Getting ready

Hey guys!

This post might make you feel better if you are a last-minute sort of person. I had known I was going to come to Mexico since October, but it took me a looooong time to actually get ready for my trip. And even when I took the plane, I wasn't really ready. For example, I only bought the ticket less than two months before the start of my internship, even if I knew it might have been cheaper booking it earlier. I have a good explanation though! Well, sort of...Basically, on average, I've been taking a plane every two or three weeks in the last year or so. Yes, I know, not good for the environment, but you have to consider that my family is in Italy, I live in the Netherlands, one of my best friends is in the UK....and I love travelling!! ;) As you can imagine, then, I'm constantly on websites where you can book your plane tickets. Seriously, CONSTANTLY!! At a certain point I was in Italy, had booked my flight to come to Mexico but in the middle I had to go to the Netherlands and come back (as my flight was leaving from Bologna). The return journey Italy-Netherlands was not booked though...Well, it just isn't easy to juggle all the trips so that dates will match, and I don't end up having my flight for Mexico a day before my flight for Italy. I'm really not complaining, I know how lucky I am to have the opportunity to travel so much, and I even love organizing trips (the booking part too). It's just that sometimes it'd be nice to have months of 60 days! ;)

The other part of my life that I had to prepare before leaving Europe, was supposed to be the internship/research plan. I don't remember if I already wrote it: I have to do a research for my university, on something linked to what I'm doing in my internship. As I was the first one among my classmates to have found the internship, I was expected to have this sorted out pretty quickly. ....You wish! We did sign a document called "internship agreement" (basically like a contract between me, the internship organization and the internship supervisor at uni) soon enough, but the plans for the research are just taking such a long time! Yes, are, because I haven't written my plan yet and, by the way, I've just decided to change my topic. Fun times! :P I wanted to do it on the issue of migration as part of Mexico/USA relations, but now I'm realizing that I have this amazing opportunity to interview migrants, so I should do something with it. Right now I'm therefore considering focussing on the violence they encounter in their journey, but we'll see...

Last but not least, my spanish. To come to Mexico for more than a week or two, you need to speak spanish. To be honest, you're likely to need it even if you come for just a week, unless you go to reeeeaaally touristic places. Not many people speak english here (I do feel at home, as it's very similar to what happens in Italy), so unless you are one of those people who really don't care if their taco is made of beef or of larvas, I suggest you learn some basic words! (OK, they don't make tacos of larvas, as far as I know, but they do eat them in some parts of the country!) I have an advantage, since italian and spanish have (almost) the same grammar and several words in common. Plus, my father works with a spanish company and I have lots of memories of me sitting in the car with him talking - often shouting - in spanish (please note, on bluetooth or headphones...don't use your phone in the car!), and I picked up some words here and there. Before coming here I was supposed to start studying it for real but, well, you can all guess how that went...Between duolingo and Mexican tv series on youtube (let me know if you need some titles!), I learnt enough, and now I'm making progress every day. I hope.

I'm gonna leave you know, if anything else comes to mind about getting ready for Mexico I'll write another post. Oh, two last words. One on clothes: always check the weather of where you're going! And, if you're coming to Mexico, chances are you won't need a coat. Seems fairly obvious, but I have met people with the weirdest kinds of clothes for the place they were in. Lastly, I was just talking about how I like booking plane tickets...Well, yesterday I discovered eDreams decided to cancel my booking for the return flight. Without telling me. How nice of them! So, now I have that to sort out, and that is something that I do NOT like!

Cool, 'till next time!!

Caterina

Singing helps the troubled souls

Hola familia! :)

First thing first, the title is a sentence from one of my favourite songs, "Immigrant Punk", by Gogol Bordello. Check it out if you're into (gypsy) punk/rock! I chose it as a title because today in the comedor (I hadn't talked about it yet, it's the place where i work in the afternoons: migrants can come in between 4 and 7 pm to have a shower, hot food and, in some cases, the possibility to call home), we had a very interesting visit. A group of migrants were bringing along two guitars and amazing voices, so they gave us a private concert after eating. They were singing Christian songs (they were part of a church - surely catholic, but I don't remember exactly which denomination) in spanish...it was really cool (*free spanish lesson* in Mexico, to say "cool!" you can say "chido!" or "padre!". The last one is particularly interesting for me, because it also means "father")!

Now I have completed a whole first week of working with migrants and it's been extremely intense. I wanted to write my posts in a logical order, so the next one was gonna be about getting ready to come here, but I really needed to reflect on my experience tonight...so here I am! Today it was a particularly emotional day as I was, for the first time, in charge of interviews. Let me explain, there's four main areas in the comedor in which volunteers are needed: the kitchen (where you cook and serve the food), roperia (=literally, clothes shop...of course it's not a shop, as everything is for free for migrants), interviews and door.

The door is where the first selections is made: only migrants who are passing through Guadalajara before continuing their journey can come in. The comedor is in a street with a lot of homeless people, so you need to be able to distinguish them. Also, sometimes migrants decide to remain in Guadalajara for a while, but they can't come in to shower and eat more than a few times, so you have to tell them "no" if you realize they're not continuing their journey. The first day I talked with my supervisor here in FM4 Paso Libre, he explained to me that it is important to understand that the organization, as it is small and voluntarily-founded, has its limits and cannot welcome EVERYONE. Sad but true!

