Thursday, March 11, 2010

Catching Up

Monday we started out working at the recycling center again. I got some pictures this time but only a handful before my camera died. We made some major progress since last time though. We managed to clear an aisleway through the plastic and drastically reduced one of the mounds. There were tons of bags that had lots of trash in them, they shouldn't have gotten in the door. We of course had to pick through all of those to find anything recyclable. I was really glad to have bought work gloves from the falayma (local grocery store).

We've been having discussions in spanish class lately for an activity. Martin brings in a paper with a summary of what's going on in Mexico concerning some issue and then we compare to the US, give our opinions, etc. A few of the more recent ones were adoption, abortion, internet dating, and then college today. I was absolutely dumbstruck by Mexico's system. UNAM is the absolute best university in Mexico and in all of Latin America, and it's public. Not only is it public, it's dirt cheap. Each semester costs-brace yourself-3,000 pesos. 3,000 pesos converts to a little under $240. I've spent more than $240 on books in a semester!! Martin says he has a friend who goes to a public university and also has two scholarships. With her scholarships it costs her 100 pesos each semester (=$7.90 USD). Can I please go there??? I have 2,000 pesos in my room right now!! According to Martin, the public universities in Mexico are the best, and the cheapest. But there's really steep competition, you have to take a test to get in, and there can be 40,000 kids applying for the same major at the same school. He says that the private schools cost a lot more because you don't have to take an entrance test or anything. He also said they tend to be "prettier" than the public universities, that don't spend a lot of money on equipment oranything. But seriously, $240 a semester?? Hello grad school.

Today we had another DR day. We got together to revise our interview questions, since we noticed that some of them were a little difficult to understand or leading people to answer in a certain way. There's still more to be done, as we realized in some interviews today. AJ said that he went through 6 revisions of his dissertation interviews. It's somewhat frustrating to have four or five people sitting a table trying to figure out how to phrase something, and then have to translate it into spanish. Luckily Jose has been really helpful with translating everything.

After lunch we went out to the house of Juan Carlos, the administrative secretary of the coop. He had said that he knew the houses of some of the coop members who live in Puerto San Carlos. Once we got there we met a couple of coop members who happened to be hanging around. We interviewed one in Juan Carlos's house. He was interesting and at least half drunk towards the end. Then they introduced us to some other fishermen who didn't have time, and they directed us to Ramon, another fisherman. Ramon gave us an awesome interview. Our interview lasts about half an hour so far, and Ramon went almost to an hour because he answered just about every question with paragraph instead of a sentence. His spanish was pretty clear too, so I understood a lot of it. I also worked up the nerve to start asking questions myself instead of asking Jose to translate something. We have all of our usual interview questions written down and we just read from the sheet, but if you think of anything it's nice to be able to ask follow up questions.

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