River rafting...in Mexico

One day, I rafted a big river in Mexico with a bunch of people who had no idea how to steer a raft.

In 2012, I joined the Peace Corps in Mexico. Long story short, I quit after a month...well, four, if you include the three-month training. I'm not proud of it, but I don't regret it, either. I made a lot of good friends and had a lot of fun adventures, like exploring the city of Puebla, taking the wrong bus in Queretaro and ending up on the wrong side of town with a 50+ pound suitcase, and hiking in to some volcanic crater lakes that I'm sure only a few Americans (or Mexicans, really) have ever seen. But basically, I think the universe was telling me to quit.

View from my roof in Tehuacan

I won't go into too much detail, but to sum it up, there were a number of negative things that occurred in a very short period of time to convince me I was in the wrong place:

• My host mother for the 3-month training in Queretaro died after a month, which was pretty traumatizing.
• Then, I got placed with an older couple who fed me nothing but bread and milk (not even real milk, but milk made with vegetable fat), and kept their better food in a refrigerator they kept locked so I couldn't get into it.
• My site placement was in Tehuacan, Puebla, a hole of a town in the middle of the desert (and I hate deserts), which was recently voted worse than cities like Ciudad Juarez, Monterrey, Veracruz, and other cities that are renowned for violence and drug problems. Granted, my host family there was great, but the environment - not so much. As a result:



My super-awesome host brother
and mother in Tehuacan, dropping
me off at the bus station to begin
the long trip back to the U.S.

• I got four eye infections and my first ever case of pneumonia, I'm guessing from the enormous chicken farms for which the Tehuacan area is known. My vision in my right eye, which was already bad, dropped 2 whole diopters almost overnight (if you don't know what that means, well, it's bad). I couldn't sleep because I would cough uncontrollably, especially at night. (One of the results was actually kind of cute, though; my host mother, a lovely middle-aged Mexican woman who couldn't ever understand my horrible accent when I tried to speak Spanish to her, would just walk into my room in the middle of the night with hot tea to soothe my throat. She was awesome.)

But in general terms, I don't think the PC was ever for me. I'm far too independent, and far too reliant on recreation for balance and happiness - and that's just not something you can easily do in Tehuacan, especially not as a single American woman. It's too hot, too dangerous, and too inaccessible. You're not allowed to drive, so you're dependent on buses and other people driving you, and that really restricts what you can do or where you can go. Plus my Spanish skills never got very good and that really frustrated me. I also was alone in my town, while many other volunteers got sent to sites together - there were at least four from our group alone who went to Puebla. With my horrible Spanish, I definitely could have used that kind of support.

The Mexico Peace Corps program is a bit different than other programs, in that they place volunteers who are more "specialists" into natural resources programs. Most typical PC volunteers around the world become English teachers, though some work in protected areas management, teaching about sustainable agricultural practices, building better healthcare infrastructure, and the like. But in Mexico, half of our group was in Environmental Education, and the other half - including me - was in Natural Resources Management. Many of my fellow volunteers had backgrounds similar to mine: biology, GIS, or other physical sciences.

My placement in Tehuacan was with the Mexican equivalent of the National Park Service, called the Comision Nacional de Areas Naturales Protegidas (CONANP), working in La Reserva de la Biosfera Tehuacan-Cuicatlan. It's a large natural area spanning the states of Puebla and Oaxaca, including amazing

Military macaw (not my photo)

canyons, river valleys, deserts, and mountains. It also has one of the only populations of Military Macaws, or Guacamaya Verde. The agency requested me as a volunteer there hoping they could use me to help monitor the macaws, as well as other species in the Reserve like neotropical otters, deer, and others. (In reality, though - and I don't have time or energy to get into it - CONANP, like many Mexican governmental entities, is beset by so many political, societal, and monetary problems that getting anything done is usually quite miraculous. Imagine Yellowstone National Park, but with about a hundred indigenous communities still living inside it and trying to eke out a living from the resources the Park is trying to protect. The frustration, boredom and pointlessness was another one of the reasons I quit.)

Anyway, to get to the story....

The boat.

