Mexico Day 70 - Where The Hood At?

A couple days ago I was listening to a song by DMX and it talked about what life in "da hood" is like and I realized the majority of stuff I've talked about and pictures I have uploaded have been of the children's homes and Back2Back property but no chillin' out in da hood type stuff. But now it's April and we really don't have any groups coming until right before I leave so my job description has evolved a little bit since when I first got here.

Now I get to go with people places that normal interns don't. I think. I just sometimes get to chill with people and go off campus whenevs I have a staff member with me. A couple days ago I went and saw Furia de Titanes (Wrath of the Titans) which was ehhh but the experience was pretty shweet. I went with some of the staff que sólo hablan Español so we had subtítulos in Spanish which was a pretty cool experience because every time there was a funny part, Steve, Gabo, and I, all fluent in English, laughed first then when everybody else in the theatre had read the subtitles there was a second wave of laughter. I have always heard people say that the best way to learn a new language is to completely immerse yourself in it (which I have) and get lots of music/movies of said language. Entonces, I have flooded my iPod with everything from Hillsong United's Spanish album to Chilean electro indie bands called Astro. Súper chido (that's Spanish for "super cool"). Another cool thing about going to the movies in Mexico is that my entire movie + a large POP (Joya Manzana is the best drink on Earth) cost less than a normal, non-matinee film in the states. You can also go to a "VIP" movie where your seat reclines all the way back and you can order food while you are actually in the theatre through a device that they lifted straight off those super awesome hospital chairs/Deny's drive-ins which made me thoroughly surprised that this idea has not caught on in United States of America. I must specify the "United States of America" because we are not just "America", America covers everything from Greenland to Cape Horn directly South of Chile and we are not simply "THE United States" either because "Mexico" is technically known in the UN as "Estados Unidos Méxicanos" so we could call ourselves, "some United States" because I am sure there are others. But back to food....

Seriously, think about everything we have that just kind of makes us more flojo on a daily basis. Peanut-butter and jelly no longer need knife nor jar, they both can simply be expelled through a squeeze bottle....the SAME squeeze bottle. In order to make a phone call in the car we merely must talk at our car. OUR CAR and it will make the call for us. Our phones will also googlear (and yes, that is the verb for "to Google" in Spanish, spelling.....not so sure) whatever we want through some witchcraft magically woven into the very cells (get it?) of our phones because typing with our fingers is just too tiring or inconvenient which is why I rest my case that we should revert back to a more simple time. A time of minimal worries where blackberries and apples were just fruit and a nook was a word only used when paired with its predecessor "cranny" (now you have to admit that was pretty flippin' clever for being written at approximately 10:53pm at night). We must devolve our cellphones back to the age of the flip-phone where computers did computer things, video-games did game things, and phones did phone things. Isn't this an ironic wake-up call readers who are reading this post on your iPhones? Isn't it?

Yesterday I had the opportunity to go to one of our new properties called LTP which means something in Spanish that I have completely forgotten. Fortunately, the three people that I went with were all Mexican and only preferred to speak in Spanish so I got lots of practice. One of the chavos de la Programa Esperanza came with us so he and I worked together for the whole day and he only speaks Spanish so we got to talk about our películas y programas de la tele favoritas rather than our favorite movies and television shows. Unfortunately, he doesn't like ANY Star Wars nor ANY Batman and thinks they are both chafa which is Spanish for "cheap" which in my world means, "I hate you, your family, your ancestors, your face looks weird, you have bad taste in movies, people probably don't like to chill with you often, and everything that you have ever liked on Earth is poo poo (that's Spanish for poop)." Ergo, I discredit basically every Mexican movie he told me is awesome because he is OBVIOUSLY misled about que es que. But he DOES like "Walking Dead" and "Avatar: The Last Airbender" (TV show not movie) so all is not lost with this young soul.

I had been to one of the LTPs before but there are two properties right across the street from each other and I hadn't been to the one that we worked on very much yet and it was pretty eye-opening to what a punky, little, missionary organization can do. Seriously.

Over the course of     a certain number of     years we have literally built a new Casa Hogar for one of the homes that we work with to move in to. And this isn't all. Since I've been here alone we've put in underground conduit for electric and phone lines, welded fencing on a chicken coupe that will hold a crap ton of pollos (and yes, that IS a unit of measurement), and just kicked some trasero.

On the way home I once again thought of my homie DMX and starting taking pictures of what a normal side of the road looks like in Mexico and I think it may surprise some people....

And this was really close to the one of the more rural parts of Monterrey where people live in wood huts and cinder-block houses. The first time I came to Mexico I was expecting to see the B2B property as a concrete hut and desert wastelands in all directions but that's not really how it is.

Before I wrap up I just have to share this picture and say that we cut three more branches just like this down BY HAND with a saw.....just a saw, no adjectives needed.

And that I totally thrashed Gabriel "Gabo" Velasco in Wii Sports Bowling, Tennis, and Baseball.....and that I hope he reads this.

-N8