Author: Laughingnomad

A Mixe Wedding

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Open Fire Kitchen

Click on the photos to enlarge them.

The wedding was held in a tiny church behind the Flower Market. We three (2 gringos and 1 Mexican) arrived at 4pm, the supposed time of the wedding. Just one old woman in a rebozo and a young girl was there. But this is Mexico!! So we walked to the main road across from TelMex to find a bar. After two beers and some botanas later we walked back to the church…just in time!

As part of the ceremony to symbolize unity, a large loop of rosary beads called the Lazo Cord, is placed in a figure eight shape around the necks of the couple after they have exchanged their vows. The symbolism of the lasso is to show the union and protection of marriage.

Thirteen gold coins (arras), representing Christ and the 12 disciples, are given to the bride by the bridegroom, signifying he will support her. This represents the brides dowry and holds good wishes for prosperity. These coins become a part of their family heirloom.

Rigo and his family (wife and two children) and extended family are from SANTO DOMINGO TEPUXTEPEC in the mountainous Mixe region SE of Oaxaca City. The Mixe are one of the 16 indigenous groups…all with their own languages…in Oaxaca state. It is not uncommon to wait until a family has the money to actually have the marriage ceremony.

Rigo and his family live in Oaxaca City now. and takes care of our flowers and plants in our apartment courtyard as well as gardens belonging to other families. My neighbor, David, me and a Mexican friend Edgar were the only people there that were not Mixe. A DJ friend provided music on a keyboard. The Pollo Asado (chicken in guajillo chili sauce) individually cooked in tin foil, beans cooked with avocado leaves and up-to-date macaroni salad was delicious. Nothing like beans with avocado leaves cooked over an open smoky fire!

This was the loveliest and sweetest wedding in Mexico I have attended. This Mixe wedding differed from Mestizo events in that it was quiet and attended mainly by extended family. It was also different because the wedding was held in Oaxaca City where they live instead of in Santo Domingo Tepuxtepec, four hours away in the mountains, where they are from. Unfortunately my camera ran out of battery before I could get more photos of the guests.

An American Mother in Mexico

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I often encounter locals in Mexico who are quite shocked to hear that I have three sons…one in the U.S. one in Hong Kong and one in Thailand part of the year. To make it worse my husband is in Thailand also.

Why do you let them go there!? Never mind that the kids at least are 44, 42 and 37! And as if I could do anything about it anyway!

Sticking his finger out at me, one teacher implied I was a bad mother to let them go. Why not, I asked? Because it is dangerous! Never mind that the countries they are in are no more dangerous than Mexico! Never mind that kids as young as 12 crawl across the border illegally without their families. But that is survival and maybe another story. Or not.

Mexican children are expected to take care of their parents until death. This means not leaving home (or at least nearby their home) while they are alive if they have a choice. It means that Mexicans who have immigrated to the U.S. and lived there for 30 years are proud to come home as their parents age to spend their last years, months, weeks or days with them. Maybe we Americans could learn something from these people if we had more respect for our elders.

We Americans, until the recent economic downturn, usually have expected our kids to be on their own by about the age of 18…or out of college. We Americans are pragmatic. My Mexican-American friend, who was born in the U.S. but grew up with migrant parents and now lives in Mexico with her Mexican National husband responds this way when she hears Mexicans lamenting the American style of family

“If 18 years isn’t long enough to teach your children to be independent, then how long does it take?” Ha ha. That’s Patty!

I would never want my children to feel pressured by any kind of emotional blackmail. I would hate for my kids to feel a “duty” to me instead of love and interest freely given and received. I have my own life as does my husband in Thailand and we are careful not to try to live out our lives through our children….in other words…laying a trip on them. Often it is the parents who are getting their needs filled through their children.

I feel that I had a chance to live my life the way I wanted. I left home at the age of 12 because all children of isolated farm families had to go away to school if they wanted a decent education within which to prepare for university. My mother, a child of Polish immigrants and having grown up on an isolated ranch in Montana, did the same.

And it is now my children’s opportunity to answer to their heart’s desire. When I talk to young Mexicans this way I sense yearning. When I describe what my children are doing in various parts of the world they sigh. When I talked to my young female dentist about her mother who she took care of until she died, I asked if she was very sick. No, she said. She just had a problem in her head. Oh, I said…she was senile? No, no, no, she said. She was fine. She just wanted her children around her all the time so me and my three brothers would take turns visiting her each day! Oh, I said. Needy. Yes! she said. Then she sighed.

