“Would you go back to Puebla?” I asked about six months ago. I was talking on the phone with a professor from Seattle who had spent three months teaching in Puebla and had brought her family along with her.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “It is just that our family isn’t there. Our friends aren’t there. We enjoyed it, but I don’t think we would go again.”
Luckily, we are in a different situation than she was in; we do have family in Mexico, and we do have friends. We have had some rough days, but we have been anything but lonely here. Each person and visitor has helped us in different ways and taught us new things about where we live.
My brother-in-law, Tim, lives about four hours from Puebla in Queretaro. Without my sister and Tim’s knowledge of Mexico and how to settle in for a few months with kids, I don’t know if we could have pulled off this semester.
Tim runs the program Wheaton in Mexico and brought his group of students to Puebla for a day. We got a group of students from my university, BUAP, to meet with the Wheaton students for a day. The students from Puebla showed the Wheaton students around, and they all had a meal together.
My dad came in February to help us settle in, and his visit gave us an excuse to explore new parts of Puebla. He took Langston to visit Tim in Queretaro, and Simone, Marie, and I had a girls’ weekend. Simone invented the “smoreo,” a marshmallow melted between two Oreos.
Our dear friends, Seth and Kristen, from church came to visit with my kids’ frin-sons (friend-cousins), Hilde and Stephen.
We went to the Baroque Museum.
We did art projects at the Amparo Museum.
We visited the ruins in Cholula and ate paletas and ice cream. We had a wonderful time.
The night before they left, I asked Hilde what she most enjoyed about her visit, and she said, “washing the volleyball with Marie.” Between all the fun activities, the kids had decided that Marie’s volleyball needed to be washed; a reminder that just doing mundane things with friends is the best. Both my parents are here now, and we plan to visit Tim in Queretaro for Holy Week.
Having visitors has been lovely. But it isn’t just the visitors that have kept us from being lonely. We have been so well cared for here.
The humorist Dave Barry wrote an article on his recent visit to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. He reports, “The people of San Miguel de Allende are warm and welcoming and genuinely just… nice. In fact, as far as I could tell — remember that I’m a professional; do not attempt this kind of generalization at home — everybody in Mexico is nice.”
I’m not a professional writer like Dave Barry, so I’m not making any general claims. I frequently remind myself of Solzhenitsyn’s line saying something like, “the line between good and evil does not lie between nations but right down the middle of my own crooked human heart.” But we have experienced so much kindness during these last few months.
Last Thursday, I was giving my presentation, “A Guide to Pain-Free Thesis Advising” to a group of professors, and I started coughing. Two people ran to get water for me, and someone offered me a cough drop. I tried to speak again, and all seventeen people put up their hand to tell me to stop. “Take care of yourself,” someone said, “we know how it is.” One of the participants stepped in to give his perspective on the topic at hand until my coughing stopped. We have been so well cared for.
We have enjoyed having visitors to help us experience all the various parts of Puebla, But, as Hilde pointed out, just doing normal things with nice people is often just as good. Some days are hard, but the fact that those days are surrounded by times working and studying with people who are kind to us has made all the difference.
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