Heat wave

When I first arrived in Tijuana, everyone asked me two things: "Weren't you afraid to come here?" and "Isn't our weather great!". Well, by the second week of school, the weather was not great. Suddenly, unpredictably, the temperature spiked. Hot, really hot and not much of a drop in the evenings. Alec and I had acquired a futon and began sleeping in the living room, it was too hot to go upstairs. Mexico is loud. Everyone knows it, but no one tells you how to deal with it. The kids howling next door with their karaoke machine at 8am, car alarms, people with loudspeakers mounted to the roofs of their cars, blaring music or advertisements. I would wake up in the morning, in the living room, willing myself to stop grinding my teeth.

At the beginning of the second week of school, I still did not have lists of which students were supposed to be in my classes. I tried not to be the uptight American the first week, things take time, my U.S. school never had it's shit together either. By the second week, I was getting testy. "Poco a poco" my fellow teachers told me. Random kids were coming to my classes, simply to heckle me. Some kids were coming to whichever class was convenient, regardless if it was their class or not. It was hot. No air, no fans, just gray, concrete classrooms. Ten, fifteen kids at a time entering class late. Some arriving five minutes before the class ended. I was moving ahead, their curriculum is super tight here and I couldn't wait for these kids to be ready for school. They started refusing to work. After days of preparation, twenty of forty kids would refuse to do an oral, though they knew they were getting a grade. The tension in my head was inexplicable, I was willing myself to smile, move forward and not tell these little shits to fuck themselves. Whoever they were, because I surely didn't know. I guess the good thing is that I'm not a cryer, at least not in front of a bunch of kids.

I finally got some rolls midweek. Now, I would get this thing under control. I found an online gradebook and spent about eight hours in my sweltering apartment adding all four names of each of my 350 students to the attendance roster. I made seating charts. I returned to school for the third week and found that the rolls had been changed. Some new students, many students no longer on the list. I had a really screwed up, eight hour, online gradebook now. My scalp even felt tense. The heat continued. Still sleeping in the living room. Was this culture shock? I thought there was supposed to be some sort of honeymoon period before you started hating everything. One day, the school invited some folks to entertain the kids during their four o'clock break. They brought huge, loud speakers and rallied the kids to dance and scream. The 4:30 class bell rang and we all started our classes. But the entertainment didn't stop. Blaring music, a matter of feet from our open classroom doors. We couldn't close them, or we would surely die of some sort of heat related illness. The kids didn't even seem to find it strange, they watched me calmly as I screamed above the music and wrote things on the board, as if this was completely normal.

Early on, the school was pretty proud to tell me that they had a lot of technology in their classrooms: projectors, computers, more than most Mexican or American schools. I discovered quickly that three of the nine classrooms I teach in did not have these amenities. The outfitted rooms had computers that were locked in metal cases, when I inquired about a key it couldn't be found. No copies, no video or audio and in some cases, no overhead lights or functioning electrical outlets. It was starting to feel kind of Little House on the Prairie.

The crime here is terrible. Everyday some one's head is spilled across the front of the newspaper. I told myself that people who get shot here are probably involved in some way with the drug trade, until I heard Lourdes' story. There is a huge police delegation between our privada and hers. One afternoon while her family was spread across Tijuana, she began hearing heavy firing, "In front of Calimax" she told me "at the delegation". She was afraid and began calling all family members. Hours later, she watched our street on the news. Traficantes had ambushed the police delegation. When the police tried to radio for backup from other delegations, they found that the raiders had cut off their ability to radio, how? Who knows. "They were just killing them" Lourdes said. I was uncomfortable because she was crying. A long gun battle ensued that kept all of the residents trapped in their houses, terrified. I don't think Lourdes is involved in the drug trade.

One evening, on my late day, I noticed through the window of the classroom that the hills around the school were on fire. Everyone just kept working.