One day, my coworkers - my counterpart Ceci and her supervisor, Juan Manuel - took me with them on a trip down the Rio Grande in Oaxaca to survey for neotropical otters. Since I basically did just that for my master's research, I was pretty excited to get back on a river. Our objective was to set up some remote cameras and locate any scat/tracks we found.

We arrived at the drop-off point after a two-hour drive down some of the scariest, curviest roads I've ever experienced, south through the high Oaxacan desert mountains past the city of Cuicatlan and numerous other little communities. Our boat was a little inflatable raft. Along with the three of us, we also picked up a fourth person, who I think was a student at a local university but I can't remember.

Cool views

We set off. It soon became clear that nobody knew how to steer the boat, except me, and they wouldn't let me do it because I couldn't speak Spanish and I'm a woman. Basically, every time we saw an obstacle, Juan Manuel would try to steer away and would inevitably ram directly into it. I sat in the front with an oar and tried my best to control things from there, but Juan Manuel steered from the back and there was no predicting or counteracting his efforts.

Green heron

Setting up a camera trap

Green iguana

Within two hours we had been swept under dozens of low-hanging branches and nearly capsized several times. Ceci got knocked out of the boat on one of these little forays into some trees, an episode which also cost me my hat, an oar, and several chunks of skin on one hand. We got stuck on some rocks, trapped in some whirlpools, and utterly, completely soaked. When Ceci went under, she actually damaged one of her ears, and starting experiencing constant headaches that lasted well beyond my departure from Mexico.

my hand after a rendezvous with a tree

There were good times - seeing cool birds and lizards, finding otter scat and tracks, and even possibly catching a glimpse of one leaving the river (though none of us were sure). The worst part, though, was toward the end.

We had been rafting all day and were eagerly watching the shores for signs of the pick-up spot, where another biologist would be meeting us. Gradually, the light began to recede, the chill began to set in, and all we could do was trust Juan Manuel's repeated encouragements of "Esta cerca, esta cerca." And then, the sun set, and complete darkness fell, and we were still out on the river.

I am quite a good swimmer, and none of the rapids or obstacles throughout the day had seriously worried me, but around this time I began to get very, very nervous.

Especially as we came around a bend and heard the foreboding roar of what were certainly the roughest rapids we had yet experienced. And we would be going over them in complete darkness.

Backwards.

Yes, Juan Manuel, utilizing the same level of skill and agility he had shown all day, in his efforts to avoid the worst rapids somehow got us completely turned around. Ceci shrieked and I held on for dear life (having lost my oar) as the boat sped up and swept us down into a hole blacker than the black of the river we could see. For a few terrifying moments were were stuck swirling in circles as the river gushed over us and around us and into the boat, resoaking what few parts of us had dried and threatening to tip us and crush us into the rocks beneath. But finally we managed to push ourselves out, and the river jettisoned us back onto the calmer waters beyond.

And just around the next corner was our ride, waiting beside an enormous bonfire he had set up on the beach.

We didn't get home until late, late that night, partly because Juan Manuel decided to stop for tacos in a little village on the way home. (One thing about Mexican culture in general - it's never too late for food. And nothing will ever make them hurry.) I perceived the adventure as yet another of the Messages from the Universe telling me to leave. I found out later that the Peace Corps probably would have kicked me out anyway if they'd have gotten wind of the trip - they have pretty strict policies on volunteer safety, and I'm sure they wouldn't have given me permission to go (or would have made me wear a helmet). I just didn't feel safe working in that environment, going on trips like this haphazardly with little or no training or thought for our safety.

Or maybe, by then, I was just looking for excuses. I try not to think about it. Like I said, I don't regret my decision to leave, though I regret disappointing Peace Corps or Ceci or the rest of the CONANP office who maybe really did have high expectations for me, even I never got a chance to learn what they were.

Mexico has some amazing resources and I hope they can protect them into the future. And whatever their problems, their shortcomings, the aspects of their culture that we can't understand or that frustrate us, we could learn a thing or two - or a thousand - from them. Like the importance of family. The benefits and pure joy of a laid-back, no-hurry lifestyle. How to make really, really good food.

And it may surprise you to learn that, unlike the United States, Mexico has officially recognized the reality of climate change and is taking steps - however small - to address it.

Who's behind the times now?