Pick Up Duty

Every afternoon at 3:45, after the tornado of the last class period has passed through our doors, we go to the curb to send kids back out into the world. The sun warms faces, hands, wrists. The context of my classroom returns. 

The pickup line stretches past the gate of our campus, to the potholed roads outside the gate, and as parents pull up we pace the curb passing students’ names back to the school building like hot potatoes. 

At my small private elementary school in New Jersey, pickup was similar, except that a lot of parents arrived an hour early because they didn’t work. The line of Chevy suburbans, minivans, and BMWs reached the gates of campus, too, and caused traffic in downtown Morristown. Mr. Mortensen’s voice came crisply from the loudspeaker, clearly enunciating each first and last name. 

On East Las Milpas Road, around the corner from Juniors’ taco mart and in between two huge fields, there is no traffic to be caused, but the rhythm of names is the same. 

The window rolls down. Para quien? I ask. Ponce. Ponce, I shout, and Vargas tips it up to Karina, who passes it to Ms. Medina on the mike in the hallway where the kids wait. Barragannnnnn. I relish the rolling my rs, i relish projecting names not mine with confidence, passing them down the line to other teachers until the child emerges from inside, book in hand or backpack messily unzipped, ready to go home. I relish thinking that each child is a part of the hopeful fabric of our school.

Parents often look surprised to see me, la guerita, out there. In my first week, I had to ask “otra vez” many veces when I asked for a child's name. There are many Mexican names I have never heard before - or names that, in the mouth of a mother, come out so quickly my brain needs a minute. I’m learning. I try to channel the simple solid I mean business tone of the women in kindergarten who herd small children efficiently and kindly. This week, a dad smiled at me when I bellowed his son's name up to the front of the line. “Good pronunciation,” he said. I acted like it was no big deal, but that made my day. 

***

98% of our student body qualities for free or reduced lunch; I’ve been surprised by the number of big, new pickup trucks, Ford F150s and Toyota Tundras and Chevy Silverados, cleanly washed with shiny chrome rims. When they get into gear to move up two places in the pickup line, they roar. You need to pick up a pre-K student, Dora the Explorer backpack and all, to load her in. 

Then you have the smaller trucks with farm mud on the flaps and bulk crates of eggs in the bed. The low Hondas, bumpers dented, with rattling doors. The dusty minivans with cleaning equipment inside and mom in her cleaners’ uniform. 

Such a window into a world, the threshold of someone’s car. Mom’s driving, with gold-teeth grandma in the front seat, or it’s an older sibling, or a young couple who could be the parents or the older siblings. Healthcare’s the fastest growing industry in the valley and many of our kids’ family members wear scrubs. I see big new cowboy hats, engine-grease-stained t-shirts, polo shirts from Churchs’ chicken. One mom in a black Acura SUV wears yoga pants. They listen to norteno or country music or Mexican ballads i recognize from 105.1, radio internacional. 

Parents pass back gummy bears with chamoy, or Doritos. sometimes an orange. I've seen empty Coke cans in the back seat, rolling around near the feet of a Kindergartner with three silver fillings in his teeth; I’ve seen 2nd graders sit in the front of a huge truck without a car seat. It’s not my job to judge; rather, putting a child in their car, back with their families, reminds me to think carefully about why they may not be doing their homework, or why they complain about stomachaches all the time, or why they are not reading on grade level. 

***

i have one student, whom I’ll call Emiliano. Many teachers have called him chiflado, lazy. He still does not start his work until you’ve gone over to him, crouched at his face level, and asked him to tell you what the instructions are. He has tried to run away from mandatory tutoring 3 times, sobbing. This child has never loved school, except for one day when we read part of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. 

On Thursday, his mom came to pick him up. She drives a white suburban and wears reflector aviators. She had her phone held up to her face after saying hello, and it took me a second to understand what she was doing. Emiliano was walking out of the building with his 1st grade sister by the hand, walking and smiling slowly when he saw his mom. She photographed them in that golden afternoon light and Emiliano happily hopped in when I opened the door. Mom took off her glasses, smiling. 

This student is a child, loved by a mother; this student is a child who matters, and it’s my job to figure out how to get him to smile like that every day before he comes to the curb to go home. 

In the Valley, Before School Started

Notes from a long time ago, in another country. 

Buying a Car

I spent my first day in the Valley looking for a used car. My friend Juan picked me up at the Harlingen airport and we went right to a dealership housed in a vintage building where the flatscreen TVS blew out the electricity. Juan lamented that girls in the valley only like guys with big trucks. We test drove a new Rav4 and returned it to a parking lot where heat waves mixed my vision. The next dealership had cookies and popcorn but no car in my price range. After that, I ordered my first Big Mac and acquiesced to go see Antman. The trailers were for Mexican kids’ movies. When we returned to reality, we went to Walmart and bought shampoo with families doing Saturday night shopping. 

Signing a Lease

Mr Thompson, the landlord and proprietor of Thompson Citrus, drives a white suburban with a grapefruit on the license plate. He was born in this house and he calls Mexicans Latins, though he speaks a calm respectful Spanish with his guys. 

“Don’t get snookered,” he told me. “Don’t go to the wrong Walmart or they’ll steal your purse,” he told me. “I can be there in 5 minutes flat with a gun if need be,” he told me. 

I locked all the doors and set the alarm the first week, but I don’t think we’ve set the alarm since then. Cumbia music comes from down the road some nights, but mostly dark is the sound of crickets and a moon over the citrus groves. 

