Christian Beckwith:
9: Christian Beckwith: Epilogue
Monday, February 9, 2009On Friday, February 6, Mike Miller received an email from El Presidente, Antonio Astiazaran Gutierrez, the mayor of Guaymas. “I… spoke with the CFE [the Comision Federal de Electricidad, Mexico’s state-owned electric monopoly] for the permit [to tie the solar panels on Fatima’s Vicente Guerrero de Guaymas Primary School to the grid], and they will help us with it,” wrote Gutierrez.
The Guaymas Project was done.
8: Christian Beckwith: The Orphanage
Friday, February 6, 2009
The project was finished. Though CFE’s permission was still in limbo, all we had to do was a bit more work on the website, and we were done.So why was I headed to an orphanage on Saturday morning when I could have been enjoying some well-earned rest?
I had barely finished my third cup of coffee when Jennie mentioned the day’s plan. The translator who had helped us at the school, an immense woman with triple chins and a beatific smile, also volunteered at a local orphanage. She had mentioned the orphanage to Jennie, who had immediately agreed to visit. Mati was already packing his cameras in preparation. My wife and I had been thinking of adopting, so I dutifully signed on, too.
Opposite the airport, a dirt road led toward the scrubby flanks of a convoluted hill. We followed it past a decrepit auto-repair building through flora I couldn’t name. Spiky trees bearing fruit that looked like giant wooden peapods leaned in over the road as we navigated the ruts.
After a mile we came to a wildly leaning barbed-wire fence held up by dead branches. Behind it lay a building with pink cement posts, Caribbean-green walls, and pink borders around the windows. Corrugated metal walls and a corrugated roof composed the second floor, which winked dully in the sun. A large pink cross on the wall faced the road.
We turned through a metal gate into the dirt driveway. “Casa Hogar,” read a sign. Beneath it, smaller words announced: “Hijos del Rey.”
An acne-faced teenager in jeans and a white t-shirt sat on the open porch, staring at his hands from beneath a brown Levi’s baseball cap. In the background, at the far end of the dirt parking lot, sat a squat, two-story house painted in pastels. Bars guarded the windows.
We parked in front of a wire fence. A Mexican woman of an indeterminate age stood waiting on the porch, her gray hair piled up into the beginnings of a beehive. “Hi,” she said, in English as good as my own. She was perhaps fifty-five, perhaps ten years older. “I’m Mrs. Navarro. Welcome.”
A young boy burst out of the screen door as Mrs. Navarro held it open for us. She rattled off something in Spanish, and he stopped and politely shook our hands.
Inside, a large room doubled as the living room and kitchen. Metal-legged tables, plastic chairs and an old blue couch comprised the majority of the furniture. The room was spotlessly clean. I asked to use the bathroom. It was spotless, too.
Jennie sat down beside the table and began speaking to Mrs. Navarro in Spanish. More children emerged: two teenage girls, whose English was as good as Mrs. Navarro’s, followed by a succession of boys, each younger than the next. She ruffled their heads lovingly as she directed them to greet us. Jennie caught the hand of the youngest and followed him back out to the porch.
“How many children are here?” I asked from the couch.
“Ten,” Mrs. Navarro said. Her eyes twinkled as if she were about to smile. “Four from the same family.”
“Where’d you learn your English?” I asked.
To my surprise Mrs. Navarro grabbed a chair and pulled it over to where I sat. I liked her instantly.
“Phoenix,” Mrs. Navarro. “Jessie, my husband, and I both grew up there. We were called by God to come here on a humanitarian mission… and this”—she swung her hand to encompass the room and the children, who seemed to be multiplying as we talked—“just sort of took off from there.”
Casa Hogar, Mrs. Navarro explained, was more accurately a foster home: when children were taken out of crisis situations by Desarrollo Familiar, Mexico’s children’s welfare organization, they often ended up in places like this.
“What’s up with the building in front?” I asked.
“It’s a medical building,” she said. “We invite doctors from the US and Canada to come down to do work for free. Right now, we’ve got two dentists from Seattle doing dental work. Do you want to see?”
We walked outside and across the lot to the other building.
Ten adults and a flurry of children were parceled out on the concrete porch, in the shade of the scrubby trees, on rickety metal chairs and their adobe-colored pads. Mrs. Navarro chirped out greetings to them in Spanish as we walked up to the porch.
