Tlahuiwhaaa?

Ok, let's talk internships. This post is a long time coming and might have to happen in 2 parts. Hold on to your hats!Like I said, I've been working with Puente a la Salud Comunitaria, which "contributes to food sovereignty and advances the health and well-being of rural communities in Mexico by promoting the cultivation, consumption and commercialization of amaranth" (this is straight off the website). Although the headquarters are in the city of Oaxaca, most of the real work is done in 3 mountain regions surrounding the central valley: the Mixe, the Mixteca and the Sierra Zapoteca (I'm about 80% sure that I got these right). I've spent most of my time with the Familias Salubables division, which works mainly with women and children, although there is an agricultural side as well. A while ago I mentioned that my 2^nd day on the job involved an overnight trip to the mountains, but I didn't really explain. This is mostly because it terrified me, although I didn't want to admit it at the time.
Under vague instruction from Team Puente, I took a colectivo to Tlahuitoltepec, which is about 3 hours away in the Mixe region. A colectivo is a taxi that operates on a set route like a bus, but charges by distance traveled like a normal taxi. Unlike a normal taxi, you don't know the other riders and 5 passengers is the norm, with the extra person (me) snuggling the stickshift. For 3 hours. Between 2 Mexican men. It turned out that the taxi driver had recently returned to Oaxaca after 20 years in the States and literally talked the entire way to Tlahui. It was nice that he spoke English but it's also a lot harder to evade personal questions from a stranger when they speak your language.

Anyways, he helped me find the bakery where I was supposed to meet Vicky, the Puente promoter from Tlahui. The evening's plan was a cooking workshop, at which my main task was to take pictures. This took all of about 10 minutes because there were only 5 women there and you can only take so many pictures of people cutting up vegetables (especially with my photography skillz). It was hard to get involved or even know what was going on because most of the workshop was conducted in Mixe, the local language, so I bonded with the little kids who thought I was the world's best photographer.

At about 8pm it started to get dark and it was announced that I would be dropped off at a guest house for the night with plans to meet up at 9am for another workshop. The guest house ended up being a cabin building hidden in the trees. The señora in charge was convinced that I was both mute and incapable, refusing to talk to me. So I hung the extra sheets across the bare windows as curtains and settled in for 12 hours of…
Like I said, I was terrified. This was probably not the greatest start that an internship ever had. Luckily, the loud group of male voices wandering by at 11pm was just some boys, the crash at 5am was just a mango on the roof and I was not kidnapped while walking from my room to the bathroom with only my TelCel flashlight function to guide me. After a confusing conversation in which the señora's daughter with Down's Syndrome insisted that I only pay $7.50 for the night (about 60 cents), I headed off for another cooking workshop. This one went a little better despite the fact that I still didn't understand Mixe and was still bad at taking pictures through cooking fire smoke. I can't say that I was disappointed to finally be dropped off by Chedraui at the end of the day.

Although my cabin-staying self would have vehemently denied it, this was perhaps one of the most significant experiences I've had this summer. I still wouldn't use the words best, favorite, enjoyable, or easy to explain the 24 hours that I spent in Tlahuitoltepec, but it was significant. I've never felt like such an outsider before. Every single head turned as I walked through the city square on the way to breakfast and more than a few people stopped to ask why I was there. Like the güera comments in Oaxaca, the attention was mostly curious and not really malicious or unwelcoming. Nevertheless, I was really wishing that I could be invisible. I was acutely aware of myself standing next to the local women wearing traditional skirts and sandals with babies slung across their backs in scarf contraptions. Talking about "working in rural impoverished communities" sounds so heroically simple until you're there, surrounded by wood smoke, muddy trails scattered with stray dogs and their excrement, houses made of scrap metal and ancient people hauling their produce in a box slung around their forehead. But this is just as much the real Oaxaca as the bustling zócalo or the charmingly colorful streets full of hamburger stands and handicraft vendors. Reading about Oaxaca's relatively low standard of living and rural poverty could not have prepared me for this excursion and I didn't know what to do with myself. And that is why it has taken me 3 weeks to finally write about it; because I was overwhelmed, scared, and a little embarrassed by my naivety. In the end though, this was just a life lesson in disguise and whether it's a formal lecture or a taxi ride to a remote village with a crazy name, we have to admit that we don't know everything before we can learn anything.