Running

The week before school started, I got a drink at Chili's off the highway with three TFA women and then I ran in the Weslaco city park, where I was the only white person. A truck with a loudspeaker sold ice cream and elote, corn in a cup with mayonnaise. Little kids tentatively kicked soccer balls while their older brothers ran laps around the field with graceful footwork. Packs of grandmothers sauntered around the outside trail hablando en Spanglish. 

I’ve been running alone in the state park about a mile from my house, where the sky is open and my footfall surprises rabbits and flocks of small yellow birds from sage brush and cactus. In the city park, I moved feeling part of a beating heart of human activity.

On the drive home, at dusk, a neon car wash sign glowed beautiful in my rearview mirror. 

Driving

During TFA training we watched a video about a woman namedCarmen Anaya and how, speaking no English, she still managed to agitate for change so that, eventually, children in the colonias didn’t have to ruin their shoes walking through sewage puddles on the way to school. 

After that training, I filled my car up with its first full tank of gas (2.40/gallon), and drove out to Las Milpas, the neighborhood of Pharr that Carmen Anaya helped pull up and out of the most extreme poverty. There was no one on the road but me and a bunch of shipping trucks headed to Mexico in a hazy, vaguely holy evening light. I stopped at my school, which was quiet. 

The drive back along Military Highway was almost empty too. Flat and green, the type of landscape that might make you imagine you’re on dirt roads. Mexico, arrow to the right. I got home and ran in a new direction, in a housing development called Springfield Estates where they’re still trying to sell lots. Financing available with $500 down. Electricity from the city of Weslaco. The American dream! Across the street, in a small, fenced-off clearing, a woman pitched hay and a small goat bleated. 

On the radio, the Mexican government proclaims in baritone, “move to Mexico for your prosperity…”

The Border

After I met my students’ parents for the first time, I ran to the border. I carried their questions and their bendicciones. It was dusk just before darkness: The Rio Grande swung past, a calm seafoam green, an easy swim. Cows mooed bucolically on the other side. 

We had started our run in the evening. Santa Ana felt empty, jurassic. As the gold went away and dark fell it became emptier. DPS suburbans illuminated the dark on the drive home.

The Pulga

Today, when the heat was heaviest, we went to La Pulga, the sprawling flea market off the freeway. 

We parked in a lot by dudes who would tint your windows. The whole thing felt like a mall in a highway underpass. The old woman at the check in booth had a gold tooth and asked what time it was. 50 cents to go to Mexico. Casi no hable una palabra de ingles between the stands selling new DVDs, the kitchen appliances, the old clothes, the piles of fruit. Griffin told me about chiles that grow native and wild, little pinpricks of heat. We bought tacos and micheladas at an outdoor stand where Aimee and I were the only white girls. Inside the dance hall, old couples twirled, touched, took each other’s hands to the back bar when a song ended. I still don’t know my research question for the Valley. La Pulga reminded me that I am in a place of fluid identity where I have a lot to learn. 

Sick Day

I drive to school in the morning at night. The moon and the stars still hang in the sky. The llano fed by the Rio Grande stretches soft and dark outside my car window like the bed I leave behind. 

When I turn onto Military Highway, white US Border Patrol suburbans appear now and again like ghosts. They train their headlights on Mexico, 1.6 miles away. I haven’t seen any people emerge in those beams yet. The lights at the international road bridge to Progreso blink red, green. Sometimes there’s a parade of 18-wheelers; mostly, it’s just me and a few other early commuters. The animals at this hour are still nocturnal. When I get to school, the milk is just being loaded into the cafeteria. I see the sunrise from the hallway door when my first period class lines up outside my room. Unless I have recess duty, I don’t go outside until 6 pm. (My students don’t have it much better, on the days when they have inside recess). Military Highway winds me home between the llano’s fields when the sun hangs close to setting. 

On the drive to school on Friday, I hit a racoon. Baby’s first roadkill. Thump. I saw its eyes shine in my headlights. 

My voice was almost gone, anyway. All I did last week was wake up, go to school, drive home, prepare for the next day, and fall asleep worrying about how I was going to get all the pencils sharpened before class. How N. has been more and more defiant. How I feel like all I do say is no. How the kids who speak the least English misbehave the most because they're not engaged. I noticed myself getting sick but was too worried I was an incompetent teacher to pay it any mind. 

On Thursday, most of my 120 students had been sweet. Miss, you’re sick, they said. Miss, you should go see the doctor. They were less chatty than usual, sort of, out of kindness. 

But your voice, you see, is power. Tone and volume change responses and reactions in ways I’m just beginning to comprehend. I still believe there’s power in silence. But you need vocal power if you’re going to corral 120 under-exercised, over-sugared Friday-morning ten-year-olds into a hallway to read silently while Kindergarden gets to use the playground. That didn’t go so hot on Friday. I rasped and coughed instructions to a substitute and drove home feeling defeated. The raccoon’ s corpse lay on the middle of Military in the midday sun.  

I got home and sorted through the surveys I had given my morning classes. I had asked them to tell me how they felt about our class, statements like (Agree or Disagree) “Miss Parker believes in my potential” “Our class feels like a safe place” “I feel like Miss Parker is working to get to know me."

I had expected their responses to be negative, based on how many of them mocked the questions while I was reading them out loud, how loud our room still gets at breakfast, and how my pockets fill with confiscated eraser bits and cootie catchers by the end of the day. 

 And I couldn’t decide if that expectation, or their positive, thoughtful responses and notes (“This is my favorite class” “Can we decorate the classroom for the seasons?”“I wish everyone were respectful to everyone else” ”HARRY POTTER”), made me more melancholy. How the heck can I tap into the potential of all of these children when I spend most of my time with them and away from them worrying I’m not doing things right? 