Out of the open door emerged a woman with scrubs and glasses who carried a stainless steel bucket that sloshed with spit and blood. “There’s a hole over there,” Mrs. Navarro said, gesturing at a depression in the parking lot between a purple Grand Voyager and a Jeep with Arizona plates. The dentist walked into the flat noon light and dumped the bucket’s contents in the low spot.
I poked my head inside the building. A white plastic bucket beside the door held Amoxicillin packages, toothbrushes in plastic wrappers and Crest in travel-size containers. Black PVC pipes radiated out from a central array. Styrofoam blocks and fluorescent lights comprised the ceiling. Donated dental chairs were separated from the rest of the room by moveable cotton walls. A young boy lay prostate on one of the chairs.
“You’re from Seattle?” I asked the dentist as she walked back in.
“Tacoma,” she said from behind her mask, then—“Excuse me”—walked to the boy in the chair. A moment later I heard the sound of high-speed drilling. My tongue went to the gap in my mouth where a molar tooth had once been.
When we returned to the main house, Jennie was still on the porch, sliding colored beads onto string for necklaces with three little girls and one brown-faced little boy. The mother of the youngest girl, in an orange t-shirt and pink sweatpants, grabbed her daughter and pressed her lips against her cheek. She was hardly older than a girl herself.
The dentist’s teenage daughter came up to Mrs. Navarro. “My mom needs a magnifying glass,” she said.
“Do you want to come with me to my house while I get it?” Mrs. Navarro asked me.
We walked down a smaller dirt road toward her house. Banana trees, mango trees, and grape vines crowded her front yard. “We’ve got twelve kinds of fruit in our yard,” she said.
The house was locked. Inside, Mrs. Navarro scurried about, looking for the magnifying glass in a few promising places heaped with sundries: a small shelf beside the front door, a side table, an island next to the kitchen. Three fans hung from the ceiling, still in the January cool.
“Do you want a burrito?” Mrs. Navarro asked.
As she cooked, she told me about herself. She had been abused as a little girl by a relative, she said with surprising candidness, and her self-esteem had bottomed out. She and her husband had come down to Guaymas as part of a mission with their local church, but something had compelled them to stay. Though they had had no money, everything had worked out thus far: the construction of the buildings, the rearing of the children, the orchestration of free medical care for the people of Guaymas.
She paused. “Why are you here?” she asked.
“That’s a good question,” I laughed in response. When I’d left Jackson a week earlier, my car had been filled with rock shoes, ice tools, climbing ropes, skis and boots. I’d had no idea that three days later I’d need a sunhat and steel-toed shoes.
I told her about the Guaymas Project, about our efforts to salvage the defunct solar energy systems from San Carlos and repurpose them in Fatima, and about Greenscool’s mission to provide renewable energy to impoverished schools and educate the schoolchildren in the process.
“What touched you most about the project?” she asked when I finished.
I paused. The whole thing had occurred so quickly—from the decision to fly to Mexico to the immersion into the group to the late-night work on the website—that I’d had no real chance to reflect. But now, as I looked at Mrs. Navarro, a series of thoughts came to mind.
Apart from the project itself, our little team of budding humanitarians was united by a common love for adventure. Often, our journeys had taken us past places like Fatima as we traveled to remote peaks or wild rivers in the far reaches of the world. But rarely did we stop. Lord knows that in twenty years of climbing, this was the first time I had.
In a few days we would all be making our way back to the States. Jennie was flying home tomorrow; I was departing on Monday. The rest of the group—Mike and Mike, Khyber, Kina and Mati, and the three dogs, Deuce and Molly and Squirrel—would get back in the van a day or two later and begin the 2,000-mile drive home.
When I’d agreed to come down to Mexico, I’d thought that the children would affect me the most. I’d thought that being around them, mired in poverty, would break me wide open. I’d hoped that somehow mere proximity would rend the walls of my soul.
But it hadn’t really worked out like that.
I realized now that what had touched me most about the project was not the children, nor renewable energy, nor the poverty of the barrio, but Mrs. Navarro herself, right then, right there. Her, and people like Mark Mulligan and Terry Challis and the dentist from Tacoma, who had found a way to give something back to the world without thought for anything in return. Whether it was the children of Fatima or kids displaced by broken families or people without medical attention, there was an infinite number of good causes in the world. All you had to do was focus on one at a time.
Where are you going to place your heart, I asked myself, when the world needs so much love?
