Learning to See Baja - September 2004
Somehow what I was seeing didn’t live up to my romantic images of Baja.
Growing up in Ohio, I had always pictured myself, one day, driving down the peninsula in a gritty old convertible, Jack Kerouac-like, with a bag of tacos on the passenger seat and a surfboard sticking up from the back seat. But, much of that had already dissolved along the way during this, my first trip into Baja.
Instead, I was riding bitch in a ‘96 Toyota Camry and we weren’t flying down some coastal highway. We were bumping along in a dusty junkyard, on our way to an impoverished village where we’d come to help build a schoolhouse.
Granted, I had come to work in an impoverished village, so I had already lowered my expectations about what I would see. What I wasn’t prepared for was how empty I would feel once I got there.
Flies swarmed everywhere. The smell of trash and sewage choked me when I inhaled it, along with the hot desert air, into my lungs. Behind the old schoolhouse yawned a dirt pit, over ten feet deep. The children were running around the edge of the pit trying to push each other in. This was their playground.
We had to transport the wood for the building from the fenced-in house of a man who had the wood and supplies in the care of his pit bulls. It took us almost twice as long to move it because the children wanted to "help" us. They were adorable, though, so we let them. I worked until lunch time and then I decided to take a break and play with the kids.
Between working on the schoolhouse and getting my ass kicked at soccer when I played with the children, I found myself thinking about the problems the people faced here and I self-indulgently considered what I could do to save this part of the world.
I’d learned a few days before that he families who lived in the village were mostly Triqui. The Triqui are a group of native Mexicans, originally from Oaxaca. They still speak their native language and many of them don't speak Spanish at all. This makes it difficult for them to get anything other than low-paying farms jobs. The families that rely on these types of jobs, the native Mexicans who can't get jobs in other parts of Mexican society, move north and many attempt to cross the Mexico-U.S. border. Part of the reason we were there was to build another schoolhouse so their kids could learn Spanish and get better paying jobs.
When I woke up the next morning, it took me a few minutes to remember where I was. I felt like I was in summer camp again, waking up in a roughshod cabin of plywood and two by fours. I shook my work boots out to make sure there weren't any Brown Recluse spiders napping under my shoelaces - their bite causes a necrotic wound, eventually fatal. I walked outside and I looked around at the valley that housed our barracks. In the morning, before it became hot, the surrounding countryside was actually quite beautiful. It seemed strange to me that I had woken up in a third world country, when a relatively short drive north would take us back to one of the wealthiest cities in the world.
The coast was less than two miles west of the village. The children living there had no idea that they lived near a beach, nor did they even know that the ocean was literally in their backyard. It was a symbol to me of how little opportunity they had to explore the world and enjoy their childhood. They were working almost all the time. Even so, they were always laughing, playing games whenever they could, and generally seemed pretty good at being kids. This improved me mood a little bit as I watched them play. It seems that no matter how bad a place is, if the kids are laughing and playing, then it really isn’t so bad.
On our third and final day, I sat on the bumper of our car, gulping down water from my nalgene bottle. I had only been there for a few days, but it already felt like weeks. I held a little girl in my lap, and I listened quietly as she babbled on to me in Spanish. I had no idea what she was saying and it didn't really matter because it seemed that she felt safe with me.
I realized at that moment, as I sat on the bumper of that car and looked out at the valley, that the more time I spend in a place; my eyes tend to seek out beauty instead of desolation. Maybe it's a survival mechanism. I've done this ever since I was a little kid - I can't stand being in a place that is ugly, boring, or uninspiring. If it is, I will find ways, even if only in my mind to make it appealing. Just like night vision goggles use any available light to aid vision, I use any source of beauty, no matter how seemingly insignificant, to make a place seem better. I'm a romantic, and if I can find a way around it, I am quite happy to ignore the messy details of reality to form an appealing vision of my own. Maybe the people living here did this too. We all have to find ways to survive and keep our spirits alive. Even in the worst conditions, there is almost always something worth our attention.
When we first drove into town, all I could see was the trash and the squalor and the ugly shacks and the sick dogs. But today, my eyes naturally scanned for the green fields, brooding mountains in the distance, open expanses, and the bright eyes and white teeth of the children we visited. I no longer saw the poverty and the desolation. I saw the happy children help us paint the schoolhouse salmon pink. I smiled when the pretty schoolteacher began teaching in the new building. My chest was tight when all of the families waved to us as we drove away. I didn't want to leave the village anymore. It was beautiful.
All Images & Content Copyright Ray Grieselhuber 2003-2005