I just taught simile and metaphor, sorry. I lost my voice and I have been losing my voice. I have been forgetting why I’m here. I’ve been in a daily tunnel of stress and nerves, driving up and down Military Highway in a fog even on the brightest evening. 

The fog was so thick it took me about 24 hours to remember that when you’re sick you normally try to get better. I drank tea on Saturday morning and called the doctor, who told me I had laryngitis, badly infected. Don’t talk, she said, until you’re back 100%. 

So I called a sub for today. This weekend, I did all of the things I normally do for the upcoming week but breathed in between them. I took more than five minutes to eat dinner and I vacuumed my room and I spent a few hours on Sunday morning exploring river channels with my roommate in an inflatable kayak. I’m starting to remember that I need to do the things that fill me with joy, so I can bring that joy into my classroom. (Duh, but revelatory, two months into this job). 

This morning, I drove to school so I could make copies of a work packet to leave for my students. I left the building just when the kids would be pulling the breakfast cooler into our classroom. The sun’s fingers appeared. Parents’ pickup trucks lined up outside the long, low building. As I was pulling out of the parking lot, it all seemed sort of miraculous: two faithful buses shimmered on the horizon, bringing a hundred more kids for another day of learning. 

Long Weekend

On Sunday, we found an abandoned pool club on the Rio Grande. Four pools, hot tub, beer (warm) still in the bars. Mexico on the other side of the river and border patrol vans driving by.

In the old Spanish chapel next to it, a woman prayed and gave us dirty looks for our dirty feet. I stayed outside, bare shoulders. 

We kept driving along the military highway that tracks the river and the border - past a burned out monastery that sits on a Catholic schools campus, past old men drinking beers and shooting doves pop-pop  from folding lawn chairs, past the road bridge to Mexico, past a small red bar called El Vaquero, right under that bridge, past about a mile of shipping warehouses with NAFTA flags. 

I bought poblano peppers and bistec suave from the meat market, La Michoacana, got looks because I was the only white girl. A father and son joked while they waited in line with the butcher. I drove home missing the evening light in NJ, joking with my parents in our kitchen. I cooked for my roommates and my hands burned for two hours after from the pepper seeds, reminding me that I did not come here to feel at home. 

New Posts will be under "Borderlands"

...but I have yet to set up a subscription widget!

So for now, I'll post links here:

I'm living in a new country in my own country, on the border with a country that permeates every aspect of the day. 

I toggle between South Texas country 100.3 and 101.5 Digital, which plays Enrique Inglesias and Mana on heavy rotation. Que dios te bendiga, God bless you, the ladies in the front office say, at the end of every conversation. The nurse orders us plates of flautas and tacos for lunch on Fridays. My kids are testing out swears in Spanish and they eat gummy bears and chili on their shaved ice after school. The drive-through convenience stores sell micheladas and avocados and all the flavors of Takis. 

I'm working in a new country, too, a nation of  120 ten year olds who test me and push me to remind myself, every day, that respect is earned, not given. Confidence covers up most mistakes. Everyone wants to be loved, and no change happens over night. My voice sounds like I've been on a three week bender, not working from 6 am to 8 pm in an air-conditioned schoolhouse. 

I've been writing more lesson plans and sticky note reminders than anything else, but there are rich words and images here to share and I'm working on pulling them together. 

Postscript, aka Publication

After spending most of my trip, it felt, pitching my research to various publications, I placed two articles with OZY, a new media outlet focused on the New and the Next. 

If you haven't already seen them, here they are. Thanks for reading. 

"Why the Keyword in Farming Startups is Regenerative," June 26:

http://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/why-the-keyword-in-farming-startups-is-regenerative/60722

"Going Wild on the Coast of Uruguay," July 24:

http://www.ozy.com/good-sht/going-wild-on-the-coast-of-uruguay/40940

Post-Script Table of Contents

In homage to the genre of Blog, the end of this first stage of Southern migrations probably calls for a Reflection. But I Reflected enough over the past few months to last me through at least a few weeks of not writing a single word, so I provide musings to you in the form of a pared-down selection of what I wrote:

1. Mari, on a wise woman and traveling back to Argentina six years after my first visit.

2. The Road to the Ranch, One and Two, from the week I spent in Wally and Pilar's home in Salto, Uruguay, watching them run ranch and family. 

3. On Language, in which I vent about feeling like a baby and hanging out with babies.

4. On the Road: Resistencia to Buenos Aires to Punta del Este, on hanging out with fifteen Paraguayan farmers in northern Argentina and pretending to be Martha Gellhorn.

5. 20 Lines on Solitude, because damn, I really did keep my own company on a lot of this trip, especially on the coast of Uruguay (except for a brief unfortunate date with a surfer who turned out to be nineteen years old and a believer in UFOs (oops)).

6. On Sidewalks and Walls, on learning Buenos Aires. 

7. Dining With Welders, an experience that reminded me that travel is often absurd. 

8. Maps, on Patagonia's pull and the Fenton family, who magnified that pull for me. 

9. Will Hamilton, because East of Eden is always relevant, especially when you are researching farmers and Benefit Corporations.

10. CrAzY dAYz in BA pt. II, on playing writer for a few weeks.

11. Two Buenos Aires Stories, because that city spun itself strong and pulled me in for a little while. 

12. Rio, on how bar-hopping may be one of the best ways to digest that complicated city.

13. Sunbathing, on America (of the 'Murica variety), from Mexico. 

Sunbathing

I read The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in Cancun, on a beach under a sun that laughs at you for previously thinking you could tan. The book made sense there. Junot Diaz calls the places that speckle the Caribbean sea surreal, for their heat and their water and the true myths of their histories, and Cancun definitely fits the bill. It’s Disney surreal, not the dirt-floors-and-guns absurdity of countries under dictatorships, but still - you question the reality of the whole place. The sun that pulls sweat out of your pores and dulls your brain. The water that’s brighter blue than a blue raspberry Slurpee. The sand and the high-rise hotels that are blinding white; the fact that someone thought to line a thin strip of barrier shore with those high-rises in the first place; the fact that in high season every room in every one of them is occupied by people who are escaping their own reality, wherever in the world that may be. 