I think it’s good not to confuse geography with intimacy. It’s not the location that makes the difference. For me, it’s the frequency and quality of the communication. You can be interdependent and not living in the immediate vicinity of each other. Whether it is “fashionable” or not strikes me as an odd question. I am proud of my very close relationship with my “kids.” And thank God for video skype. I suspect they are quite happy that I am not in their hair all the time with me in Mexico. 😉 They always just rolled their eyes and did what they wanted to anyway.

Having said that, however, we are all very dependent on each other for safety and helping each other with personal needs. I have recently sent my oldest, in the US, a lengthy list of instructions…and put his name on the title of my car, and my living will, in case something happens to me here in Mexico. My Thai daughter-in-law says, “mom, I take care you!” You should have seen the look on my son’s face! hahahaha. Whatever will be will be but I know I would want to be independent as long as possible. Maybe located in a group home with a wonderful caregiver where my 94 year old mother-in-law is.

The kids left home when they went to university and afterward found their own paths in life which happened to take them away from their birth place. The oldest, unmarried, is in Las Vegas because that is where there was the greatest demand for his work at the time. Besides he hated the cold and windy and cloudy NW of the US and Chicago where he did his medical residency and likes the heat to physically train in. The middle one visited Thailand, loves the culture and the water and fell in love with a young Thai woman to whom he has been married for 9 years. She’s the daughter I never had and she’s funny and very wise. The youngest went to culinary school after university which led to working in Manhattan for eight years, Beijing for two and now Hong Kong for three. He has decided to stay in HK, has just been promoted to Executive Chef at the American Club and is quite happy to be avoiding the financial crisis in the US. It probably helps that he has a long-term relationship with his Cantonese girlfriend. 😉

I suppose living internationally came naturally to my family because they were raised within an extended Mexican family that I had lived with in high school. Then I was a volunteer director of a foreign student exchange program while they were in high school and they were exposed to students of many cultures when I would often host parties for them in our home. And I had a disabled Mexican girl for six months and a boy from Brazil as exchange students for a year in our home. And they all separately often traveled internationally before settling into their jobs.

Truthfully, I am so happy that they are all healthily capable of living independently…finding adventure and new horizons. I am excited though, that, after 14 years, we are all meeting up together on Koh Samui Thailand at the end of January 2013.

Dangers of Humor Across Cultures

Posted on by Laughingnomad

A friend in a Couchsurfing forum observed that when he first moved to Malta he would try jokes, wry observations, and other kinds of humor I was used to back in New Hampshire and Boston. I’d usually receive blank stares, nasty looks, and be ignored. I stopped the jokes, quickly.

Maltese culture has been affected by population packed on small islands, being colonized, and surely other forces unknown to me. My friend Michael, an extremely astute retired sales person, told me that the men here never consciously show weakness – loss of face is a serious thing.

Humor in Malta seems to be heavily into toilet references and slapstick (people slipping/falling, dropping packages, being splashed by cars, etc.). Enjoyment of the misfortune of someone else.

Humor and culture in Ireland has been refreshing for me. People are far more open, smile and talk to strangers, love long well crafted stories that have a clever punchline, and most of all seem to make a high art of slagging.

Slagging took some getting used after a dozen years in the Mediterranean. Slagging is making fun of someone (in a good natured verbal way), give them a bit of a hard time, and welcomes engagement. It promotes verbal, goodhearted interaction.

Slagging in the Med might result in your new car being scratched by a key or maybe even a more severe, dramatic action. Losing face is a major traumatic experience in the Med.

——
I think gender plays a big part too. Women are more geared to sympathy-giving however sincere it may or may not be. And there may be other more arcane reasons too.

I think razzing/slagging is more a male thing in the western world…a safe way of bonding…if there is a common understanding and it isn’t underscoring hostility or used as a way of keeping emotional distance. Which is another story entirely. Heaven forbid that an ordinary western man would admit to sentiment! Although I have met some…and read some…of the most deeply sentimental men. It takes great courage and confidence.

