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 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.
6: Christian Beckwith: Swimming with Dolphins
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
I’d always wanted to swim with dolphins.
Our second day in town, we’d seen them from the deck of Charley’s Rock, a San Carlos restaurant with a thatched roof and pale orange walls and an open patio on the second floor from which you could hit golf balls into the bay. We’d finished off fish tacos while pelicans dive-bombed the water.
Suddenly, a different movement had caught my attention. It was a dolphin, breaching.
Jennie’s voice had broken with delight. “There they are!” she’d said. The dolphin’s back and fin had glittered in the sun. Another fin had appeared, then a smaller one, moving smoothly through the water.
You could swim with the dolphins here in San Carlos. You could snorkel with whale sharks, scuba dive with sea lions, fish for marlin, mountain bike the tumbling hills. You might even be able to wander out to those red ribbed walls I’d seen my first day in town and climb. Ordinarily, that’s what our group of adventure athletes would have loved to do.
Adventure athletes: men and women who engage in pursuits that contain an element of risk. Pursuits like ski mountaineering. Whitewater kayaking. Alpine climbing. Things where, if you screw up, you could die.
Kina had skied big lines in the Tetons for years; on many of them, if you failed to make the right turn at the right time, you would fall for a thousand feet, pinballing between the rocky walls of the couloir until you ragdolled out the bottom. Khyber began running Class V rapids in his early teens; deadfall, often lurking just below the river’s surface, could hold you under until you drowned. I climbed in the Tetons, in Alaska, in Scotland and Kyrgyzstan and Peru, where avalanches, rockfall and inclement weather were an inherent part of any ascent.
We’d all lost friends doing what we loved to do, but every season we were back, staring over the tips of our skis at the narrowing funnel below us, finding the balance in the kayak just before the thirty-foot drop, swinging our ice tools into thin brittle ice that creaked in the twenty-below cold, the endorphins bubbling up right below our sternums. The sports we did were dangerous, and they were addictive. We’d built our careers and families and lives around such experiences, and we always sought out new ones that could produce them as well. I would have loved to kayak the serrated coast, to hike up to those cliffs on the hills around Guaymas and find out if they were climbable, or simply to dive into the sparkling sea and paddle as hard as I could for the dolphins.
But Mark Mulligan was addressing the San Carlos Men’s Club Thursday morning, so Kina and Mati and I drove to hear him speak instead.
The San Carlos Men’s Club met in a cafe across the street from the Marina Terra hotel. We ditched the car alongside the broken cobble and, guided by signs in English, walked upstairs to a low-ceilinged room on the second floor.
Fifteen or twenty men, most of them in their sixties, gathered around the L of a table. Sunlight splashed in through the windows, illuminating their tans. I had expected all Americans, but four Mexicans sat at the table as well.
We were directed to the president of the club, Mel Klein.
“Why’s Mark here to talk to you?” I asked.
“Every other week our group gets together,” Mel said. He wore a green golfer’s hat and a Hawaiian shirt; like most of the men in the room, he was in his late sixties. “We try to bring people we think are interesting to talk. Mark plays a lot of music around here, and he’s been mentioning Castaway Kids in his shows, so I asked him to come to tell us more about it.”
Mark was leaning over in conversation with a bald septuagenarian who wore large, rose-tinted glasses and looked like a retired B-Movie producer from Palm Springs.
Mark was five-ten, with close-cropped gray hair and a healthy tan. He was fifty and rested; he also looked as if he would have been more comfortable in a Hawaiian shirt than in the short-sleeve button up he wore. Part of the shirt poked up from his belt, untucked and askance, as he talked to the producer.
Mark slowly made his way to the front of the room, introducing himself as he moved. Then, he began speaking about his group.
The roots of Castaway Kids had started with Mark’s early years in the barrio, when he had been a missionary teacher, and solidified with his marriage of seven years to his wife, Adela, a Fatima local. When Adela died in a car accident, she left him two sons, Marcos, seven, and Luis, three.
