Week #22 Living water

Our first Informe Anual of humanitarian aid programming was on Thursday this past week. They took my very pragmatic recommendation in November on the need to organize a call for project proposals and made it into quite a remarkable spectacle in the stake center by the Mexico City Temple. Other than the invitations, everything else was pulled together in about a week and half just before the event. The just-in-time approach is one that I have seen time and time again in my work with Mexico. 

The event brought together many of the key implementing organizations for humanitarian aid projects that our church funds, to recognize their work and to communicate our project priorities to them for this year. It was good to be able to put faces to the names of people in these organizations that we have been communicating with by email, WhatsApp and phone calls. Hopefully we will get an ample number of quality project proposals as an outcome, which was our team's objective. We still have a handful of projects from last year to close. Come March 1 a constitutional ban begins on government participation in all public events - our projects usually end with a "protocolario" event in which government officials participate. I am curious how we are going to manage this as we turn our attention to new projects. 

We participated in a protocolario event at Mexico City's Cancer Institute on Wednesday. In the news yesterday I read that 330 people die every day in Mexico from cancer. Our donation was an ecocardiogram equipped ultrasound, the first to be used in Mexico. As part of the events that morning we participated in a technical session reporting on the benefits of its use for cancer patients. One of the presenters described working without it to being akin to winning the battle (defeating cancer) but losing the war in that many patients die not long after from other undiagnosed causes related to their treatment, usually cardiovascular diseases. The ecocardiogram equipment allows doctors to do baseline studies on patients before cancer treatment begins, and then follow up throughout and after treatment to identify and address problems that arise before they become fatal. Much to my horror, on the way out I learned from one of the doctors that they unplugged the machine we donated and vacated the small room where it is used just for us to take pictures - the waiting room was filled with people. My contact in arranging the event was one of the doctors - he was not a man of many words, next time around I will make sure we don't inadvertently interfere like this. 

In the technical session, Sister Schlachter and I sat beside the foundation that was the recipient of the donation for this hospital (hospitals here cannot accept foreign-sponsored donations like this directly). At the end of the program, the chair of the technical session called this fellow up to the podium to say a few words and despite my protests, I ended up going up to the podium with him. He was very generous in his gratitude for our donation. Sister Schlachter and I are only the organizers of such events and the church officials tagged to speak were nowhere in sight and so I found myself speaking to a couple hundred doctors and other healthcare professionals.     

Mango season is just starting to ramp up here with Atauflo mangos appearing in large piles in Chedraui, the supermarket we buy many of our groceries at. They are still pricey at 64 pesos/kg (CAN$5), slightly more expensive than avocados (60 pesos/kg), quite a bit more expensive than Golden Delicious apples imported from the US (45 pesos/kg) and a whole lot less expensive than strawberries at 167 pesos a kilo (CAN$13). Mangos are absolutely delicious but a very slippery, messy experience. One of my bosses at Agriculture Canada was telling me she didn't like mangos at all, her experience being purchasing them in Ottawa - stringy, tasteless and hard as rocks. We were at an event in Mexico City not far from where we are now living and I offered to get her "real" mangos to try.  My instructions to her were to take all her clothes off, wrap a towel around her neck like a bib, sit down on the tile floor in the middle of her hotel room and then peel and eat the mangoes I gave her.  I didn't ask her how closely she followed my instructions but she became a mango fan after the experience. Sister Schlachter has had quite a bit of practice eating mangoes - all she needs is knife.  As you can see in the photo below, I'm not so careful. Pro-tip, the ones that look like they are well past their prime, a bit wrinkled with brown and black spots are the best.

I mentioned last week that In wanted to help generate some business for the place where I get my hair cut at in the Pueblito Tecamachalco and so I took a photo that I intended to post online. However, when I got home I found that the shop was not yet even on Google maps and I couldn't find the address looking at the street view either, so I went back. It's a great little place and my request to have it added to Google Maps was accepted. Next time you're here...I highly recommend the place - yes, not much hair left to cut on my head but this adds to the challenge of the job. It's called "ML Barbershop Aztec" (ya somehow it says barbershoo). Miriam is the sole proprietor. On the way back I spotted a number of mill stones embedded in the concrete in front of a tortillería. I chatted with the owners to make sure they were o.k. with me taking pictures - the fellow I talked to was pretty impressed that I knew what the stones were.  They had simply worn out. 

The past couple of weeks a drilling rig has been working on the water well across the street from where we live. It caught my eye because I took training and worked on an oil rig for a "tour" of a couple of weeks. I was 29 and despite seeing myself as being a strapping farm kid, the instructors advised me to look for a job on a big rig, not one like the link because they said the pace would destroy my body pretty fast. The tour was by far the worst job I have ever had: a rig pig, wallowing in drilling mud. It started by being met by a drunk who I shared a bunk with and who gave me a brutal verbal beating each time I set foot on the platform to do my job. After a particularly nasty bout of profanity, pushing me out of the way to "show me how" to make a connection and him failing more than once, only to have the driller tell him to let me do it for him and my succeeding, he invited me to his "office", a remote shack off site. I was ready, willing and primed to respond with my fists. When we got there, he told me that he had treated me the way he was treated when he first started and apologized. We were best buddies from that moment on.  They asked me to stay on for another tour, back to back - I told them I didn't have a good enough sense of humour for the job and went to Mexico instead for the rest of the winter. 

Our lodgings here in Mexico are located in Tecamachalco, a small sliver of the State of Mexico that dips into Mexico City's Polanco neighbourhood. News reports this week included a listing of 284 neighbourhoods (15% of the city) in Mexico City with access to water only during certain hours of the day and, in some cases, only on certain days of the week. The city's response has been to provide discounts on their water bills of up to 95%.  I'd rather have access to the water than a discount on my bill. On the Flamme farm south of Bow Island we hauled and rationed our water use and when we lived in Mexico before, our well all but went dry. Our hotel suite has ample hot and cold water and even ample pressure - its not potable but we are so very blessed to have so much of it. 

Plain water is my favourite beverage. In my farming days I would occasionally forget to either bring or to refill my water bottle - with the heat of the day, and being a long way from either a vehicle or anywhere for that matter, I would get very thirsty. On more than one occasion I remember wading out into slough's or a dugout beyond the ducks and duck weed to either strain the water through by teeth or fill my bottle to quench my thirst. I am still a believer of "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger".  

My government colleagues used to tease me about travelling all over the world for a bottle of water instead of any of the myriad of local alcoholic or even fruit drinks I could have tried. The New Testament and the Book of Mormon include parables referring to living water. John 4:6-15 is the story of the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well who Jesus asks to draw water for him to drink, "If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water" and later, "Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." And the woman's response, "Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw." I have received and continue to drink the living water from the spring now within me that He has given to me.  In our world of so much information, good and bad, it is difficult to know what to do - many seem to just ignore it all. Like the woman at the well, the choices before me over 35 years ago were to doubt or to believe Jesus Christ.  I chose to believe and have been blessed ever since, no longer thirsting nor having to "come hither to draw" as if it were drudgery.