My life until Wyoming.

Some reflections.

I was born from a very hard-working mother. During my childhood, my sister and I would only get to see her on the evenings after her long shifts. She was a busy logistic manager at a jean manufacturer facility for an American company, on a small town an hour from Merida city. She hired many nannies to take care of us. For my life as a teenager was easy, my main concern was to play video-games with my friends and little else.

Until college, I was educated on private institutions. I got accepted to fully government funded: Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan (UADY) to study Physics Engineering. Students didn’t have to pay tuition but a small fee per semester, and it showed. For the lack of staff and facilities, many professors struggled teaching. It was a common conversation topic among students, how not to learn but pass a class. Many students cheated with no repercussion, but many others learned truly by themselves. Some students, unlike me, faced constant financial hardship -even if they lived with their families-. They were there to get a decent job as soon as possible to help them: an emblematic task in Mexico.

I remember on my high school years, driving to my swimming club, and every single evening on the Calle 60 intersection with Avenida Garcia Lavin, a dad was selling flowers to drivers at the stoplights. His two teen children would be doing homework at the sidewalk under the streetlight. I saw them so often, many people did, but we would just look away. I never bought a single flower from that man.

One hot winter day, when I was 19, a friend from Michigan was coming to celebrate New Year’s with my family and to tourist Yucatan. A couple days before the arrival, I was waiting on a stoplight and spotted a man selling some appealing sky lanterns. I opened the car window and hollered. The guy rapidly approached, and while whipping off the sweat off his face, he told me the price -$200 pesos (~$10 USD) for 2 of them- I paid him, and he started eagerly thanking me. It seemed he was about to cry. He made the sign of the holy cross, and disclosed -This is the first sell for the day. God is blessing me today, thank you so much- I don’t recall the exact time of the transaction, but I do recall being overwhelmed by this event. For me this was just an spontaneous convenient purchase; for that man this meant, perhaps, that he and his dependents were going to have dinner tonight.

When I came to the states to study at the University of Wyoming, I originally arrived on J1 Visa, as an exchange student. I was saturated my first couple months. There was so many -activities, clubs, gatherings, parties, opportunities, duties- I remember being very anxious for missing out, and on top of that I had to start working. I had only worked the summer before arriving to the US as a barista in a cute little cafe, a very calm job; I started working here at the understaffed university dinning center, not a calm job. At the beginning I was trilled, since I was learning how these big kitchens work, and was meeting a lot of people. 3 to 4 weeks later nonetheless, I wanted to quit. It was an obscene amount of work sometimes. But what really hurt was the unfamiliar (to me) juxtaposition with the other exchange students who where my very close friends at the begging. Almost none of them needed to work. They were simply enjoying their exchange year. I would spot them eating together, and sometimes they would spot me too back at the kitchen and kindly wave. I always wished I could join them -with a meal plan, without my working uniform, and without the financial anxiety I still carry- These were the days where I started understanding the meaning of the word privileged, and recognized that I had unawarely been so most of my life back at home.

I’m currently 23 years old, and while I have a whole life ahead of me, I can’t help crying when ruminating my naive childhood and its subsequent years. Every given day I’ll understand a little more why (years ago) things went the way they did. Why my parents behaved the way they did, why I grew up the way I did, why people did what they did.

I slowly realize everything is meant to be the way it is. May God bless us all.