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Parras de la Fuente Printable Version PRINTABLE VERSION
by ElizabethTilden, United States Aug 5, 2005
Culture   Short Stories
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Parras de la Fuente For the past eleven weeks I have been a participant in the first Humboldt State University summer immersion program to Parras in Coahuila, Mexico. As it comes to an end tomorrow it's a good time to reflect on this experience. Outside of my room right now there's a Mexican woman who has lived in Parras all her life. Before this summer, she didn’t even know I existed, yet now every morning she makes me fresh orange juice and has taken me in as one of her own: feeding me and doing my laundry, helping me with my Spanish and inquiring about my day. Now, she wonders when I'll be back. From the beginning, my Mexican family, the Torres, have been patient with my Spanish and have made me feel completely welcome and at home. And I am not alone in this feeling; I know that for the other twenty-one HSU students leaving in the next week, there will be many sad farewells.

The first time I heard about this program I knew it was something that would be good for me as it combined two subjects that I wanted to know more about. My exposure to appropriate technology was incredibly limited and I had wanted to learn Spanish since my first family vacation to Puerto Vallarta six years ago. This experience of being isolated in a small town in the middle of the desert where the only people who can speak your language, know your lifestyle and are your “color” are those twenty-one other students that came with you causes uniquely strong and rapidly-formed relationships. Generally, I don't like meeting people. I love knowing people, I just don't like those first phases-- probably because I think I make a terrible first impression: quiet, shy, reserved--all things I'm perceived as. I come from a small town myself, a Yupik Eskimo village in rural Alaska, so this feeling of being an “outsider” is familiar to me. But here in Parras, we were thrown together in this strange situation where we ALL felt like “outsiders,” so it was natural that we quickly became close to each other- what a wonderful relief!

As I mentioned before, when I arrived in Parras I knew very little about appropriate technology, although even this was considerably more than I knew when I left Alaska, two years before. I became much more aware of my impact on earth when I moved to Arcata, California in August of 2003 for my freshman year of college. Not only did it open my eyes to the fact that the world has a lot more people in it that I had ever conceived of (I grew up in a town of 2,700), but also that most of these people, along with myself, are participating in a system that is exploiting the world and its resources to continue the capitalistic cycle of consumptive consumerism. Last spring in my Natural Resource Conservation class I learned more about the strain we put on the earth. The population of the earth going into the 20th century was 1.6 billion and the population at the end of the century was 6.1 billion. In this blink of time in the spectrum of human existence, we have exponentially grown -- no wonder we're burdened with the current situation of waste and exploitation of resources. This population explosion has led us to the necessity of finding alternatives for energy and other resources, which is why I've spent my summer in Parras, a town that still builds with adobe, studying about appropriate technology.

In these past two months we have covered a lot. We read about Gaviotas, a place in Colombia that has integrated the concepts of appropriate technology into the reality of everyday life. We each had to do a project, which ranged from building a passive solar pool heating system to organic gardening with girls at an orphanage. Under the instruction of a local man who has been building with adobe for the past thirty years, we made adobe bricks and then went back and constructed a wall with those bricks.

Some things, I know will put a smile on my face long after we've left the desert heat of Parras. I'll remember helping Francisco, my Spanish professor and trip collaborator (not to mention one of the kindest people I know) by holding his hand as we crossed a rickety three hundred year old bridge. Other unforgettable moments include feeling intoxicated after a thirteen dollar buffet in Saltillo, the food wasn't that great but the company was unbeatable; a trip with both Humboldt students and Mexican students to Cuatro Ciénegas, a desert nature reserve with warm water lakes, where we camped for one night. That night I lay surrounded by bathtub warm water as, starting with Venus, the desert sky turned spectacular with the most vivid views of the stars and milky way that I've ever seen; delirious laughter with Katie when adobe brick making crossed the line from learning the components to manual labor; Jeff's random, hilarious and usually inappropriate questions eg “Como se dice (I'll return when your daughter's eighteen) en espanol?; Club Parras, which is what we called ourselves when the group would break into twelve minute abs, random running or pull-up contests; the estanque de la luz-the lush aqua blue half lake, half pool that I spent most free moments perfecting my newly acquired swimming skills; and the look on mi padre's face when he'd start to tell me something about Parras, a place he clearly loves.





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