Blog #9: Justin Maher's Concluding Blog Entry

Justin Maher’s Concluding Blog Entry

 

Oaxaca has been awesome.  At no point did I get very sick, the food here is good – both the local comida de mole negro, and the international crepes & capuchinos.  Best of all, I got lucky enough to stay with a family that neither forced food nor alcohol down our throats, but cooked well nonetheless.  Unlike the opaque atmosphere that is stereotypical of large 3rd-world cities, the air in Oaxaca is somewhat breatheable downtown in the evening – and improves towards pristine in the mountains.  Oaxaca is a great place.  The beggars are few and sedentary – no elbows or body-checks required.  A laid-back atmosphere is maintained, but lest these people seem slovely, one does not have to walk more than a hundred meters in a downtown area to find someone making a well-layered Irish cofee, or equisitely-detailed metal earrings, or making and selling hand-woven carpets that range from elegant simplicty to photo-realistic portraits woven in wool.  It is an uncommon place where people both command respect / awe for the quality of their work, and are simultaneously relaxed – to whom stressed running from one activity to the next is a foreign ethos.  Usually, in my experience, the impossibility of one is the price of the other; a place that has both is a rare jewel – Mark chose a great place to hold this Mexican study-abroad program.

My only fear is that he chose the best place in Mexico, and now everywhere else will be a dissapointment.  A few days ago, Jose said, in one of his incomprable snippets of wisdom, “it feels like I’m in Oaxaca, but it doesn’t really feel like I’m in Mexico.”  Oaxaca is a unique place.  Considering the variation within Oaxaca itself, it cannot but be so.  It has 570 municipalities (something like ¼ of the counties in all of Mexico, according to both Mark, and the guy who spoke on migration from Santa Anna de Valle), and has over a dozen distict ethnolinguistic groups.  In the Zapotec Women article, and elsewhere, it is said that these groups are sometimes very distinct – not just “dialects” (of the same language), as is sometimes stated.  But personally, I can barely fight my way through a conversation in Spanish; I cannot tell Zapotec from Mixtec to give my own judgment as to linguistic distinctness.  I did, however, see a lot of variation in the ethnic sampling of Oaxacan dances at the Guelegetza performance last night.  Oaxaca is not a very large place on the map; such diversity therein is impressive, possibly matched by the mountains & islands of Greece, or the mountain-valleys of south-west China, but not matched by many places on earth.  Were all the world this diverse, large national identities would scarcely be fathomable.  At least in terms of the diversity of the region, Oaxaca must be a very unique region of Mexico.  A place that is both unique, and is good in absolute terms, is necessarily good in relative terms.  Maybe Mark has brought us to the best place in Mexico, full of indigenous peoples exotic to the US (where we murdered and marginalized them out of sight, and maybe I feel a bit of historical guilt for that).  The Oaxacans constantly disabuse the notion of indigenous people being lazy and backwards, by producing phenomenol rugs  (or earrings or alibrehes), and showing up to deliver them before 08:00 – after taking a bus from a neighboring village! 

A few people especially: Veronica, and her family, have won a place in my heart, not only weaving good rugs, but being full of kind laughter, and always asking me to sit down and talk with them,  even when they were well aware that I was not going to buy anything, but was going to butcher theSpanish language.  Yesterday, Veronica romantically emailed me,  “I want to see you once more before you leave – meet me at Santo Domingo tomorrow at 09:00“ (or something like that, in Spanish).  It was a good thing I forewent dancing late the night before, because Veronica and her mother showed up at my house 75 minutes early the next morning, and gave me a substantial rug, and a very-soft wool scarf, “The color of the earth – to match the clothes you wear.“  They gave me stuff that would probably cost about 1000 pesos, and take 2-3 weeks to make  - a huge gift.  Because of Veronica and her family, it would be very difficult for me to not-like Oaxaca.  And I must thank Mark for putting together a great study-abroad program.  Aside from the obligatory heaps of featureless praise, I thank him for being judicious with the schedule. 