When they come to the comedor for the first time (or their first time in this camino, as sometimes they have been deported so they're repeating their journeys), they have to go through an interview before showering and eating. This serves many purposes: it lets us know them better, it is useful for research aimed at improving the protection of human rights, and it gives us the opportunity to know if there has been any abuse, and of which kind. So, today I was at the interviews for the first time. It wasn't easy as my spanish is not so good yet (I know the grammar and everything, but I don't know that many words), but all in all I think nobody complained. However, it really gave me a lot to think about. Sooo many of the migrants just took it for granted that in their camino, it was normal for them to be robbed and to be pointed guns at. When asked "have you been victim of a crime?", they might often say "no", but then once you talk to them a bit more they'll tell you that one night, as they were waiting for the train, a dozen of armed men with their faces covered robbed them of all their money. And maybe even killed a guy who was travelling with them. Say what???!! Yes, it happened to one of the migrants I interviewed today. What's more, a couple of them told us that the federal police, at the border with Guatemala, asked them for money, otherwise they wouldn't let them come into Mexico. Interestingly, only migration police can deport people, but obviously most (...all?) migrants don't know it, and therefore they pay. It's disgusting and very saddening, but I always try to put on a brave face, as obviously I am not the only one who witnessed these things in person, so I don't really have anything to complain about compared to the people I'm talking to.

At the interview we see if they need anything - shoes? a new t-shirt? a hat? - and, if yes, we write it down on a piece of paper that they bring to the roperia. After receiving these things + a towel and a soap, they can go and take a shower. They then have to wash the towel they use (which, I find, is a very intelligent method to do it!) and finally they can go and eat a nice, hot meal, served with some agua fresca (a drink made of water, sugar and some kind of fruit, depending on the type) and/or coffee. Before today I generally worked in the kitchen, and I loved it. You really get the chance to talk to people (yes, you do that in the interviews too, but that's a more formal setting) and you see these big, beautiful smiles when you serve them food.

Well, to (hopefully) cheer you up after all the talk about robbery/human rights violations, let me put a few pictures I took today. All taken in the kitchen area, in the first one you can see three volunteers, in the other two the migrants playing and singing.

Hopefully next post is gonna be about getting ready for Mexico, but who knows...Vamos a ver! ;) (=we'll see)

Ciao!

Caterina

Why Mexico?

Hi everyone :)

I am Caterina, an italian student who's arrived in Mexico 10 days ago and is planning to stay here for about 2 months and a half. Why? The short answer is: to do an internship. When I give this answer, though, I then have several people asking me: yes, but why in Mexico?

Just to be clear, I actually live in the Netherlands and the moment, where I'm doing a two-years Master in International Relations and Diplomacy. The master's module for these months precisely consists in doing an internship, with the end goal of writing a research paper on something related to the experience. This was actually one of the main reasons why I chose my course so, free tip to everyone who's thinking of doing a Master: consider whether it has an internship or not! It's a tip that my professor in my Bachelor gave me, and I think it's very valuable. Not only because employers do look at this kind of stuff (basically, working experience), but also because you can get the chance to try out a type of job, and see whether you actually like it or not. Of course, these Masters tend to be two-years long, so you have to see whether that's something you're OK with!

Well, let's get back to why Mexico. I was here last year, in July, after a week in Cuba with my mum. The week in Cuba was sort of a "prize" for graduating, and was probably my best holiday ever (no, we didn't spend all days on the beautiful, sandy beach...just one, tbh). When planning it, I realised Cuba was relatively near to Mexico (what a surprise!), so it could be a great occasion to go and visit on of my best friends, who lives in Guadalajara and who I hadn't seen for one year and a half. The decision to come here the first time, in 2013, was therefore purely out of chance. I was never really interested in Mexico, the picture I had in my head was of boring deserts with some cactuses here and there and, sometimes, pyramids. Nah, not my kind of thing.......how naive!! To cut a long story short, I fell in love. Purely, in any sense of the word, since one night I found a great Mexican man who made me go crazy with his perfect salsa moves.

After that amazing experience, then, all I could think about was: how do I get back there? So, when I had to find an internship, I decided to ask my friend's boyfriend, who's a professor of International Relations here in Guadalajara, if he knew of any organisation I could work with. I was thinking in particular of the issue of migration, something that is very interesting for me personally, both because I'm italian (and we get a lot of "illegal" immigrants there) and because it's strongly connected to what I study. Short flashback: last year, when I was here, we went to the Tequila distillery with a train. When boarding the train in Guadalajara we saw the other train, the one called la Bestia, carrying goods (and migrants) to the US. It was rather shocking, seeing these men holding onto the outside of the carriages, in such an unstable way that several of them never have a chace to reach the US. Since then, I had been thinking that I would have loved to work to improve their conditions.

And this is where we finally get to why I came here: my friend contacted the founder of this great organization (FM4 Paso Libre, I'll talk more about them in the next posts), who agreed to have me as an intern. I came here because, during my short trip last year, I realised there's so much more than cactuses and pyramids here. I came here because Mexico is a country that tens of thousands of immigrants cross every year hoping to follow the "American Dream", and where the issue of human rights is therefore particularly pressing. I came here because I thought I had a chance to do something meaningful, while enjoying it.

The whole blog is meant as an account of my weeks here. I hope that it will serve to explain better why I came here, and to inspire other to do something similar. As I'm writing, though, I'm just being particularly optimistic: I don't know what will happen to me here in the next months...It could end up being a horrible experience for some reason! I doubt that, but I'll keep you updated! :D

Ciao!

Caterina