Maybe most surreal was the documentation of that escape. Everywhere we looked: phones out to capture arms reaching to the sky, hats at a jaunty angle, abs tightened. Props, I guess, to the numerous women I saw attempting the complicated mermaid-selfie maneuver: lounge in foamy surf in small string bikini, take selfie without drowning phone or self. 

So on this beach, drifting in and out of sleep, I was reading Oscar Wao, a story that’s basically about how real life can feel like a fable and dreams can infiltrate reality. The sentences of sneakily poetic slang, Dominican and American, went down like cool water because that’s how my brain feels, right now, a total mezcla. It’s running back towards sure-footed English but feeling like it’s picked up a few words in Spanish it doesn’t want to let go. 

I fell asleep on a page where Junior, our main guide through all this quilombo, is talking about his drives around Paterson and Camden and Perth Amboy. Place names and their peculiar gravity. These are the cities on the highway signs on my way home from the Newark airport. Like Oscar Wao’s Dominican grandmother La Inca is stringing their names together, incanting me home. 

Somewhere else, Yunior talks about “a particularly Jersey malaise - the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres,” but I woke up sunburnt on a surreal beach to the feeling that this time the longing is for places that are real, that are already there. 

Notebook Scraps from Mexico

//Time started here with oranges. On the way from Tuxtla to San Cristobal, when I was giddy with arrival, the bus driver stopped by the side of the road, bought a bag of oranges warm with sun. He passed me one. Its peel was scraped away, leaving a thin white spiral of pith like a planet’s rings. 

//I’m enjoying my newfound status as pure tourist. I wore flip flops in town yesterday and running shoes today. 

But I took photos in a place where they said not to take photos and all of a sudden it felt like I was taking it too far. It was in San Juan Chamula, a church near San Cristobal. The building is a Catholic church, built by the Spanish when they invaded, but its shell protects the beliefs and the rituals of the indigenous community. Inside, there are pine needles on the marble floor and a tree in the back corner by the shrine of the Virgin Mary. The entire perimeter of the church is lined with fire - hundreds of tall candles in glass jars, a tribute to the God of the sun. People kneel on the floor and sacrifice chickens to chase away spirits of sickness, swig from a bottle of clear alcohol, light thin colored candles that leave wax puddles on the floor. I’m still trying to figure out why I couldn’t just see it, why I had to try to take a piece of it away with me. 

//One day, we left at 5 am to drive in a white van with six other tourists to see waterfalls and Mayan ruins. The van stopped at 8 am at a roadside restaurant where the buffet served beans and rice, plantains, or pancakes to people who had emerged from about twenty other white vans. We rolled in a caravan, with a police escort, to the first waterfalls. We ate lunch facing the waterfall and had the bittersweet pleasure of watching people pose for photos that they'll show their coworkers or grandchildren next Monday. They used selfie sticks, drones, long arms, and/or an iPad on a stand in a bush. 

At the top of a temple in the Palenque, the Mayan ruins, a guy in a straw hat held up a black flag of the Harley Owner’s Group of some small town in France. 

The frogs, or the bugs, sound like the whine of an arriving UFO. Not too far from the realm of possibility, if you believe the Mayans built UFOs. 

//They grow coffee here, for Starbucks and Green Mountain coffee. There's no time for much subsistence farming when the coffee day is over, so many of these indigenous communities don't see a lot of vegetables. Beans, onion, tortillas; maybe some tomatoes. The chicken is all free range (on your house floor) and beef is almost non-existent. Kids drink soda, which is cheaper than bottled water and cleaner than well water. Sometimes, Ali said, she stayed with families who could only scrounge together cookies and coffee for dinner, before waking up in the morning to harvest the beans for Starbucks again. 

//On the night bus from Tuxtla to D.F., Mexico City, the driver played a movie about a prison uprising and the bus stopped two times so that federal police could check for drugs in the sides of the bus and in everyone’s backpacks. After the second stop, in the final scene of the violent prison movie, a baby in the front of the bus wouldn't stop crying.   

//Every street corner we’ve passed in D.F. smells like lime. There is so much food on the street in so many different colors. By the Palacio de Bellas Artes, there was a cart bursting with bouquets of fried snacks. Red, green, orange - the same color as the fruit they sell In cups, watermelon, lime, mango, all with a dusting of chili if you want. A woman fries black tortillas with orange filling, lets you ladle red or green sauce. 

//Flying into Mexico City from the flat Yucatan, you understand why Tenochtitlan was the first city of empire.  That Aztec city was made strong by mountains. Today, Mexico’s main city spits houses over hills like its ancestor did. Shafts of light strike the mountains;the clouds are the serpents’ wings.

Rio

My friend Catherine, a freelance journalist who has been living in Rio for three years, gives a walking tour of Rio’s city center and port zone that narrates disparate neighborhoods through food. She leads the walk through a company called Culinary Backstreets, and if you are going to Rio I HIGHLY suggest that you go on this walk. A few highlights - an aid, if you will, for digesting this complicated city: 

Rio was the seat of the Portuguese empire for thirteen years. The King had barely any idea what lay inside Brazil's borders, beyond jungle and potential slaves, but he did bring a European fondness for pastries that could be made with the new cash crop: sugar cane.

