Surviving Mexico

May 10, 2013 · 3:08 pm

Parenting Challenge–Cultural Apathy

El Día del Niño Children’s Day April 30th

April 30th in México is El Día del Niño (Children’s Day). I love this holiday! The main idea is to celebrate childhood and the children in your life and hasn’t gone too commercial yet. It isn’t about giving your kids toys. It’s about spending time with them–which is priceless.

So this April 30th, the school where I work on Saturdays sponsored a Children’s Day event–free to the public. About 200 hundred children in the immediate area were given an invitation that included a small bag of candy. Come the day of the event, 20 children attended. Well, not to be discouraged, we made the most of it. We played with a parachute. We played red light–green light. We had a tug-a-war contest. We played musical chairs. We did Zumba. We played gallitos (Little Roosters) which is a game where balloons are tied around the kids’ ankles, and then the other team tries to stomp on them. (Anyone who knows me will tell you I personally hate this game since I have a moderate balloon phobia. However, someone else directed it, and I went and hid upstairs until the last balloon was gone.) We kicked the soccer ball around and generally had enormous fun. Prizes were simple, hula hoops, yo-yos, piggy banks, and balls.

Of course, there were a few stick-in-the-muds. One little boy brought his PSP. I found him tucked away in the corner of a classroom playing in complete isolation. I took his game away and made him come out and do Zumba. Twenty minutes later, there he was again, hiding under some desks with his game. I threw my hands up in exasperation. Another little girl had some difficulty integrating at first–the kids ranged in age from 2 to 13 and most didn’t know each other from Adam–but about halfway through the event, she was out there tugging her little heart out with her team.

My son, of course, was there the entire time, from set-up to clean up, the price he pays for being the teacher’s kid. He even tortured his poor old mom with some balloon popping fun. There was no doubt he had a great time.

But when we got home, he was a regular gloomy Gus. He was disappointed that not one of his classmates came to the event. He asked me why he couldn’t be just like everyone else and have friends that come over and visit.

That was a two part question, so I addressed them separately, although the answers were somewhat related. I asked him if he had a good time. Of course, he did. I asked him what he thought his friends had done instead of coming to the event. Watched TV or played video games. I asked who actually lost out–my son or his friends. Well, his friends, because he really had a good time. So I said that no, he wasn’t like everyone else and probably never would be, because he participates in the opportunities life presents, and that wasn’t a bad thing.

Then to answer the second part of the question, I asked why he thought his friends didn’t come to visit him. The obvious reason is that we don’t live in town and coming to La Yacata requires a bit of effort, not because his friends did not want to play with him. He wasn’t entirely satisfied with that answer and said he would rather live in town.

I know that at his age (nearly 11) socialization is the end all and be all of his existence. I feel guilty as a parent sometimes that he doesn’t have any brothers or sisters to play with and that we live isolated from the bulk of the population. I also feel guilty that that way we have raised him creates a feeling of an outsider when all he wants to do is fit in. His values and priorities are different than the mainstream. I have tried to make him a citizen of the world, and I may have succeeded too well and made him belonging to nowhere.

Yet, as agonizing as he finds pre-adolescence, having gone through it myself, I know that one day he will discover that “the road to a friend’s house is never long” and that acceptance does not guarantee happiness. Meanwhile, I will love him unconditionally through the prickliness and tears and laughter and joy with the hope that it will be enough.

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Filed under Education, Mexican Holidays, Parenting Challenges and Cultural Norms

Tagged as Children's day, el día del niño, Mexican Holidays

May 5, 2013 · 8:06 pm

Battling Nature–Flies

We live outside of town, surrounded by open space, grasses, and animals. Our garden wall is shared with the neighbors, who happen to be bovine. We have horses, goats, sheep, rabbits, and dogs, and an occasional pig, all of which poop. And the poop attracts the flies. In the months before the rainy season, there is a biblical plague number of flies. They are everywhere. We have screens on the windows, which for this area is eccentric, but necessary to keep out the swarms. But somehow they still get in. So I looked into methods of extermination.

First I tried Raid for Flies. Yep, it’s a real thing. Comes in a purple canister. I sprayed one day after I had left the garage door open and a gazillion flies peppered the ceiling. I sprayed the whole can and then stumbled outside, nearly unconscious. It did kill some of the flies, but I puked and puked and thought I was going to die as well. And when the air cleared, there were dead fly bodies and live fly bodies about. Not a victory there.