“Castaway Kids provides money, food, and care to the children of Guaymas,” Mark said. He had the easy, conversational tone of a singer who was comfortable in front of an audience. I wondered how much the organization helped alleviate the grief of his wife’s death. “Our goal is for these children and their families to become self-supporting so that they can assist other families like them.”
Mark continued to describe the group’s efforts. A month earlier, they had orchestrated the purchase of a home outside the barrio for a family whose shack had been swept away in a flash flood. At Christmas, they had taken some of the barrio children and thrown them a Christmas party, complete with presents.
In 2007, Mark had organized the building of a park in Fatima for the barrio children; Adela’s family still lived in a home across the street. At the pointy end of the park—a triangle-shaped slab of concrete with a couple of blue and yellow swingsets, monkey bars and two barrels welded together for the kids to crawl through—stood a rectangular memorial. It was for Mark’s wife; the barrio residents had erected it on his behalf without his knowledge, and unveiled it at the opening ceremony.
I looked around. The retirees of the San Carlos Men’s Club listened attentively as he spoke.
Next to me sat a tall, friendly American who looked to be in his early sixties. What did he think of Mark and his Castaway Kids? “They’re doing good work,” he said. And why was he here at the meeting? He smiled gently. “I want to give something back.”
I thought about Terry Challis, the woman from Arizona we’d met our first day in the barrio. She had impressed me with her pragmatic understanding of the children’s needs. She didn’t seek to put anyone through college; the scholarship fund she had helped to start simply covered the costs of secondary school for the children who might otherwise not go.
David Keilholtz, the husband of our translator, Rosa, had similar, modest goals. He had assisted in the construction of the park across from Adela’s family’s home, and he’d helped families in the barrio to build small cement-block houses where before they’d had nothing.
In addition to the eighteen-hole golf course where Mike Chase’s house was located, San Carlos featured tennis courts, bowling lanes and two marinas. Above the harbor, houses with a Mediterranean accent ringed the hill in tight, hierarchical rows. There were restaurants featuring seafood, Sonoran beef, Mexican dishes and American cuisine.
I could almost imagine the life of the retiree here: snorkeling among the parrot fish, sailing the desert coast, fishing for yellowfin tuna, the hills tumbling, tumbling, tumbling toward the sea. You could relax in comfort and never even notice the barrio. Which is what I’d been sure most of the retirees did.
“If we get some downtime, I want to go kite surfing,” Mike had said the day before. He’d been talking about kite surfing in Guaymas since he’d first told me about the project, months earlier; the bay was expansive, and the winds came rushing down the hills across the surface of the water. “You should try it,” Mike said. “You’d like it.”
He was probably right. I’d probably like the kayaking, too: for years, I’d heard stories about NOLS courses that came down to the Gulf of California and explored its mysteries by boat. In fact, there seemed almost limitless things we could have been doing that would have been a blast. But such things were secondary to getting the panels on the school’s roof.
For a moment, I thought I understood something that had been in the back of my mind since the trip had begun. Mark, Terry, David and the other volunteers could have been golfing, fishing, sailing, doing whatever you do when you’re a gringo retiree in Mexico. And they probably did do them, most of the time. But they also had their projects, and they kept chipping away at them, bit by bit.
When we’d arrived in San Carlos I’d had a certain skepticism about what we’d be able to do with The Guaymas Project. Any solar power we brought to the school would be minimal, if we could get permission to tie it to the grid at all, and I wasn’t sure our lessons would have much of an effect on the children, either. Plus, we’d be in and out of there in a week—hardly enough time to make any real impact.
Terry had been handing out scholarship applications at the Fatima school the day we met. She had given me one. A line in particular had jumped out at me. “We can change the world,” it read, “one child at a time.”
I’d thought it horribly naive at the time. Now I wasn’t sure.
On the way back to town, we drove in silence. I looked for the dolphins as we passed the bay, but they were nowhere to be seen.