Real Gabinete Português de Leitura (Royal Portuguese Library): When the King of Portugal fled to Rio and moved the head of empire to his new city, he brought a boat full of first editions of Portuguese literature and built this church-like library to hold them. The collection also has a full archive of Brazilian newspapers. From an exhibit poster, a reproduced cartoon, circa late 1800s, as railroads were built across the country: “progress, but for whom?"

In 2013, as private contractors finished stadiums and hotels for the 2014 world cup, millions of Brazilians protested across the country because public transportation fares were too high and buses too slow. Down the street from the library, in the faculty of social sciences, so many people came for an open-mike grievance meeting that they pulled a heavy wood table from the red-curtained auditorium and held the meeting in the square. Thousands of people came, Catherine said, and for six hours took turns speaking for two minutes each about what needed to change as  Brazil went about growing. “Order and progress,” says the Brazilian flag. 

Catherine’s roommate recently wrote a story about Brazil’s guarantee of asylum for Syrian refugees. We drank coffee at this shop that was founded by the first wave of Syrian immigrants, in the early 20th century. The owners started out selling nargileh; now they sell cigars from Brazil’s Bahia region. 

This store, founded by another Syrian family, sells West African red palm oil, Middle Eastern olives, peanut butter, dried mango, pineapple, banana, and pastry supplies; in other words, a nice indicator of how diverse Brazil is. Outside the store, you can eat a middle eastern empanada, sprinkling on each bite a brand of African red pepper sauce that’s now produced in a suburb of Rio. There are five branches around the city.

Tapioca: This is the Brazilian hot dog, choripan, taco, your pick - the street food you grab on your way home from the office or after a late night out. It's made from manioc flour, which looks like little white pearls until it's been cooked in a pan of oil and turned into a crepe-like base for salty or sweet fillings. 

Neighborhood bars are a key social space. "We’re in a boteco and we can talk about whatever we want," Catherine said. We ate bolinhos de bacalao (codfish balls) and bolinhos de feijoada (beef stew, breaded and fried). Feijoada, like cachaca, the sugar cane alcohol, was once slave food - and is now one of the pillars of Brazilian cuisine. 

Also, there are 200 word for cachaca in Brazilian Portuguese. 

From Morro da Conceição, a hillside neighborhood that's becoming an artists' haunt, you can see abandoned buildings in Brazil's downtown. On the right, Catherine shows how the port zone fits into this hill neighborhood and the city center. 

Pedra do Sal, Little Africa: African slaves carved these stairs into this rock before slavery in Brazil was finally abolished in 1888. Their descendants carved out a neighborhood that's become a hub for Afro-Brazilian culture. Now, on Fridays, on this rock, there's a samba show here and so many people come you can't move as anything but part of the swaying crowd.

The view from the top of Morro da Providencia, Rio's first favela. 

Here, at the top of Morro da Providencia, in a square that used to be a public park before the city government built a cable car as a gentrifying gesture, a community pillar makes gnocchi with shrimp in a spicy coconut sauce. She learned to make gnocchi from the Italian woman in whose house she is a maid; the sauce is a speciality of the northeast of Brazil and uses West African red palm oil. "It's an amazing fusion dish," said a Turkish chef who did this food tour with Catherine a few weeks ago. 

Favelas are hillside neighborhoods of adaptation and resistance. People build houses with flat roofs so that they can add floors when the next generation comes along. This building here is covered with portraits of the Providencia residents who were evicted from their homes when the city government built the cable car. 

En Transito: Everywhere to Mexico

24 hours of travel from Rio to Mexico, pictures > words:

On Uruguay: Painting with a Broad Brush and a Gourd of Mate in my Other Hand

The curtains on every bus I took around Uruguay opened  to green, rolling and rocky views - unexpected mountains, extensive grasslands. A nation of grasslands. To me, agriculture gives the country some coherence. But there’s a lot more to say than that, or that it’s the Switzerland of South America, or the country that elected as president a former guerrilla named Jose Mujica. The Uruguayan puzzle I've started to put together is part traditional mindset, part progressive politics - and part something else I haven't found yet. 

Over two months, I stayed in the capital, Montevideo; a mid-sized city, Salto; a large coastal town, La Paloma; and a tiny coastal town, Punta del Diablo, that in the summer swells to a resort. I passed through two other mid-sized cities, Tacuarembo and Rocha. In all of these places, I was struck by the general homogeneity of the houses. In Montevideo, of course, there are luxury towers and beautifully preserved (or elegantly crumbling) old palaces; but in general, people live in small, one- or two- story cement houses. Bars on the windows, and gates to a courtyard; maybe a place to park a car. It’s a place where people have enough money to live and maybe go on vacation in January, and maybe buy their kids Samsung cellphones (iPhones are rare here) - but the luxury is not apparent as it is in Buenos Aires. I’m sure that if I spent time in Punta del Este or more time in Montevideo, my view would be complicated. But from what I hear, read, and understand, Uruguay is just chugging along. 

Before I came south, I had subscribed to Google alerts for Uruguay that had made me think that the country would be booming. My inbox was full of links to World Bank press releases and the Uruguayan Investment and Export Promotion Agency’s home page: a solar plant here, a wind power plant there, a proposal for an open pit iron mine that had passed an intensive social and environmental impact assessment.

I see more problems in those stories than I did before. After being to Pilar’s ranch in Salto, the timber forests that push at the edges of pastures seems sinister. After spending time in La Paloma and Punta del Diablo and the wild beaches further north, the thought of a deep water port (since put on hold!) in the middle of that beautiful coastline, one that Brazil and Bolivia would use, too, seems short-sighted. There’s not enough need to justify it; there’s too much wilderness to permit it. 

