Christmas

Technology is wonderful and amazing and can bring me right into my parents living room and I can almost feel the rug and smell the tree and taste the coffee cake--almost.
Actually, Christmas was a very poignant time for me to reflect on my life that sometimes feels split between two worlds.

Being here in Zipolite feeling so at home at Piña Palmera and in every way swept up in this film and this way of living, it was strange to see my family smiling back at me in the glittering rectangle of my computer remembering all the times we've gathered together during the holidays and during the rest of the year. Slowly, slowly, day by day what we do becomes our lives. Spending so much time away, in Mexico, at college, it feels like the comfortable regularity and tradition of Christmas in my parents' living room that I saw in that rectangle is a distant memory. And it felt rich and powerful to talk to them and see them and hear their voices as if they were coming to me from a past life. I think that's all culture shock is: changing gears super quickly moving from one way of life to another. It affected me during Christmas because this is my first Christmas away from my parents and to be thrown back in with the tree and the coffee cake was like doing a 180 sitting here on the beach in 70* weather speaking Spanish and eating animal crackers and coffee.

Regarding the project, I'm going to a rural community tomorrow to visit some ex-patients of Piña Palmera and do some filming. I spent the day today with the lifeguards, who are hoping to celebrate a year with no deaths for the first time in the history of Zipolite on Thursday. Cross your fingers.

The long haul

It was a tough decision, but I won't be returning to Amherst for Christmas. Originally, I would be flying home Tuesday and spending between three and four weeks in Amherst with my family, regrouping and taking stock of my progress so far. I decided, however, that to leave Zipolite after only a month and a half here would do more damage to the film than good would be done by removing myself geographically in an effort to reimagine the project.

Relationships are funny things. Often we consider ourselves quite close to people around us, only to find that they are not worth contacting even infrequently when we are away from each other. I've found it to be true often traveling between home and school, a distance of about two hours in a car or three on a bus. One might draw the conclusion that friends serve a very immediate need for companionship, but at the same time, it can be a quite disposable or interchangeable role that can easily be filled by others. This is what essentially convinced me to stay here another two months before taking my break. Trust is quite important in this project and I don't want to ruin what I've been building since October.

So I'll be here through January now, which will also allow me to be present for the holiday tourist season. The next big wave of tourism is in April (Semana Santa in Mexico), and they say it is quite different.

My work at Piña is taking up most of my time these days. I spend the mornings working in one of the many areas--therapy, special care, kitchen, mantainance, etc...--and the afternoons are sometimes outings, or interesting conversations, often extensions of the morning work and always time consuming. I did spend the other day on the beach with a couple young lifeguards taking about work and money (or the lack there of) in the evening, which was very beautiful and it reminded me of how the lifeguards were originally the imputus for the film. Balancing my time between the two constituencies continues to be a struggle.