5: Christian Beckwith: Progress
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Jennie Gershater is a petite woman of thirty-two with riveting brown eyes, a pert nose and an athlete’s lithe body. The fact that she had joined a group of five hard-charging men in Flagstaff and driven to Mexico in a fetid van with three dogs, multiple video cameras and a hoola hoop spoke to her fortitude. But she was also a spiritually conscious graduate of Naropa University from the politically, environmentally, and socially correct town of Boulder, Colorado, who didn’t drink and couldn’t quote Borat. I had no doubt she’d be able to handle the barrio. But could she handle us?
When we got to the Palacio on Monday, Mike had taken me aside. “Jennie lost it, right before you got here. Just burst out crying in the van.”
“What for?”
“’Cause we weren’t wearing our seatbelts. Her cousin died in a car accident a few years ago because he wasn’t wearing his. Dude, she freaked.”
“I’m not sure how this will go,” Jennie confided to me on Wednesday morning. We were driving to the barrio, where she and her brother were scheduled to teach the children about the panels twice that day. Mati sat in the back seat without speaking. “My Spanish isn’t very good,” she continued. “And I’m shy.”
Jennie and Mati were our education specialists. Mati taught children about the environment with what he called “enviro-tainment camps,” while Jennie had finished her Master’s in May.
“In what?” I asked.
“It was a dual concentration in dance/movement therapy and body psychotherapy,” she said. “Technically, my focus is community-based somatic counseling and psychology.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. Naropa, psychosomatic therapy, community-based movement, enviro-tainment: this brother-sister duo approached things differently than I did. But Mati had been charismatic with the children yesterday, and Jennie, even if she didn’t party with us, sure smelled good. Plus, she would make a great designated driver.
Jennie and Mati had expected a couple of dozen schoolchildren for their lessons. There were eighty in the first class alone.
The vast steel roof above the cement floor of the central schoolyard served a single purpose: to provide shade for the kids. It was the middle of January, and perhaps 75°, but in the direct sunlight it felt warmer. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like in September. “Imagine 110° with 95% humidity,” a local had told me the day before.
The teachers corralled the students into a broad U beneath the roof. Boys gathered in gender-specific clumps; girls did the same. Many of the boys had product in their hair that inverted their cowlicks. The girls giggled and whispered to one another as they settled into place.
The faces watching as Mati set up a solar panel were typically Mexican—black or brown hair, brown skin and brown eyes—with few exceptions. One young girl had strawberry blond hair and blue eyes. Another had big pouty lips and a concentrated expression that broke apart radiantly when she smiled. A boy of perhaps eight watched the proceedings with blue eyes, his wool-knit hat pulled low over fair features. He could have been an American from the ‘hood.
In fact, in their t-shirts and sweatshirts, dresses and blouses, sneakers and jeans, the kids could have been from anywhere. It was easy to forget the context of their lives… until you walked back outside, into the barrio.
When the teachers had successfully herded the children into order, Jennie began talking in Spanish. She spoke tentatively at first, watching the translator for corrections. As she talked, Mati began jumping around the semi-circle, acting out concepts—the sun, the wind, electricity, light—and encouraging the children to mimic his behavior. When he had made a complete tour of the semi-circle, he returned to the front, where Khyber helped him hook a small black electric fan to the positive and negative wires of the panel. It began instantly to spin.
The children were riveted. Gone was the squirming and jostling that had characterized their assembly, replaced by concentrated faces. A chubby boy in a red sweater stood up and asked a question, his face focused in thought, the color of his sweater standing out in marked contrast with the blue walls behind him. The girl with the pouty lips swiveled to watch Jennie’s answer.
Jennie’s Spanish seemed to move deeper into her body with each passing breath. She gesticulated, finding individual children in the sea of faces and coaxing answers from them. Mati did a quick run around the circle, slapping hands in exuberance. The kids cheered.
Twenty minutes passed, then thirty. The children of Fatima’s Vicente Guerrero de Guaymas Primary School were engaged.
Mike Chase stood in the yard when we returned home in baggy Carhartts and a loose t-shirt. He’d spent much of the day putting together the panels with a power drill and bolts. That assembly had gone well, but another problem remained. The Comision Federal de Electricidad—the Federal Electricity Commission, or CFE—didn’t want us to tie our solar panel systems into the grid.