And what people told me is that there aren’t enough people to do the work projected for those big projects, either. “People don’t have the same values as they used to,” I kept hearing. Because the government gives out social security to people under a certain income level, they don’t bother to work, I was told. Pilar has a real labor shortage on her ranch. “There’s money to be made, but only for who wants it,” the hostel owners in La Paloma said. For anyone else, the government can supply enough to buy mate and cigarettes and beer.

I don’t know the details of any development projects well enough to say for sure - perhaps sustainability is truly taken into account, perhaps they projects will create jobs that will boost people’s livelihoods, maybe the new infrastructure would be a blessing for everyone. The roads are invariably bad, in cities and in country. “We’re really still a developing country,” I kept hearing, “Have you seen our roads?”

***

On my last day in Uruguay, I went to a conference about Benefit Corporations, or companies that are required, by charter, to seek not only economic but social and environmental impact. In the conference room of a sponsoring law firm in Montevideo, we heard about the history of B Corps, the story of the first certified Uruguayan B Corp, and the beginnings of a process to create a legal framework for B Corps in Latin America.

The coordinators of the Uruguayan hub, which currently consists of two companies, said that Uruguay could be a good place for more B corps to grow. It’s small and progressive enough to change legal frameworks and business culture within its borders, they said, and can then influence other countries in the region. At the coffee breaks people drank organic tea produced by an Argentine B Corps and took notes on their iPhones. The organizers were pleased with attendance - not just “save the earth types,” they said at lunch afterwards, but lawyers and businessmen, the people who have the tools to change the legal frameworks and push industry to seek that triple bottom line (financial, social, and environmental). 

In the evening, I met up with one of the organizers and her boyfriend. They were sitting at a corner bar in their neighborhood, wearing yoga pants and jorts, respectively, drinking mate and beer. We ordered sliders. She is Uruguayan but was raised in the US. She told me that coming back to Uruguay has brought her back to the basics, in a good way, but that Montevideo feels sleepy, for 20-somethings who are working in movements to change how the world works. Uruguayans may allow progressive policies to pass in their legislature, but in the end, she said, this is a place where you buy the same type of squash from the same corner grocery for thirty years without wanting to change it up. 

I’m in Rio de Janeiro now. Last night, I went to a party hosted by a group of young Brazilians who work in city government, congress, and a grassroots community organizing association. Before we arrived at their door, they had been hosting a meeting for a campaign to block a law that would lower the age of criminal responsibility and send more teenagers to Brazil's dangerous prisons.

For the rest of the night, even as the sangria bowl emptied and the music pulsed louder, people wore bright red and green stickers on their t-shirts: Amanhecer contra a Redução, or "A new day against reducing the age." The whole campaign had been inspired, a friend told me, by how youth had mobilized and prevented a similar law from passing in Uruguay. 

20 Lines on Patriotism

It started with a feeling of affectionate embarrassment for Bill Clinton. At a conference on social enterprise, the head of the B Corps network in Uruguay gave a presentation that included a video of Bill talking about B Corps back in 2012. He spoke haltingly and he looked sort of flushed, like he had just had a few drinks. I looked around the conference room full of lawyers and social entrepreneurs to make sure no one was laughing. The subtitles, in fact, did not pick up on Bill’s lack of eloquence. 

I sat back. Hearing English was soothing and, no matter how he stumbled, what he was saying was good - we need to clear our minds of the primacy of short-term profit. Corporations and shareholders need to be willing to think long term. His accent and his aim made me think fondly of the country where I was born. Straight-shooting, idealistic. Then the founder of the first Uruguayan B Corp took the stage and hit play on another YouTube video. It was about lawyers in the US banding together to create a legal framework for these Benefit Corporations. They wanted companies to be allowed to incorporate social and environmental benefit as fiduciary duties in their charters. 

As the music swelled and more states who had passed legislation were highlighted on a big US map, I found myself feeling a little emotional. When Jack Markell, the Governor of Delaware, spoke about his states’ duty to pave the way (over 50% of publicly-traded US companies are incorporated in Delaware), my heart beat faster. Then the kicker, the corkscrew opening that bottle of American idealism:

“I believe, ten years from now, we will look back on this time as the start of a revolution,” said Yvon Chouinard, the Founder of Patagonia. 

After this doozy, the clip gave the final tally of states that had approved legislation and cut to a scene of a small New England town square. That just about did it for me. When the video ended, I was about to excuse myself to the hallway so I could let tears stream down my cheeks in peace.

Facts: The B Corps movement is strong here. The Latin American countries that have been forced to host transplanted capitalism may understand, better than we Americans who have mostly reaped the benefits of that blind industry, why a triple bottom line is important. I almost cried watching YouTube videos about corporate law in the United States, so I think it may be time to start working my way home. 

Two Buenos Aires Stories

1.

They met in a church. The chapel was freshly painted turquoise for a bride wearing melon and pink. The Uruguayan priest cracked a few jokes and ended the service in fifteen minutes. The church spilled out 120 guests from France and Buenos Aires. The Argentines wore more colors and higher heels. His eyes were blue and her scarf was red.

They said goodbye in a bus station. She knew what his trip home would be like because he had told her when they met in the church. He loves arriving in Buenos Aires by ferry at sunset. The boat slides in and the city emerges like a Carlos Gardel tango, powerful and melancholy. 

2.