I grew up hearing my father razz his friends and being razzed by them. Then I lived in a house for years with a male spouse and 3 male off-spring and their friends. I was the in-house “straight man.” I soon learned that it was much more fun to join them than to go off sulking…thinking they were making fun of me. And to give it out as good as I got it. A bit of a confession here: Fortunately or unfortunately it has become second nature for me but usually people don’t expect it coming from a woman. So generally I prefer being around men who don’t take everything so deadly serious.

But this only works within cultures, as you say, where it is known and understood what is going on. And it can be absolutely hilarious. To this day I love being around my kids and their friends and listening to the repartee. “Intelligence” may play a part in how quickly a person can pick up on it and think of a “comeback though.

Outside of a culture that does this, though, it can be very dangerous. I had to laugh at my friend’s description of men in Malta!

My husband has a very dry sense of humor and he could say the most outrageous things possible with a totally straight face when we were traveling together. Getting enjoyment, of course, out of watching a shocked face of the person who doesn’t get it and takes him literally. Many times I have wanted to crawl under a chair when they get the feeling they are being made fun of.

This is most common in Asia. It got so tiring of having to take care to “save face.” Which is why I am so simpatico with Mexico and most Latino cultures that place a great value on humility. They can laugh easily at themselves and they are delighted when you tease them and they can tease back. The countries we were in in East Africa were great fun in this regard too. And India was the best of all! Indians can be really funny and they were great fun! Of course these are all generalities.

In the Couchsurfing International Politics group right now we are seeing a lot of sparring between an ardent edgy Iranian female feminist and an irascible male New Yorker neither of whom “get” the other’s sense of humor. Of course the start of it was a self-proclaimed satirical post which bombed because no one there really knew her and took it literally.

But humor is a great way of getting under the skin of another culture…if you survive to tell about it! Ha!

Another winter in the States I won’t do again!

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Why have I spent the last three visits in the States during the winter, I ask myself. Well, spending time with at least two of my off-spring during Christmas has a lot to do with it. But perhaps it is my need and not theirs.

After a few weeks in Salem Oregon with my middle son and 10 days in Las Vegas with my oldest son, I’m leaving today to go back to Salem for another 10 days before driving to Oaxaca (the Nogales crossing this time) and the sun!! And no more doctor check-ups to get some return on my medicare payments! Whoopie! But am happy to say that it looks like I probably won’t die anytime soon! 🙂

I miss my tribe of young friends in Oaxaca. I will be happy to see them again.

Thanksgiving 2011

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I was invited to a wonderful Thanksgiving potluck…turkey, trimmings and all. Far more than any of us could eat in a week of course. Most of these young people were volunteers for En Via…a local micro-finance project. Some were former couchsurfers who had stayed with me. And some I met through the others. Great bunch of younguns! And I am grateful they included a 67 year old lady! ha!

Occupy Wall Street Transforming Consciousness

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Meltdown: The Men Who Crashed The World

This is a 4 part documentary of the worldwide financial crisis and the inside story that will keep you on the edge of your seat. After watching part 1 click under Meltdown: (part 2) A Global Financial Tsunami, (part 3) Paying The Price and (part 4) After The Fall.

The men who crashed the world – Meltdown – Al Jazeera English.

And if that is not enough there is the earlier film called “Inside Job.”

In short, a comment on Facebook: America’s wealthiest one percent owns 40% of the country’s total wealth. (The bottom 80% owns just 7% — no typo) — America’s wealthiest one percent owns 51% of all of the country’s stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. (The bottom 50% owns just one-half of one percent.) — America’s wealthiest one percent takes in 24% of all the income generated each year. — Between 1923 and 1929, the concentration of wealth at the top of the country’s economic ladder was at the highest point in US history. Then came the Crash and the Depression. For decades afterward, the middle class was dealt into the game at a much greater level. As recently as 1976, America’s wealthiest one percent took in only 9% of the country’s income (again, the current figure is 24%). Time Magazine, hardly an outfit full of liberal kooks, says that the concentration of wealth has again reached 1929 levels. Something is wrong here. To quote a great man: “But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists. We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.”

In response we now have Occupy Wall Street sit-ins all over the U.S. and the world by young people who cannot find jobs in their chosen fields and, in the U.S., are saddled with education loans up the ying yang that they cannot repay. Jobs have been lost. Homes lost.

