Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Day 11!
Today is the feast day of St. Anthony, the patron saint of San Antonio. (Single men and women ought to get to a church, drop 13 coins in the poor box, and ask St. Anthony to find their "lost" partner. St. Anthony will get to work on finding your soul mate! Worked for me, but that´s another story.)
My husband and I started the day at a restaurant across the street from our hotel. (Aedan wanted to sleep in.) Marco Polo serves a delicious breakfast--I had huevos rancheros and Blair had pancakes--for 33 pesos, which includes a bottomless cup of coffee. We picked up a "pie de queso" (pie of cheese...cheescake) to bring back for Aedan at a bakery around the corner.
Ana Maria met us at 10 a.m., and we walked several blocks to jump on a bus to her college, El Instituto Tecnologica de Oaxaca. Salvador Ramos Salazar welcomed us to their campus, which has a park-like feel to it. Lots of trees and benches. Very green. He said there are 4,500 students at the campus, and it offers six engineering degrees and two administration degrees. He said that for the past two years, ITO has come home with the first-place prize in engineering against all 140 tecnologicas in Mexico. He also said that three women represented the school. (Viva las mujeres!) The enrollment of the college is 60 percent women and 40 percent male. (Ana Maria, our local contact who´s been with the college for 30 years, is a civil engineer.) Their college is much like the colleges in the Alamo Community College District in that our classes are smaller--They average between 32 and 33 students per classroom--and their tuition is reasonable ($400 per year). ITO does not have open admissions like our colleges, however. Each year, about 2,000 apply, but only half of those are accepted. They don´t have the space or the necessary faculty.
From there, we went to a classroom, where Dr. Pedro Maldonado spoke about the poor of the State of Oaxaca. He received his doctorate in Economics from a university in Cuba. According to Dr. Ramos, Mexico is falling in international economic standing. For a long time, they were in tenth place. However, with Mexico losing jobs and manufacturing to China and India, they are now in fourteenth place. Guerrero, Oaxaca and Chiapas, the three southern states of Mexico, are the poorest in the nation.
In the United States, a family of four living on $20,000 a year is considered impoverished. In Mexico, a family of four living on $2,920 a year is considered impoverished. I thought the following statistics (state of Oaxaca/national) were very interesting: illiterate (22%/10%), kids aged 6-14 who don´t attend school (18%/14%), water in home (65%/88%), indoor plumbing (44%/77%), doctor per 10,000 citizens (10/14), nurses per 10,000 citizens (13/20), infant mortality per 1,000 births (35/14), life expectancy (71/73), migration...number of citizens per 1,000 who leave (18/6), poor population (85%/72%), and rural population (56%/25%).
Dr. Maldonado spelled out eight factors that are necessary for Oaxaca to grow economically:
1. Better lines of communication
2. Quality education (better human development)
3. Better conditions for business in Mexico
4. Reduce paperwork for those who want to start a business in Mexico
5. Empower workers with skills and training
6. Train administrators to make wise decisions
7. Provide low interest rates
8. Form social networks (redes) and business networks
Three values are necessary for this structural reform to occur:
1. Trust
2. Reciprocity
3. Unity
Dr. Maldonado said that education is key, and we got into a conversation over the striking teachers. It turns out that it´s good that we visited ITO today, because the college is closing tomorrow. The professors will join the teachers of this state to protest their working conditions. If the sign that I saw on the street yesterday was correct, teachers make $5,200 a year ($100 a week). This might be on the high side, because I´m not sure if they´re on a 12-month or a 9-month contract. I´ll have to do some reporting and find out! Stay tuned.
We went over to the college´s cafeteria after the talk, and it was packed with students watching the World Cup on a big screen TV. I loved hearing the moans on missed scores and the jubilation on winning scores. This morning during breakfast, they had the TV on a sort of Today Show-like program, and the reporter was interviewing Mexicans who´d make the trek to Germany. (Large mugs of frosty beer were prominently featured.) You can tell there´s a lot of national pride when it comes to futbol (soccer). Some commercial that played was nothing but clips of Mexican fans painted with their team´s colors, singing along to the national anthem, and glorying in their team´s success. I´m not a fan of organized sport of any kind (Sorry, Spurs!), so it´s interesting to try to relate to those who live/die by soccer. (Gail said that England pulled the passports of 3,500 known soccer hooligans so they couldn´t travel to Germany! I can´t see myself getting so worked up about a team.)