I went for a walk last night, after it got dark but before the heat lifted. There were closed storefronts with sounds behind them and a stream of bicycles on Cordoba. There were birdcages on a roof. There were shadows of trees and the smell of jasmine. There was a dog who looked like a lion, walking without a leash, and the flashing light of a TV behind a window, and a couple kissing in a dark corner with balletic grace. Over the railroad tracks, there was a block where people spilled onto the sidewalk in a bath of fluorescent light. 

This pulled me in like a moth to a lantern and pushed out delusions of poetry. It was a grill house in an old garage. I asked for a table and the man at the grill was kind but brusque because he had a whole lotta mouths to feed. At the tables on the sidewalk, groups of old men poured themselves more Quilmes and yelled about their wives. A mom cut pieces of steak for a two-year-old wearing a NASCAR shirt; a family argued over who got the last chorizo. A few guys in soccer clothes waited for takeout.

From my plastic table in the back room, I ordered a skirt steak and fries and a small bottle of wine and I didn’t end up bothering with the book I had brought  because the TV was playing a telenovela about a bunch of singing nuns with nicely-plucked eyebrows. The boy with the NASCAR shirt toddled into the room every few minutes, shrieked with joy at the screen, and went back to his mom. 

Just as my steak arrived on its metal platter, a group of about twenty guys filed in to the table a foot away from mine. Buen provecho, bon appetit, they said, one by one, smiling. 

I spent twenty minutes keeping my focus intently on the steak and the telenovela and trying to avoid eye contact. Apparently you can only do that for so long when you’re eating by yourself a foot away from a big group. 

“Where are you from?” the guy with the dreadlocks asked, when I accidentally looked up from my food. 

We had a pleasant conversation under that fluorescent lighting. It was his 29th birthday. The guy across from him spent a week in New York last year. They were all friends from high school. We cheersed to his 30th year. When my waiter brought my check, I paid for an extra bottle of Quilmes and asked him to bring it to their table after I left. Que lo pases hermoso, I said on my way out, suerte.

I walked home thinking about how there’s something really nice about stories you don’t make up. 

CrAzY dAYz in BA pt. II

In a nice instance of travel symmetry, I'm ending this two-month period of my trip where it started, in Buenos Aires. Somehow, I still haven't managed to do much of the visitor-in-BA stuff, like stay out until 5 am or eat a whole cow off a grill (I would be doing that, but I'm still recovering from the quantity of lamb I had to eat in Patagonia). 

Yesterday, I ran at dusk and tripped on a rock in a slim path in between a park and a Friday evening highway. I went sprawling under the weak lights that lit the path. At the end of my run, it started raining and at an internet cafe I changed a hundred dollar bill to pesos with a bleeding elbow. (Crazy gringa, said the cashier's eyes).

I am staying with a friend from school, Sarah, whom I actually didn’t know very well before I got to Buenos Aires. There is a curious luck to getting along with someone new and you take advantage of it, stay put. Staying with Sarah has both pushed me to make as much as I can of my project and kept my project in healthy perspective. She is working to pitch a story she has been reporting for almost two years, about a Cold War-era massacre in a Salvadorean village. 

We’ve been living primarily off of butternut squash and wine. There are two kilos of ice cream in the freezer, which are there mainly as an excuse to practice some activity other than writing but that still feels like writing: we dig spoons into the ice-crusted tubs as if there aren’t just cookie pieces in there, but the word that might hold together the pitch an editor will love. 

We talk a lot and we barely talk; today, we’ve exchanged only a few words, here and there, knowing that in a few hours when this individual flow state has exhausted each of us we’ll talk about life again, the life we’re trying to encapsulate in our stories or the life that exists beyond this apartment. 

I spent most of the day today lying on the floor slow reading John McPhee’s New Yorker piece on structure and taking messy notes in a shitty faux-Moleskine notebook. We float through the apartment moving from one pose of thinking to another, walking slowly to the kitchen to cut another slice of apple, peel another half avocado, mix in a little more instant coffee; always wearing bathing suits, because there is a terrace with a counter facing the midday sun. I think we’re trying to photosynthesize. We cross the threshold of the terrace back to the cool apartment only when our computer screens get too hot.

After my tumble yesterday, I’m limping up and down the stairs and I have a homemade  bandaid ((paper towel)) flopping off my arm but I feel this is appropriate, like falling is all part of this focused and freeing process of trying to make sense, in words, of what I’ve learned in the past few months.

Last week I dreamt of the public library in the town where I grew up. I don’t think this current existence is the long-term life for me, and I’m starting to feel the pull of home again. But when I get home, when I go do something other than lie on floors in a bathing suit trying to sell my thoughts, I hope I have a little scar from that fall. 

Will Hamilton

Of all the Hamiltons, Will lived with the least unfettered joy but the most money. While his siblings tied sofas to the back of carts so they could take two girls to the dance (Tom) or told bawdy stories to all the town’s women in the fitting room of a dress shop, so that those women left feeling less weight in their tired feet (Dessie), Will sold a lot of cars and ate expensive steak alone at the bar in Salinas.

But let’s not consign Will to the world of robots - let’s not make him the forebear of today’s office drone, the antecedent of the millions of collared-shirt-wearing humans held aloft in New York City office skyscrapers each day from 9-5. No, I think Will understood joy, too. He just calculated it in a different way. It was an input, not an outcome; it was a means to an end, not the end of his day with a few beers and a bunch of buddies. 

"From instinct and training in business, he was a fine reader of the less profound impulses of men and women." He understood how to take peoples’ quest for joy, or love, or comfort, or status, and turn it into the money old Sam Hamilton never had. I don’t think he minded sitting alone at the bar, absorbing the rest of the world and storing it for a future deal. Will had his feet firmly on the ground, but in his own way he saw wings. 