So then I asked what the locals do for the flies. The solution is to hang a clear plastic bag full of water at the entrance of the house. The theory being the approaching fly will see its own magnified reflection, think it is some sort of giant insect, scream and veer off. I see some flaws in this plan, the predominant one is that it doesn’t seem to keep the flies out of my house anyway.

When my mother-in-law moved her kitchen from in the house to an outside patio area, the fly problem was exponentially increased due to the lack of walls. So her solution was to buy pink pellet poison, put it on plates and set them around the kitchen, on tables and the floor. The way it works is the flies are attracted to the sweet poison, eat it and drop dead. As a testament to the effectiveness, little dead fly bodies littered the plate. Again, however, there was a flaw in the plan. No less than 3 of the household pets were also attracted to the pink sweet poison and died horrible deaths. I also thought it might be hard for my mother-in-law to win this battle with flies, as the kitchen was outside. For it to work effectively, she would have to exterminate all the flies in La Yacata. This seemed an impossible task and more than I was willing to take on. I only wanted flies to stay outside my house, not kill off the entire species.

So I asked around some more. Fly traps. That yellow sticky spiral tape stuff that you hang from the ceiling. Ok, this wasn’t venomous. I could try this safely. And each role is only 8 pesos. Within an hour, my house was fly free. I admit, it’s not pretty, dead and dying flies and their parts hanging in the kitchen. And if it is accidentally hung too low, a pain to get out of one’s hair. But it works. The simple way is usually the best.

Yet, there were still flies outside. Oodles of them. As I knew I wouldn’t win the battle against all the flies in La Yacata, being outnumbered, but I hoped to reduce the number in my immediate area. I thought about other enemies of flies. So what eats flies? Spiders. Ok. Giant spider webs constructed in the garden were left in peace. Lizards. Again, found easily throughout La Yacata, but not really subject to permanent residence in the backyard.

Birds. Now there’s something. Our chicken flock had been growing steadily, and I noticed that there were fewer flies where the chickens were. I looked around again. The piles of animal poop seem to be gathering places and breeding grounds of flies. So why don’t we let the spare roosters have an area to patrol? The white rooster gets the sheep pen. The black rooster gets the goat area. The two little red roosters get the horse stall and dog area. For good measure, the littlest rooster has free range in the garden. The roosters fatten up quite nicely, and just as importantly, fewer flies.

Then, when we got ducks, yippee. Ducks love to catch flies and are entertaining to watch to boot. They lie in wait, motionless for so long that you think there might be something wrong and then, all of a sudden–blam! A vertical leap and beak snap and one less fly in the yard. And they get their protein this way. You know what they say “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

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Filed under Animal Husbandry, Battling Nature

Tagged as chickens, ducks, flies, fly extermination, lizards, solutions to fly problems

May 1, 2013 · 6:42 pm

Those Waskely Wabbits–Raising rabbits

Rabbits are so cuddly!

Rabbits seemed like a quiet and easy addition to the backyard barnyard. Unfortunately, we weren’t quite prepared when the first two rabbits arrived. A cage was quickly set up over the dog house. A big mistake! It was difficult to clean, not being on the ground, and the dogs barking caused stress in the poor rabbits. Before we knew it, one rabbit had babies. And that was another problem. Some froze with the cold as the mother hadn’t made a nest with her fur, others died of starvation, the mom being too stressed to care for them properly, and one poor little bunny rolled out of the cage into the waiting dog’s mouth. Talk about feeling horrible. We were nearly ready to throw in the towel over rabbits but persevered.

The first pen, not easy to clean at all!

The next move was to individual pens with nesting boxes for the expectant mothers. This was the way to go, or so said the reference book about rabbits. However, it didn’t work out quite like promised. Again, the pens were hard to keep clean, and the mother rabbits sometimes didn’t have their babies in the nesting boxes, so again there were frozen and undernourished bunnies.

Happy rabbits in their section by the goats.

So the rabbits were moved in with the goats. This was much more to their liking. The back half of the goat corral was sealed off partially, which allowed for a cool and somewhat dark area. The rabbits flourished. Before I knew it, there were bunnies all over the place. One count was over 30 baby bunnies, not counting adult rabbits. There were far fewer health problems as the rabbits pooped and peed on the ground. Mother rabbits tunneled down and built their own nests, warm and dark and safe. The problem then became what to do with so many cute and cuddly creatures. We learned it doesn’t pay to try to improve on Mother Nature even if the backyard barnyard book says so.

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