Mrs. Navarro watched me as I mulled it over.
“I guess it’s the people who find a way to make a difference,” I said.
She nodded, smiling.
We said goodbye to Mrs. Navarro and got into the rental car. The acne-faced teenager in the jeans and white t-shirt was still waiting for the dentist as we drove away.
7: Christian Beckwith: The Big Day
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Nothing like it had ever happened in the barrio before.
El Presidente, Antonio Astiazaran Gutierrez, the mayor of Guaymas, was coming to Fatima to commemorate the solar panel project. It was ten in the morning, and the schoolchildren whirred around the schoolyard like frenetic hummingbirds. Above them, the Mikes and Kina and Khyber hustled about on the roof, rushing to finish the installation before the entire school assembled to hear El Presidente speak.
Mike Chase, his right thumb wrapped in bright yellow electric tape, nicked marks in the roof with a carpenter’s pencil, then blasted a hole in the asphalt with his drill. A local man named Pedro moved behind him with slow precision. When Mike finished drilling, Pedro knelt onto the asphalt, inserted a long black rubber hose into the hole, then blew the thick dust out of it with a sharp puff of breath. When he was finished, Khyber wrestled another panel into place and bolted it to metal runners. Panel by panel, the strip of clean energy took form above the school.
I climbed down the rickety ladder and walked around the building to the center of the schoolyard, where the empty nests of the goalposts cast thin shadows against school’s blue walls. Mati had just finished an inverted pushup and was now walking on his hands while a gaggle of kids ran beside him, screaming. Kina leaned against a post, adjusting his camera, as half a dozen schoolgirls crowded around him to watch.
At the edge of the roof, Mike Miller stood with his cell phone to his ear, the ubiquitous pair of sunglasses clapped over his deep brown eyes. Mike had been calling, calling, trying to get CFE’s permission to tie the solar panel system into the grid, thus far without success. Given that he had yet to procure permission to tie the wind turbine to the grid, either, I was beginning to have my doubts about our chances. Was it possible the only real value of the solar panels would be symbolic?
Regardless of how it went with CFE, we were nearly done with our work. Thin puffs of clouds, the first we’d seen since our arrival, crossed the sky. Spotty bits of green dotted the rugged hills in the distance. Power towers stood at the confluence of hill and horizon. Down in the rocky, dusty schoolyard, the principal shielded her eyes against the mid-afternoon glare to watch as we finished the installation.
Jennie’s Spanish had flourished like an exotic plant in a sympathetic climate. The children adored her, as did the teachers, and as she gained confidence, she had surged ahead, grammatical errors be damned, breathing conviction into her spine. Appropriately, given the fact that no one else in our group spoke passable Spanish, she had been named Greenscool’s spokesperson for the commemoration ceremony, and now she went over her notes with the teachers in the computer lab.
Khyber and Mike were just finessing the final panels into place on the roof when the teachers began lining up the schoolchildren in a giant L. As reporters and television cameras positioned themselves—both media and local dignataries had arrived to witness the ceremony—a teacher of about forty blew into a microphone, testing the sound. Young girls in blue blouses and young boys in short-sleeved shirts snapped into order. Mike Chase had exchanged his Carhartts and baggy t-shirt for a button-down shirt and clean jeans, and he took his place next to Terry Challis, who had materialized to watch the proceedings.
Suddenly, there was a stir at the gate. El Presidente had arrived, and now his entourage guided him through the metal fence while the kids and the teachers applauded in unison.
The television cameras found their angles. El Presidente walked to the head of the line and, bent at the waist, gladhanded his way along it, tussling heads while the cameramen got their shots. Behind him lay the solar panels, aligned in a neat row on the roof.
The man blowing into the microphone began to speak. I focused, trying to discern words in Spanish, as he introduced Greenscool and then handed the microphone to Jennie.
Jennie began speaking. The children held rank as she outlined our goals in poised if broken Spanish. She swept her hand from one end of the L to the other, then gestured at individuals in the rows to make her points. Gone was the hesitant young idealist who had picked me up at the airport. In her place stood the confident teacher who had introduced the barrio to the concept of renewable energy.
When Jennie was finished, she yielded the microphone to El Presidente, who tapped it twice, then cleared his throat. In impeccable English, he thanked us for the project before turning to address the children and the cameras. I recognized simple words—“petroleum,” “sun,” “clean energy”—as he explained to them the value of the solar panels. Jennie looked on, her engagement so intense she could have been praying.