[[[Because you can think about John Steinbeck's East of Eden always and in every context. Sentence in quotes is from that epic, p. 252 I think based on the preview I can get on Google Books.]]]

Getting Down to Business

I am thinking about bottom lines before bed. 

This is an excellent piece by the New Yorker's James Surowiecki about B Corps, or for-profit companies that pledge to achieve social goals as well as financial ones:

 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/companies-benefits.

There are more than 1000 B Corps in the U.S. (I'll be finding out tomorrow how many there are in Argentina). The fiduciary duty of these companies goes beyond making money and stretches into returns that are often far less quantifiable - positive environmental impact, for example. In the U.S., at least, the promise of these sort of returns has been attracting investors to B Corps and encouraging the growth of a movement.

The more I read and the more I see, the more I understand that business is never easy or simple. But the idea of B Corp provides a neat narrative. Entrepreneur has idea for product people will buy (financial win). Product is made using clean technology (environmental win). Because people are buying products, company adds jobs (social win). There is the triple bottom line that the entrepreneur envisioned from the beginning.

What feels like a more complicated and more dramatic story is the fight to turn companies that were born with one sole purpose - that money makin - into a triple threat. How would H+M even begin to unravel the way it makes its sweaters (in sweatshops out of cotton that drank all of California's water supply)? What can convince a CEO and her Board of Directors that the challenge would be worth it? 

Some Facts

Near the southern-most point of Argentina, where the Strait of Magellan strikes and pulls at the land, Ricardo Fenton’s ancestors established a sheep ranch. Most of the other first settlers came for the gold rush of the 1880s. Now, most guests here work on the rigs that burn gas in flares offshore. The current guest house is built out of shipwrecks that the Strait spat out. 

For lunch on Good Friday, Ricardo and his family ate a lamb that they had had roasted for a few visitors. They told the visitors to try the ribs. The daughter, Erin, and the oldest son, Joel, are 13 and 11 and rattled off the names of soccer teams. After lunch, they went back to their house to do their homework, and Ricardo showed the visitors how to shear a sheep. 

"The Trader Who Donates Half his Pay"

My parents forwarded me Nick Kristof's NY Times column from yesterday, "The Trader Who Donates Half His Pay." I think it's worth a read.

Reading it pulled me out of this very unique Patagonian world I'm living in for five days - intense geography, rural schools, wool prices, grass regeneration, sheep - and took me back to the decision-making that got me here in the first place. 

A year ago, I was working an interesting job in New York that paid well but had me looking at a screen most of the time. It wasn't arbitrage or trading, but it had me using numbers and making money for big companies. My rationale for taking the job had been some combination of "learn practical, business skills here you can use later to make government or NGOs or whatnot more efficient" and "make money here and save it to give away, also later." I can still see the value in both of these ideas, and I don't fault anyone who takes a job for those reasons. For me, that was not the right job. I missed interacting with people other than at lunch time. So I made moves to become a teacher, and in the meantime I am enjoying a stint as a freelance reporter.

Reading about Matt Wage (also, nice last name), I questioned my decision-making. Maybe I had just been selfish, wanting to do a job that made me happy. At the least, his idea - making such intense calculations as to the effectiveness of your job in improving the world - is interesting.

And I applaud him. I don't think giving away half your salary is easy when you start working in a world made out of money. I think what Wage does is extremely relevant for my peers who enjoy their jobs in finance or consulting. Even if they didn't start their career with the objective of giving away most of their salary, they could take a page out of his book.

I recognize Wage from college - or I think I do, and I'm going to make a lot of assumptions. He's a good person who's hard-wired to enjoy close analysis, philosophic or financial. He'd be that brilliant guy in my philosophy section who made one amazing comment each class and who did all of the reading and stayed after to talk with the TA because he was able to focus in one one line from Singer and keep that focus even when it was 5 pm and everyone else was going to hear Sonia Sotomayor give a master's tea, or play soccer on Cross Campus. He'd definitely be a nice guy. (I can also imagine that, like most people would be, he is a little relieved that his moral calculus took him to an arbitrage job in Hong Kong rather than to a refugee camp in Syria).

But extending the "effective altruism" argument too far ignores a few things, which Kristof points out. First:

 "There is more to life than self-mortification, and obsessive cost-benefit calculus, it seems to me, subtracts from the zest of life."

As an extension of this, Matt Wage's calculus works for him - but we also need people who are going to run the NGOs that do the best work he donates to; who are going to write the articles that show us how bad the malaria crisis is in developing countries; who are going to teach kids in struggling schools across the U.S.

When you have the privilege of an education like Wage's - like I do, and like many of you reading this, I assume - you also have the privilege of making choices. This means that you can pick where you think you can do the most good AND be your best self. I know that I would not be happy in Wage's job, even if I were giving away half of my pre-tax income. I would feel that some essential part of me was lying fallow (and I'd be sleep-deprived and mean). And so I think I'd be missing out on some of the good I can do in the world.

I worry that a story like Wage's will be yet another selling point for the finance and consulting companies that take a disproportionate number of "elite" graduates each year. To people who are still in college, I say: if you know you love teaching, or writing, or tracking endangered birds, or titrating cells to find a cure for cancer, I believe there is unquantifiable benefit to the world in you doing what you love. 

I write all of this pretty sure, especially after the past two months, that business is an essential tool for fixing most things going wrong in the world. Money makes things happen, as Kristof's piece lays out. And I think I'm heading in the direction of business, of some sort, as a career. I just want to intertwine the ultimate impact I make with the way I live. 

I'd love to hear what people think about this, in comments or by email or whatnot. This is an interesting, deeper-dive into the question, from 2013 in the Washington Post.