My group of Peace Corps is bumping into its first anniversary in Mexico. Before I arrived here for this tour, I had private fantasies of Hesse’s Siddhartha, not tending the ferry across the river, but teaching in some pueblo lost somewhere on the Baja peninsula.
Well, wisdom attained on other people’s money has not quite come to pass. Truth is that I am basically working on a traditional capacity-transfer project, living in a cosmopolitan city and enjoying the symphony with my novia at seven bucks a pop.
Nevertheless, in an engaging spirit of public service combined with a simple sense of a destiny not mine, I am writing down ten lessons from my first year so those who follow me have absolutely no excuse for being pathetic human beings.
PASCAL’S PAINFUL PARADOX. “Man is neither angel nor brute. The misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.” Learned that one the hard way this past year.
KILLING TIME, KILLING ME. Beware if you have not enough to do at first. Inventing activities to fill the time can wreak a peculiar vengeance. When you are ready to let the activity fade away, feedback comes galloping in, begging for the brain-murder to continue.
WHY MEXICANS ARE FRIENDLY. Because they are, stupid gringo.
NO ATHEISTS HERE. Gone are the scintillating sociopaths born without conscience, living without consequence and ready to die without continuity. Most so-called atheists here are people struck dumb, perhaps damned, by scrupulosity with no way out.
TRUTH of CULTURAL ASSIMILATION. Giggling punctuated by intermittent, delicately timed one-word slurs like ‘bueno’; ‘bien’; and, ‘verdad’. “¿And what do you do, blend?”
VINDICATION of SHAKESPEARE. "Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them." Twelfth Night. Included to make me look like some intelligent visionary and other good stuff.
THE GREATEST GAUNTLET EVER THROWN. “Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth…”
TIME TAKES TIME. I thought after a year, I would be fluent in Spanish. Nope. People often try my patience by urging my patience.
The SECRET behind PREENING POLITICOS: Intellectual struttiness where neurotic exhibitionism amazingly morphs into self-actualization.
TRITE NOISE. People my age may believe that “children should be seen and not heard”. The young volunteers have a better point. Oldsters should not be heard, either: they snore.
Some of these lessons come from fashionably disdained sources as most people are too modern to admit to the truth of anything written before 1900. Yet these same, these dull, lessons remind ‘yours truly’ that humility really is the currency of the realm during this magical Mexico tour.
Mexico labours under the heavy burdens of a withering despair always whispering: drug wars, acute poverty affecting 45% of the population, etc. Yet her people rarely fail to help me when I ask; her women know that dainty art, long lost in the United States, of making any man feel special; and, strangers invite me to parties at least once a week.
In closing, let me affirm that I fall so far short of reciprocating all that these lovely people do; one would have to resort electron microscopes to discern what, if any, progress I have really made. Mexico will certainly not make me a Saint or even a Mexican. Yet she will continue to make me happy. Thank you: good-bye!
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