Testing times in Mexico

 

Unfortunately, shortly after we arrived in Bucerías, Nayarit, my wife Jan became ill with symptoms that seemed to be Covid. In urban Mexico you are never far from a pharmacy, and on Lázaro Cárdenas street in Bucerías there are six or seven within a 15-minute walk. The first had no pruebas Covid, but the chemist’s next to the fancy liquor store, did. The charming young woman in the standard white pharmacy uniform told me she had two types: one used a drop of blood from a finger, the other a swab inserted into one’s nostrils. The tests that required blood did not include anything to prick the finger, so I opted for the more familiar up-the-nostrils model and asked for two in case of mishaps. She fetched a box, made sure it contained at least two of everything, and carefully counted out two of all the components into a black plastic bag. The instructions were not included, so I asked her to explain to me how to conduct the test. Then she told me the price: rather more than 1,000 pesos (a little over £50 or US$70). The daily minimum wage in Mexico is 207 pesos, a few pennies over £10, so for a working-class Mexican this price is a staggering amount. I asked the young woman how on earth most Mexicans could afford tests at such prices, at which point she suggested that she could call the main branch to authorize a bulk discount. I left the shop £45 poorer and Jan tested positive. A family living on a typical Mexican income would not have had the luxury of testing to confirm whether or not they were infected. Life in Mexico can be very hard but most Mexicans meet life’s difficulties with quiet determination.

 

This rather trivial insight into the challenges of life in Mexico was emphasized by our last social engagement in Puerto Vallarta, a dinner with the family of one of Chris’ colleagues, Eliseo Molina, a physiotherapist at Pasitos de Luz. Eliseo was born without eyes in a rural community in Chiapas in southern Mexico. His mother considered a blind child a source of shame, so she forbade her son to leave the house so that neighbours could not see him. However, Eliseo was determined not to be limited by his lack of sight and, in his words, he managed to escape. State schools did not admit blind children, so Eliseo received no education until he was an adult, when he moved to Mexico to attend the Escuela Nacional para Ciegos (National School for the Blind), a residential school in the historic centre of Mexico City. The school was founded in 1870 by a former governor of the Distrito Federal, as Mexico City was formally known, Ignacio Trigueros Olea, who taught himself braille to become its first teacher in Mexico. The school now has 34 classrooms, sports facilities, and a computer room. Students are taught to use the white stick, to cook, are given a primary and secondary education, and the beginnings of a professional qualification.

 

Eliseo explained that one of his first classes taught students how to navigate the Mexico City metro and bus routes: a considerable challenge in a huge city. He also learned how to deal with pavements (there were none in his rural birthplace) and other obstacles of city life. And the trained to become a physiotherapist. Most importantly, Eliseo met his wife Lupita there. The couple have three children and live in a small neat house on calle Coliflor (Cauliflower Street) in Colonia Campestre San Nicolás, a suburb of Puerto Vallarta, which lives up to its name (campestre means rural). To reach their home Chris navigated deeply rutted unpaved streets, avoiding fallen tree trunks and other obstacles, as well as a small herd of cows. After introductions and a formal invitation to come into Eliseo and Lupita’s home we bounced along to dinner in Chris’ car and a taxi, joined by Carlitos (their son) and Sofía.

 

Over dinner I learned more about Eliseo and Lupita’s lives. Lupita teaches braille in a local branch of the DIF (Sistema Nacional Para el Desarrollo Integral de la Familia: National System for the Integral Development of the Family) ). Eliseo explained that the DIF provides a range of support services, including food parcels, refuges for abused women and children. Eliseo told me that he is a keen supporter of the current President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), because, when he was governor of Mexico City, he provided free metro and bus transport for blind people, and as President has introduced programmes to help the needy. This is not an opinion shared by many of my more well-to-do friends in Mexico, who are (rightly concerned by AMLO’s involvement of the army in many sectors of the economy, such as managing airports, building new train lines, distribution of medicines, and by his authoritarian instincts. However, Mexicans of more modest means are unsurprisingly less concerned by such matters as they are by the challenges of daily life.

 

Eliseo and Lupita explained that they share the cooking, Lupita sweeps and mops the house (a daily chore in most Mexican households). Eliseo gets to work at Pasitos de Luz by taking a local bus to the charity’s original building, where he meets the bus that transports children and staff to Pasitos. I asked him how he knows when to get off his local bus, since Lupita explained that the bus drivers provide no assistance. Eliseo explained that he counts the topes (speed bumps) and turns. When I asked if he ever gets off too early or too late, he replied that this happens only if he is distracted. Unsurprisingly, Eliseo is assigned the blind children at Pasitos. One little boy, Alexis, has no eyes and is autistic. He has been a particular challenge, especially since he forgot all he had been taught about the use of his white stick during the pandemic. His therapy had to start again from scratch.

 

I also asked Eliseo and Lupita if life is very difficult for a blind couple in Mexico, for example when dealing with officialdom, which can be very bureaucratic. They replied that most of the time they coped well with life, but recently Carlitos, who is 15 years old, has had serious treatments for cancer every two weeks in Guadalajara, some 320km away. Dealing with long bus journeys and hospital administration has been very hard for them. Carlitos has had both his legs amputated and recently had tumours removed from his lungs. When we met him, he was walking on a new prosthetic leg and crutches. Over dinner he quizzed Chris about life in London and other aspects of the UK. He listened with wrapt attention and a broad smile. He tells us that he plans to become a doctor. His enthusiasm was contagious, and, to use a much over-used term, inspirational. 