Statement published by Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Together

I have been glued to the Occupy Wall Street Livestreams worldwide where I am watching “a learning tribe that is trying to BE what it wants the world to grow into.”

What you don’t see going on in the occupations and is so difficult to communicate to the media, mainly because they don’t get it, is the TRANSFORMATION that is going on in the working groups and in the General Assemblies and in the personal interactions. It looks from the outside so diffuse because each individual is connecting into it from where they are personally in their growth and circumstances.

Comment I saw this morning to a controversial CNN YouTube video: F**k the media. Each and every one of them. They’re out there with one objective and that’s to create division between us. Everyone PLEASE stop with this Hippie, Teabagger, Republican, Democrat, Conservative, Liberal name calling classification bullshit! Don’t you fucking get it? None of it matters! All that those monickers do is provide ammo to the shit starters. Were all are in the same boat on this one and we all need to stick together as AMERICANS if were going to get anything done.” Right on! ”

A friend who is participating in Occupy Seattle says: I am trusting the nonviolence to win out.

It’s a process. Not a linear one…but an organic one. They don’t know yet how the movement will change anything. But they for sure know that nothing will change without a change of consciousness of each individual. IMO it will change when there is a critical mass of people that have changed. One by one. Each in his/her own way.

I have been hanging out with a group of young current and former Couchsurfers and volunteers here in Oaxaca (when I am not glued to the Livestreams) who are participating in the same process. Occupy Wall Street is just one manifestation of where these young folks, world-wide, are taking us. With their clear-eyed insight they are edging me out of my old paradigm…out of old categories. We spent all day saturday at a sustainability fair with representatives from 80 communities all over Mexico.

What amazes me the most is the lack of cynicism and the hope and trust they have. They are losing hope of being able to pursue their careers they studied for, so they are looking for other ways to plug into the transformative process. The exchange with them is exhilarating…and yes…they are changing me too.

Some of these young people have just come off a year traveling to 4 countries to live in and study local sustainable projects in India, Tanzania, New Zealand and now Oaxaca. They underwent life-changing experiences (and in one case a near breakdown) as they came to understand that you cannot go into a country to “show them how to do it.” That old liberal do-good paradigm is dying.

But you can empower local people in their own efforts and learn from them new ways like the one in indigenous communities here in Oaxaca called “Uses Y Costumbres” which is a consensus process they use to govern themselves and the Zapatista movement in Chiapas.

The director of the year-long program is here in Oaxaca. Here is an interview with him. He turns Paulo Friere’s educational pedagogy, that has become orthodox in US educational reform movements since the 70’s, on it’s head.

A high school and college friend on Facebook recently told me I have too much time on my hands! hahahahahaha. Can’t think of a better way to spend my retirement than encouraging and affirming all these young people!

Oaxaca Resistance-2006

Posted on by Laughingnomad

This comunique will not make much sense without the back story but it will give you a taste of the flavor of the struggle in the indigenous pueblos for autonomy that was promised by the Mexican government in 1945 and the indigenous resistance against the effort of the PRI Party, in control for over 75 years in Mexico, to take over their land…rich in precious metals and minerals. This is not even to mention the resistance against foreign mining companies who suck up precious water to take the gold…lining pockets of government bureaucrats while giving the people pennies on the dollar for the use of their land.

Letter to an authoritarian government. Communiqué from VOCAL
Published: AUGUST 20, 2011
To: Mr. Marco Tulio Lopez Escamilla, Minister of Public Safety of the State of Oaxaca

CC: Mr. Gabino Cue Monteagudo, Governor of the State of Oaxaca.

As the indigenous people of Oaxaca that we are, ancestral inhabitants of these lands for thousands of years before your ancestors came from Spain to plunder our wealth, which they continue to do, we wish to respond to some of the allegations you made yesterday. Even though they are cloaked in the ambiguity, fallacy and vulgarity so characteristic of the speeches of politicians and functionaries, we understand that they refer to us, and so we want to answer in the only way we know how –clearly and directly.

Read More

Couchsurfing in Oaxaca

Posted on by Laughingnomad


The above photos are just a few of the 40 couchsurfers I have hosted over the last couple of years.