The CFE, Mexico’s state-owned electric monopoly, controls and develops the national electric industry, and they didn’t seem particularly sympathetic to renewable energy in general and our project in particular. Despite his best efforts, Mike still hadn’t gained permission to connect the wind turbine to the grid; the negotiations necessary to connect the solar panels were perhaps more formidable yet. We had the advantage of El Presidente’s support, but even El Presidente lacked the power to dictate demands to one of the most powerful state-owned companies in Mexico.
What if we couldn’t get permission? Would it be possible to call the project a success if the solar panels weren’t actually producing any usable energy?
Mike was on his cell phone, talking, talking. It was what he did best, but even he was up against distressingly deep layers of bureaucracy.
Late that night, for the second evening in a row, we settled in front of our computers.
The Guaymas Project was a trial run for Greenscool; provided it went well, more ambitious initiatives in more remote areas were to follow. Without media outreach, though, the chances of raising funding for future projects were nil.
We’d committed to posting video, blogs and photos about the project every day. Now reality set in: such work would need to be executed once the panels were installed and the teaching completed and meetings with municipal authorities wrapped up. We were looking at another long night.
Though I’d published and produced extensively in the past, I’d never attempted anything like this from the field. As I watched Mike shift the components of the home page for the seventh time, I was shocked at how easily it could be done. He was using iWeb, an inexpensive Apple product. It’s not the sort of program you’d want to use to run a professional website, but for M.A.S.H.-unit type dispatches such as ours, it was ideal. We could create new pages in minutes and post them with the click of a button. This was guerilla broadcasting with an edge.
Kina sat over his computer in the main room, editing his photographic take from the day. Images scrolled across the screen: an eight-year-old girl, her expression achingly distant, peered at the camera from behind a whitewashed column. A single hand, fingers covered in warts, grasped a wire fence. The paint of a Coca-Cola mural peeled from a bright red wall. What had been, hours earlier, part of Guaymas was now snatched from that moment and shifted into ours.
Mati sat in front of his monitor, moving panels of video from the hard drive into a streaming montage. Kina had pulled together last night’s clip in iMovie, but now Mati used the more sophisticated Final Cut Pro to create a three-minute representation of the journey down to Guaymas. A waving hand went white on the monitor, then focused back in on the Border Patrol truck in front of the van. Mike sat in the front seat, relating the details of the bribe he had just been forced to pay to get the backup panels into the country. Mati laid in a track by Michael Franti; before long, everyone in the room was humming the refrain.
I wrote. Before my company’s collapse in October, I’d edited a climbing magazine, but although I’d spent the past fifteen years laboring over the sentences and narrative arc of alpinists and their adventures, now I was the one telling a story. The concentration necessary to create a single sentence was so intense I hardly heard the music playing from Kina’s computer.
Mike walked from person to person, checking progress, a cigarette in one hand, a Tecate in the other. “You done yet?” he asked me.
I swam up out of an ocean of words. “No,” I grunted. “Getting there.” Then down again, into the depths of the page.
Mike Chase leaned in over Mati’s shoulder.
“You know, I’ve never liked those Suzanne Summers-type shots of impoverished children. Too much of a bummer. You need to get the kids smiling in there or nobody will be interested.”
Kina and Mike looked at one another, then looked at me. Mr. Chase, jovial bear, was absolutely right.
It was if we had all plugged into the same power source. The synthesis of our individual creativity into a greater whole was electric.
It was nearly midnight when we finished. With no internet at the house, we drove back to the cafe. Closed.
“Hey, look,” said Kina. “The bar above it is open.”
Mike and I bumped fists, laughing. Atop the cafe, the wi-fi connection was perfect. The Jack and Sprites weren’t bad, either.
1 a.m. Home. I lay down on the couch cushions that comprised my bed and closed my eyes. Visions of the day—Jennie straightening her spine as she spoke, Kina focusing his lens on a leaping girl, words metastasizing on the screen in front of me—tumbled through my head. It seemed like hours before I dreamed.