 

Jovita, the cleaning lady in our apartment, told me that she would charge 500 pesos (the price of one Covid test) to sweep and mop the floors with Pinol, the universal floor cleaner in Mexico with a pleasant pine smell; to clean the kitchen and four bathrooms; sweep the terrace; wash and change the sheets; and to empty the rubbish. Two and a half hours later our apartment was scrupulously clean, our son Chris’ disorderly room all neatly arranged, and our assorted bathroom products sorted into neat rows. Public places in Mexico may often be disorderly and scruffy, but homes are always neat and clean. For a morning of hard work Jovita explained to me that she takes two bus rides to Bucerías and two back home, at a cost of 80 pesos, so she would have netted, 420 pesos, not enough to buy a Covid test, for 2.5 hours of unstinting work and her travel time. Jan insisted that this was not enough and insisted that I pay Jovita 600.

 

As we sit having breakfast on our terrace, every morning about 10am a father and two small children not more than. 6- and 8-years old trudge along the beach in front of our building carrying trinkets for sale. The trinkets are of little value, so their daily earnings must be very thin stuff, especially in this low season when the beach is pretty much empty. The children cannot attend school, so may well grow up illiterate, or at best with a minimal education. Another person who passes our building regularly is a man who sells shrimps on a stick, seasoned with a red sauce and a squeeze of lime. He holds an array of the snacks in his right hand. If sales are slow, those shrimps will be heated by the sun perhaps for an hour or more: no doubt a food safety hazard.

 

Many Mexicans scrape a living as that family or the shrimp seller do, but some have it even harder. To reach our building, as you enter Bucerías you pull into a right-hand lane to make a left turn (one of the curiosities of traffic management in the state of Nayarit is that to turn left you turn right first), and wait for the traffic lights by the enormous Chedrahui supermarket. Traffic lights are an opportunity to earn a very few pesos, if you are desperate enough, while passengers wait for the lights to change. You may be a mother working the cars with a small child selling chewing gum or some other small item. Another mother, steps out when the lights turn red, squats down and her small son sits across her shoulders, then she stands up and the boy juggles two rubber balls for a minute or two. He climbs down and he and his mother walk along the line of cars asking for a few pesos as their reward for a brief entertainment. Again, these children miss school.

 

Lack of education, or an inadequate education, consigns many Mexicans to making their lives this way. Literacy is technically high in Mexico: 99.5% of the population is literate, but the level of literacy is poor. The OECD reports that 50.6% of adults in Mexico attain only level 1 literacy, defined thus: “At Level 1 in literacy, adults can read brief texts on familiar topics and locate a single piece of specific information identical in form to information in the question or directive.” Mexico educates a substantial number professionals to a high standard. A waiter at one of our favourite Puerto Vallarta restaurants, The River Café, has a daughter who is completing a PhD in Barcelona, and another studying for a Masters in Puerto Vallarta. But many Mexicans do not complete their primary education.

 

The night-time security guard in our building exemplifies another kind of hardship. He speaks English well and quite grammatically, and understands most of what we say to him even with our British accents. He tells me that he learned some of his English in school, but more by listening to English pop music: Phil Collins, Sting, Rod Stewart etc. And he lived for two years in Greensboro, NC, where he has a 15-year-old son who he hopes to have enough money to visit some time. On an anecdotal level, family separations across the US border are a common theme of conversations with Mexicans who work in low-paid jobs (restaurant and hotel work, driving taxis, cleaning and so on).

 

A friend of our son Chris works in one of the more luxurious hotels selling tours to the (mostly American and Canadian guests). For this work he needs good English and interpersonal and sales skills. He cannot, of course, afford to live close to the hotel where he works, so he wakes at 4am and takes buses to work. He leaves home very early because the buses are so crowded that he often needs to wait for several to pass before one arrives with room for some additional passengers. The buses are thus crowded and almost intolerably hot (they are not air conditioned like the tourist buses). So he arrives sweaty and already tired, but has to put on his smile and get to work. The buses are a municipal service, so one might think that a politician who promised more comfortable transport would be guaranteed to win an election. However, Chris’ friend explained that, while formally municipal, the buses are in fact controlled by the mafia who have no interest in funding increased comfort. I asked Chris about the reference to the mafia, and he responded that friends often point out business activities that they describe as mafia. One example in San Vicente, Chris’ town, is a new and very luxurious bar, which will be beyond the means of most residents of the town. A friend assured him that this was a mafia enterprise to be used for money laundering. Whether this is true or not I can’t say, but the general assumption is that services are not run for the benefit of ordinary Mexicans.

 

One feature of Mexican life is the importance of the municipality and its residents’ attachment to their neighbourhood, which often expresses itself in neighbourhood solidarity and self-help, sometimes in vigorous ptrotest. For example, one evening, as Chris drove us to a restaurant in one of the non-tourist neighbourhoods of Puerto Vallarta along rutted unpaved streets, a young man held a paper cup out at an intersection. Chris gave him five pesos and explained that a collection was being made for materials so that local residents could make some basic repairs to their street. He commented that he frequently encounters such collections to repair streets or to paint topes.

 

We came across (or rather narrowly missed) another form of collective action as we planned to return to the UK from Mexico City. Jorge, the reliable driver who transports us from and to the airport, told us that the terminal from which British Airways flights depart had been subject to blockades by disabled people protesting their inability to obtain a medicine they need. The lack (desabasto) of medicines has been a subject of controversy in recent years. There have been similar protests by the parents of children unable to obtain medicine critically needed to treat their children’s cancer. In our case, the blockade had been lifted by the time we reached the airport.

 

The moral of all these rather miscellaneous anecdotes is that life for most Mexicans is hard, but that most face difficulties that would defeat many comfortably placed people in Europe or North America with resolution and resourcefulness.