Work

My good friend Eduardo García Aguilar scolded me the other day for not having posted anything for a long while on this humble blog, and I have to plead guilty as charged. I've been concentrating on my sabbatical projects (designing a course on the concept of freedom for my college's philosophy department, doing Latin in French, working on a novel), but also working. And I mean work in the purest sense: physical labor. The last couple weeks in particular I have been a chalán, a helper, to a construction crew that has been building a big new water cistern for Casa Tobalá. My contribution has been of the simplest kind--shoveling buckets of sand and gravel for mixing concrete, carrying cement blocks to the mason, holding boards while the molds get pounded into place. Mauro, Marcos and Jaime--the real workers who have such talent and skill--have been good-humored about all my questions about why they're doing what they're doing or showing me again and again how to hoist an 80-pound bucket of wet cement onto my shoulder. The first day I went to help, Mauro handed me a shovel and said, "Just tell me when you're tired." Hell, that was five minutes after I started and I've managed to keep my mouth shut.
That's the thing about work: just because you're tired doesn't mean you stop, just because you're tired doesn't mean that the work is over. As a college teacher the thing I find most frustrating in students is, let's be honest, their endemic laziness. Always an excuse not to have assignments done or for not coming to class. US students (well, our nation as a whole) take for granted the opportunities afforded them, like the very fact of being able to go to college or having computer labs and libraries available. Here in Oaxaca when students don't get into the university they stage demonstrations, they block streets and highways. They never say they're too tired.