He did not fly us around to another city every 3 days, trying to acquaint us with all of Mexico; he set reasonable goals for whatcould be accomplished in 17 days.  And the readings and lessons were construted around broad themes; I learnt much about broad themes in Latin American history, culture, and contemporary issues, such as migration, the pink tide vs authoritarian regimes, indigenous peoples, and Latin-American relations with great-powers.  The usefulness of the academics was not at all limited to our one province in southern Mexico.  For a generalist, this course could serve as a good introduction to Latin-American studies.  Being more of an orientalist in my own historical focus, I, for one, appreciated this broad approach to Latin-America / Oaxaca.

Mark did not over-organize activities in our free time to the point where the “free“-time-plans look mandatory; He did not pack tight the schedule with the maximum volume of activities (however worthy they may be).  Mark put together a program where, when one starts to get sick [and everyone does, to some degree], one can go home and sleep from the afternoon to the next morning, and wake up largely recovered.  Of course,  some people refuse to cease going out late dancing and drinking until they are really-sick, but barring that very-common course of action, Mark put together a schedule where one was not at all doomed to exhaustion and then illness by the time the course is half-over.  This was a program where it was not unreasonable hope that the students might be in any physical shape to think, by the final days.  And really, that is quite a unique achievement – it is VERY easy to see a schedule of 17 days x 24 hours, and fill it until there are no empty squares; to avoid that requires a judicious restraint that I have found to be uncommon on intercession study-abroad programs, which are so time-limited.  Mark did several things right, that, had they been done wrong, I would be a complainer to point it out, but having done them right, he enabled a much more fruitful experience.  He knows how to not get in the way, which, in the realm of study-abroad, is a most-difficult virtue to have, amidst keeping everyone safe, making sure no one gets lost, finding good activities, and cramming in some academic substance on top of all that.  Had Mark filled every time slot on the agenda with scheduled activites, there would have been no wandering around the city with Miguel.  Without such wandering, I would not have gained a familiarity of the city to the point that I could be dropped off at a night-club I‘ve never been to before, and find my way back home walking alone in the dark.  By staying out of the way, Mark enabled us to explore, which helped us to become comfortable, which allowed us to really-exploe.  Had the schedule been crammed tight, I would not have gotten to know Veronica well; with the unscheduled time, I found someone to practice Spanish with (Veronica is worth talking to, and does not know English), and I found a reason to visit Oaxaca in the future (and possibly have a Zapotec rug trade with the US).  Had the days been packed solid, we would have gotten exhausted and then sick, and then not have been in a state to learn or appreciate anything at all, let alond make valued friends. 

When I went to India, I wanted very much to like it.  My best friend / first love / second family is from there, and they invited me to their town in India, directly following my study-abroad program there.  But I ended up completely hating India, and abjuring the opportunity to stay after the study-abroad program to go to my best friend’s fabled hometown.  I have deeply despized my decision and my very perception of India, and have since gotten an India Studies minor.  Analyzing my considerable cognitive dissonance, I wonder, maybe I gained such a negative impresssion of India because we went to 4 cities in 3 weeks, running around to tours and lectures all day, everyday, having no time to rest off an illness (and therefoe being constantly sick and grumpy), and having no time to wander around, get used to the place, and find something to like about it.  Were Mark leading the program, that would not have happened, for which, I feel he deserves some applause.  Granted, I keep making negative-compliments – “good job for not-doing ___.“  Those sound weak and hollow, even as I write them – maybe that’s why no one voices them, and without such voices, there are no checks on letting time-constrained winter-intercession study-abroad programs turn into tests of endurance (the overture to the unamiable blinders of fatigue and illness).  Because of Mark´s judiciousness in scheduling, a deeply-fruitful program was made possible, outside of what can be put down on a schedule.  He did not force a good experience; he allowed one to happen.  And that’s not easy to do.

-Justin-