I retired in 2002 and spent the next 5 years on the road…then chose Oaxaca as a home base. Since I live alone with extensive travel only every year and a half or so, when my surfers from other countries come I feel like I am traveling again!

I have grown attached to every single one of my surfers and I keep in touch with many of them on my FB page. I space them however, so that I make sure I am “up for it” when they do come and that my time with them is quality time. The young women sometimes become like the adult daughters I never had and I totally relate to the young men who make me feel like I am with my 3 boys who are off to the winds. And I’ve loved the bicyclers!

If surfers are just enjoying some “down time” in my apartment I enjoy seeing them enjoy themselves and I enjoy cooking for them. Having said that, however, I hope I never make them feel obligated to spend any more time with me than they are willing. I take my cues from them and don’t try to control their experiences…letting them be as independent as they would like. I hope they don’t feel “mothered!” :)) After all they are adults traveling to experience other cultures/languages and as an expat in Mexico I try to introduce them to as many locals as I can…often inviting them to join our dinners. I like to share local mores and politics if they are interested.

And my age means that I don’t get the hard-core partiers that come in late drunk. The fact that surfers choose me says a lot about them, I think. And I read and screen profiles well. Reading between the lines is an art.

The tone is set in the beginning. I trust them to be respectful and responsible just as I did with my own kids and the kids in my alternative education program for 10 years. So far my surfers have lived up to it. My fingers are crossed but then if there are troubles I will just consider it a teaching moment for us both.

I just get high on the smiles and laughter my surfers bring to me which I think is reciprocated.

Thank you to all my surfers now and in the future. And of course I enjoy all the other ages too! Bente and all the 50+ friends I am waiting for you! 😀 I know, it’s summertime and Norwegians are outside and not on the computer!

Reflections on July 4

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JULY 4th

Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence?

Five signers were captured by the British as traitors, and tortured before they died.

Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned.

Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army;

Another had two sons captured.

Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War.

They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

What kind of men were they?

Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists.

Eleven were merchants,

Nine were farmers and large plantation owners; men of means, well educated

But they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured..

Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags.

Thomas McKeam was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him, and poverty was his reward.

Vandals or soldiers looted the properties of Dillery, Hall , Clymer, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Rutledge, and Middleton.

At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson, Jr ., noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. He quietly urged General George Washington to open fire. The home was destroyed, and Nelson died bankrupt.

Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months.

John Hart was driven from his wife’s bedside as she was dying; their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished.

The Brick Wall In Mexico is Me

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Comparing being in any country that is not your birth country for 2 weeks and being in a country for an extended period of time is apples and oranges.

Take a look here:

It’s not easy. I have been in Mexico for 5 years and still am not fully culturally adapted. Honeymoon, denial, resistance, humor, anger, rejection, acceptance, adaptation all happens at the same time on different levels at different times. There are some things about Mexico I just cannot accept let alone adapt to and probably never will. You probably know what they are. It’s all over the papers north and south. I watched the Mexican documentary Presumed Guilty There is no “system” of justice in Mexico. I am watching this system unroll since the murder of a friend. Four suspects (2 American and 2 Mexican) have been released at the whim of a judge who probably didn’t read the unorganized 6 inch file. I suspect he just hopes the whole thing will go away to avoid an international incident. I get to make the decision whether to accept it or not. But then I get to experience the frustrating consequences of that nonacceptance.

The cultural shock of reentering my birth country has always been the worst because I am reentering a changed person. Living part of the year or every second year in Thailand complicates things. Mexico to the US>US to Thailand>Thailand to US>US to Mexico. Each time my friends may think I have reverted to the PMS stage of my life. It feels like it until I smooth out.

It would be happening in whichever country one chose to live. The most valuable thing the new country is giving their expats is a chance to grow as a person. Anything else is gravy. There is no way a local is going to be able to understand the inner processes of the expat unless they have had a similar experience. We often are blessed with their patience. It may take years to peel back the layers of the onion if we are willing to reflect.

The least of what the locals will be gaining is a chance to learn and practice English. They will have to speak for the rest of it. I can’t speak for them. I just hope it is positive.

Ironically, probably the most difficult feeling is the intolerance we feel when we meet the intolerant because we open up and meet a brick wall. This forces us back in on ourselves. This is when we grow…or not.