Mexico was just starting to explore green alternatives. The kids probably cared less about the fact that the energy was green than they did that there was electricity at all. But as I watched El Presidente speak, I remembered what Terry Challis had told me our first day in Fatima. “It will be the next generation who makes the difference,” she had said.
“This project is good,” El Presidente said into the microphone, “because above and beyond what it generates in electricity, it creates consciousness in the children.” The kids looked on, rapt; it was the first time someone as important as El Presidente had addressed them, and they didn’t miss a word. “The children are our future, and by providing them with clean, renewable energy, we are giving them a better Mexico.”
The cameras panned to the solar panels. The reporters scribbled notes on their pads. The children held their positions. As El Presidente spoke, our message went out, over their heads to all of Mexico.
While our work on the project was now complete—or would be, when Mike gained permission to tie the project to the grid—our work on the website continued.
It was seven p.m., and we had hours of uploading still ahead of us. In two days, Jennie would fly back to Flagstaff, and I’d depart for San Francisco. Conversation had already turned among the others toward the long drive home. Momentum was beginning to ebb, we were falling behind our goal of posting every day—and now Mike wanted us to drop what we were doing and go to dinner.
We had been invited to the home of one of the electricians who had helped us install the panels. “He’s cooking for us,” Mike said over our protestations. “He expects us all there. Plus, he’s got wi-fi. We can upload from his house as we eat.”
The electrician, whose name was Servando, lived in a nice part of Guaymas. Jennie drove, navigating the narrow, cobbled streets. As we moved deeper into the city, the housefronts grew more elaborate, and the black metal grills on the windows became ornate. We could have been in Spain.
“That’s it,” said Mike, when our lights flashed on a numbered gate. We stumbled out of the van, frazzled, and followed him to a door that swung inward to a large, open foyer. My eyes went to the back wall, where a neon sign advertised Tecate. An industrial-size grill sat behind an island covered in dishes of food. Massive speakers stood against the side of the grill. A table covered in linen lay in the open courtyard, clean and spacious and immaculately presented. Was this someone’s house, or a nightclub?
Servando came out to greet us, and now I recognized him from the school. He introduced his wife, who wore a dress as blue as the Sonoran sky. Servando’s father stood behind her, smiling. Their children, two young boys and a girl, shyly introduced themselves with the Guaymas handshake: open palms sliding over ours, followed by a fist bump.
Mike walked back to the grill with Servando, where he busied himself with small talk. I looked at Kina.
“What’s the password?” I asked, flipping open my laptop.
“I don’t know,” Kina said. He’d been shooting hundreds of stills a day, laughing, solemn, confident, beautiful compositions that revealed the project from the schoolchildren’s perspective. Now, his black eyes carried a shadow of exhaustion. This would be the fourth night in a row of late nights, and it didn’t look like we’d finish any earlier than we had the night before. “Man, this is crazy. We’ve been working every night, and we’re still falling behind. We gotta get this done.”
The speakers vibrated with music. Servando’s father handed me a beer.
“I’m sorry we have to keep working,” I said to him.
He smiled kindly. “Don’t worry,” he said in English. “You’re doing good work.”
Servando flipped thin strips of carne asada on the grill. His oldest son ran up and hugged his leg, but he brushed him away, laughing, and turned back to his conversation with Mike.
Jennie caught the boy’s hand and leaned over to hear him speak. He guided her through a side door and they disappeared.
A moment later, Jennie burst back into the room.
“We’re on TV! We’re on TV!”
Kina and I exchanged quick glances, then crowded into the room beside the others. There, on a television set perched up in a corner of the room, was El Presidente, addressing Fatima’s Vicente Guerrero de Guaymas Primary School. He spoke with compassion and concern about the future of the children and the future of Mexico’s energy sources. The cameras swept to the asphalt roof. Above the broken courtyard lay the solar panels for all the audience to see.
Earlier that day, after the ceremony, Mike had disappeared. When I’d found him in the courtyard, his eyes had been red.
“What’s wrong?” I’d asked.
“I just balled my eyes out,” he’d said. “The emotions are so intense.”
Now I watched him as he witnessed his project unfolding on Mexican television. His dream of installing renewable energy sources and educating children in impoverished schools around the world had just taken its first step.