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Since it is midterms and everyone is stressed, I thought I would post this week and try to keep the lively conversation going that started in seminar this morning. What I am posting here is an essay I wrote for a contest last year (it didn't win). The prompt was "When was the moment you became a grown-up?" The essay that follows reflects on the experience I shared with you this morning about my summer in Mexico. So in some ways it is about structural violence and how an individual interfaces with social forces. In some ways it is about how a 19-year-old compulsive "helper" reacts to situations very much like those described by Professor Stein this morning during our role-playing exercise. It is also about trying to decide what to do with your life when you only semi-know who you are. Please feel free to respond to it on any of those levels or to keep talking about what we were talking about this morning: how your own style/sense of self works with or against the culture of your agency.

AMIGOS

I was leaning against a gnarled tree trunk, inches away from a half-constructed latrine and what seemed like a million miles away from my Ohio home. As I drifted in and out of an amoeba-induced stupor, sun-encircled silhouettes of Mexican villagers wandered by to check on la chica who had come from so far away to build latrines, educate them about the disease cycle, and pass out toothbrushes.

Full of bright-eyed idealism and very little Spanish, I arrived in Mexico three weeks earlier with my shiny copy of Donde No Hay Doctor and a vague notion that I needed to befriend someone with a donkey (concrete being very heavy). While I must have looked ridiculous to my hosts – my look in those days, not to mention my worldview, was heavily influenced by “Out of Africa” and first-wave Banana Republic -- it seemed only natural for me to be there. I had always been very idealistic, from canvassing my conservative Cincinnati playground for Carter to spending my spring breaks building playgrounds for kids in the hollers of Appalachia.

When my younger partners first entered the two-room house where we would spend the next six weeks, they chuckled at the Pepto-pink wall paint and the picture of the Last Supper duct-taped above the table. As the veteran work-camper, and relative old lady at age 19, I sanctimoniously reminded them of the generosity of our hosts in moving their ten-person family into one room so we could have the other. We did not have to share their decorating tastes, we just had to build them some latrines. My partners looked both chastened and irritated; I dropped iodine into my canteen, unrolled my sleeping bag and went to find a man with a donkey.

While doing volunteer work in a Mexican village was consistent with childhood dreams, it was also a key step in my adult plan to do diplomatic work overseas. I was planning on majoring in Soviet Studies, to help those folks turn their swords into ploughshares. My complete inability to learn Russian or Economics during my freshman year of college disappeared in the bright light of my desire to save the world and my fantastic British-empire-meets-army-surplus wardrobe. And now, even as I faced resistance from the villagers – latrines would get half built and everyone would continue to use the same places not the “requisite distance from the water source” (Donde No Hay Doctor) – I was undaunted.

Until I was undone by a popsicle at a soccer game. While I religiously treated my drinking water, at 19 I could still have my head turned by the ice cream truck and never thought for a moment what popsicles are made of. After about a week of racing from that pink room to the half-latrine, I decided abjectly to camp out under the nearby tree.

As I shifted my rapidly-decreasing weight off the trunk, a villager stepped out of the sun and into view. It was my man with the donkey, who had been delivering bags of concrete to latrine sites for us. He sat down next to me and asked “mala es stomacha?” I nodded. He nodded back and said sympathetically, “Same thing happened to me in Detroit.”

While it could have been the amoebas, or the sound of a latrine caving in (let’s face it, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing), I felt as if I was suddenly aware of a shell, forged by countless volunteer hours, church pot-lucks and illusions of how the world worked, cracking open. In a kind of reverse birth, my adult self emerged from it, sticky, disoriented and asking questions. Was this generous donkey man just like me: someone who, in the course of his life journey, found himself far away from home, drinking from a hostile water supply and falling ill? Or was the point that he was nothing like me – he was a failed migrant worker with no safety nets while I would soon go home to excellent healthcare, a supportive family and a college education? And which one would have made me more comfortable? Why was I here? Are single acts of community service dwarfed by structural inequities of wealth, health, and national boundaries? And, now that I had gotten started, what was the point of help, really, when you were welcome to hand out toothbrushes to folks with pretty good teeth (beans and tortillas 3x a day were clearly better for the teeth than my childhood diet of cherry Icees and Pop Rocks) but were barred from even mentioning birth control to people whose living conditions were limited by the enormous families and near-continuous pregnancy of the women? I started to feel mentally incontinent, as well.

My last few weeks in the village were spent drinking Coke at la tienda (a big Donde No Hay no no) and watching “Dallas” on its sad little black and white tv, taking my host family out to dinner in a stupidly extravagant restaurant in town (what did it matter that they could have better used the money? I was a full time citizen of the grey area now, man!), and wryly observing just what aspects of American culture seemed to make it down here (“Dallas”) and what didn’t (bathrooms).

The last 22 years have been about both learning the deep implications of that lesson underneath the tree -- and unlearning them. One of the last pieces of mail I received in Mexico was my freshman year report card. Reading of my miserable grades in Russian and Economics and my A in classical literature, all while under that tree, seemed like an omen and put me on the fast track to English graduate school and away from diplomatic service. I didn’t leave the Ivory tower for 13 years, becoming an expert in turning B+ students into A- ones at colleges favored by the upper-middle classes. I have returned to Mexico only once since then – to Club Med in Cancun, the spring break trip I had never had as a do-gooder teen.

I am a teacher, not a Wall Street executive, so I must have retained some idealism. A few pieces of shell never did get shaken off. But I decidedly stepped off my childhood path of working concretely for social justice. In many ways, life conspired to conceal this as a choice. I stayed in school, got married, had kids, moved for my husband’s jobs and he for mine. The balancing act of teaching and family felt plenty like volunteer work and I didn’t think too hard about the road not taken (or the latrines not built). Until we moved for my husband’s job once again and I went from a cushy private school teaching the cream of the parochial school crop (still couldn’t talk about birth control there, either) to teaching at an urban public school, full of underserved, first-generation college students, many of whom speak English about as well as I spoke Spanish (not to mention Russian).

The first year was about as unsettling as those weeks beneath the tree. All my years of teaching had not remotely prepared me to teach these particular students. My courses in Victorian literature were probably about as useful as those half-built latrines. But over the past couple years, hunched over stacks of papers written in Spanglish or in meetings with students who were trying to imagine a life far from the villages of their parents, I have heard the familiar cracking sound. While it could have been my aging back or the sound of my sons breaking something in the next room, I think it was a shell. This shell, forged from years of arcane academic discourse, self-sufficient students, and exquisitely landscaped campuses, was, too, falling away. Emerging, sticky but newly oriented, is another adult self. This one bears somewhat of a resemblance (alas, not physically) to that idealistic teenager, who knows what she did not – that we live in a tangled world – but remembers what she did -- that we can make that world a better place one act at a time.