At 61, Canadian woman goes back to school in Mexico
A few years ago, I joined the Grade 6 class of a rural school in the Mexican state of Nayarit
My fellow students at El Colegio Patria, 11 and 12 year old Mexican kids, soon realized that although I talked funny, I knew a thing or two. When the teacher announced we were working in groups, all hands shot up. “Dayán! Dayán! We want Dayán.” Diane becomes Dee-ah-en-eh in Spanish, so to simplify things I became Dayán.
I went to the school because I wanted to improve my Spanish, which clearly wasn’t going to happen if I hung out with fellow gringos on the beach of Chacala, the small fishing village on Mexico’s Riviera Nayarit where I was staying. Chacala sits on a picturesque bay about an hour and a half north of Puerto Vallarta, and restaurants line a sandy sweep of beach. The trouble with Mexican coastal towns is that they are gorgeous and life is easy and it’s pretty tough to avoid drinking margaritas under a palapa talking to fellow snowbirds, most of whom have interesting stories to tell. Nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to learn Spanish and that project was stalled.
What better place to learn a language than in a classroom? I’d given the village 1-room school in Chacala a shot, and I’d learned something, but now I was ready for a bigger challenge. It’s a curiosity of Mexico, easily explained, that if you go even 2 kilometres inland from the coast, the opportunity for margaritas drops off significantly. I went 10, to the town of Las Varas, and I found my school. In Canada, I wouldn’t have made it past the door, most certainly not without a security check, but in Mexico all I had to do was ask: Could I spend a couple of hours a day at the school? Say a few times a week? By the afternoon, I was sitting in a brick-walled classroom with a bunch of new friends.
On the day I joined Grade 6, I entered the class just as the teacher, Maestra Rosa, had the students taking dictation. She stopped long enough to shoo one boy from his desk, and I sat down and opened my notebook. As the teacher read the next sentence aloud, two boys dragged their desks closer to mine and began to point out my spelling mistakes. Nico, Julian, Dayán — we whispered back and forth, introducing ourselves. When I got stuck, Nico and Juli leafed through their texts to search for the words I didn’t know. The student I’d displaced sat on the floor with a couple of other kids, writing in their laps. Why were there other kids on the floor? I glanced around the room — not enough desks for all.
After about twenty minutes, it dawned on me that we were writing out the questions of an exam. At the end of the class, I asked Maestra Rosa about it. Through sign language and simple Spanish, she explained that the school had neither the money to pay for the state-mandated exams nor a photocopier to reproduce them. I was shocked at first, but then realized that we’d just been through a very effective review, even I’d learned something, and exam dictation was probably as good a preparation for a test as any other.
Is there a Mexican equivalent to There’s more than one way to skin a cat? I’ll ask my friend Socorro who manages my friend Betty’s house in Chacala.
One day in a social history lesson, we worked in groups labelling arrows on a map indicating world-wide immigration patterns. The larger the arrow, the larger the flow of migration from one country to another. “What are the causes of immigration in and out of various countries?” Maestra Rosa asked, encouraging us to read the text for the answers. Three reasons I explained to my teammates — religious and political persecution, a search for economic opportunity and family reunification. This really impressed them and helped us label the arrows drawn from one country to another. A fat arrow pointed out of Mexico toward the United States. Dinero (money) we labelled it.
It rarely rains in Mexico during the dry season of winter but one night I enjoyed (and Mexicans suffered) a dramatic tropical storm. Howling winds, sheets of rain washing out all the newly planted crop of beans, stormy seas sending all the fishing boats along the coast to safe harbour. The next day I arrived at school to find a small lake in the centre of the concrete floor of our classroom. We pushed our desks to the wall and Maestra Rosa tiptoed around the pool of water to begin our lesson.
Before Christmas, we drew names from a hat for Secret Santa. Maestra Rosa taped a chart to the wall and told us we could put what we wanted beside our names. The gift exchange had only two rules: complete secrecy and a gift of no more than 30 pesos. To my shame, I was the only classmate to obey the 2nd rule. On the day of the gift exchange, we shoved our desks to the wall to form a circle in the centre of the room.
Maestra Rosa tossed a balloon across the circle and we batted it back and forth. Whenever a student dropped the balloon, he or she stepped into the circle and said something sweet about the classmate whose name they had drawn. The other students all shouted out the name as soon as they recognized who it was, and the gift-givers offered their presents to their friends with an enthusiastic hug.
When Nico dropped the balloon, he stepped into the circle and said (I’m paraphrasing here): “She’s someone from away who we really like having in our class.”
“Dayán, Dayán,” the kids shouted.
I hugged Nico, then opened my present. When I saw a brown-skinned doll, dressed in the indigenous costume of the Huichol people of the region, I felt like a verdadera Nayariteña — a true woman of Nayarit.
But there is no time for sentiment in a classroom full of kids waiting to open presents. My moment was brief before the balloon bounced from hand to hand again. Issaias, the smallest boy in the class, was the next to miss it. “We all love her,” he said . . .
“Maestra Rosa,” Juli shouted, pumping his fist in the air.
“. . . and she teaches us new things every day and we won’t know what to do without her over our vacation.”
“Maestra Rosa! Maestra Rosa!” The kids all rushed toward her.
Issa offered the teacher a glitzy gift bag as the kids engulfed them both.
Rosa opened her gift, raising the bag for us all to see. She pulled out a present carefully covered in tissue. The wrapping came off — WHAT!!?! — not the gift you’d expect to see in Canada: a flaming pink bra and panties.
“Gracias,” Rosa beamed and bent down to give Issaias his hug.
This story is the first in the publication A Remarkable Education: Lessons Learned in a Mexican Rural School. Next week’s story, Mexican public schools are a lottery — some win, most lose, describes my experience in the village school of Chacala, a small fishing village on Mexico’s Pacific coast.
