganized town in Wisconsin. Clearly the answer had to do with the terrible poverty of these people who were living in ramshackle huts, moving about often without cars or trucks, riding draft animals or occasionally bicycles. But the question for us was whether poverty caused the poor response to flooding, or was the regular flooding in a place like this one of the reasons for the poverty?

Traveling with missionaries – the same, fundamentalist evangelicals I was familiar with at home – kept a thread of the familiar throughout my experience in Mexico, so although I was shocked to witness, for the first time, so much that was different from my life at home, nothing I saw presented a significant challenge to the beliefs that I had already formed about the world. I was surrounded too by serious Christians who, like me, insisted on regular prayer multiple times per day with close reading of the scriptures. Our every move carried with it the ever-present background sense of a personal God watching and directing us.

If I ever became lost or uncertain about something in Mexico, I knew that God – through the Holy Spirit – would direct me back to where I needed to be. So although, especially in the cities there seemed natural cause to be wary of danger like criminals or spoiled food, we passed through unscathed and unshaken, believing that our lives were in God’s hands, who would keep us safe.

And of course that’s what happened. We returned safely home a few weeks later, but with a bit more understanding of the world beyond me. I also had made several friends in Mexico, and we exchanged letters for another year or two after that. I was now firmly and permanently interested in foreign cultures.