After our visit to ITO, Ana Maria got us back on the city bus to the zocalo. We broke up and headed out for lunch. Blair, Aedan and I ended up having another delicious meal (It´s a good thing we´re doing a lot of walking!) on the zocalo. Blair had one of Oaxaca´s famous chicken moles, and I had pollo emapanizado (breadcrumb-crusted chicken). Aedan had black bean tacos. Then we treated her to a Starbucks-like mocha frappachino that cost 26 pesos for sitting through the morning´s lengthy lectures without complaint. While she was drinking it, I thought that there are not many in the state of Oaxaca who would spend that kind of money on something so frivilous. Not when their day´s wages are 40 pesos. I don´t think we´ll be buying any more frappachinos.
My husband and I started the day at a restaurant across the street from our hotel. (Aedan wanted to sleep in.) Marco Polo serves a delicious breakfast--I had huevos rancheros and Blair had pancakes--for 33 pesos, which includes a bottomless cup of coffee. We picked up a "pie de queso" (pie of cheese...cheescake) to bring back for Aedan at a bakery around the corner.
Ana Maria met us at 10 a.m., and we walked several blocks to jump on a bus to her college, El Instituto Tecnologica de Oaxaca. Salvador Ramos Salazar welcomed us to their campus, which has a park-like feel to it. Lots of trees and benches. Very green. He said there are 4,500 students at the campus, and it offers six engineering degrees and two administration degrees. He said that for the past two years, ITO has come home with the first-place prize in engineering against all 140 tecnologicas in Mexico. He also said that three women represented the school. (Viva las mujeres!) The enrollment of the college is 60 percent women and 40 percent male. (Ana Maria, our local contact who´s been with the college for 30 years, is a civil engineer.) Their college is much like the colleges in the Alamo Community College District in that our classes are smaller--They average between 32 and 33 students per classroom--and their tuition is reasonable ($400 per year). ITO does not have open admissions like our colleges, however. Each year, about 2,000 apply, but only half of those are accepted. They don´t have the space or the necessary faculty.
From there, we went to a classroom, where Dr. Pedro Maldonado spoke about the poor of the State of Oaxaca. He received his doctorate in Economics from a university in Cuba. According to Dr. Ramos, Mexico is falling in international economic standing. For a long time, they were in tenth place. However, with Mexico losing jobs and manufacturing to China and India, they are now in fourteenth place. Guerrero, Oaxaca and Chiapas, the three southern states of Mexico, are the poorest in the nation.
In the United States, a family of four living on $20,000 a year is considered impoverished. In Mexico, a family of four living on $2,920 a year is considered impoverished. I thought the following statistics (state of Oaxaca/national) were very interesting: illiterate (22%/10%), kids aged 6-14 who don´t attend school (18%/14%), water in home (65%/88%), indoor plumbing (44%/77%), doctor per 10,000 citizens (10/14), nurses per 10,000 citizens (13/20), infant mortality per 1,000 births (35/14), life expectancy (71/73), migration...number of citizens per 1,000 who leave (18/6), poor population (85%/72%), and rural population (56%/25%).
Dr. Maldonado spelled out eight factors that are necessary for Oaxaca to grow economically:
1. Better lines of communication
2. Quality education (better human development)
3. Better conditions for business in Mexico
4. Reduce paperwork for those who want to start a business in Mexico
5. Empower workers with skills and training
6. Train administrators to make wise decisions
7. Provide low interest rates
8. Form social networks (redes) and business networks
Three values are necessary for this structural reform to occur:
1. Trust
2. Reciprocity
3. Unity
Dr. Maldonado said that education is key, and we got into a conversation over the striking teachers. It turns out that it´s good that we visited ITO today, because the college is closing tomorrow. The professors will join the teachers of this state to protest their working conditions. If the sign that I saw on the street yesterday was correct, teachers make $5,200 a year ($100 a week). This might be on the high side, because I´m not sure if they´re on a 12-month or a 9-month contract. I´ll have to do some reporting and find out! Stay tuned.
We went over to the college´s cafeteria after the talk, and it was packed with students watching the World Cup on a big screen TV. I loved hearing the moans on missed scores and the jubilation on winning scores. This morning during breakfast, they had the TV on a sort of Today Show-like program, and the reporter was interviewing Mexicans who´d make the trek to Germany. (Large mugs of frosty beer were prominently featured.) You can tell there´s a lot of national pride when it comes to futbol (soccer). Some commercial that played was nothing but clips of Mexican fans painted with their team´s colors, singing along to the national anthem, and glorying in their team´s success. I´m not a fan of organized sport of any kind (Sorry, Spurs!), so it´s interesting to try to relate to those who live/die by soccer. (Gail said that England pulled the passports of 3,500 known soccer hooligans so they couldn´t travel to Germany! I can´t see myself getting so worked up about a team.)
After our visit to ITO, Ana Maria got us back on the city bus to the zocalo. We broke up and headed out for lunch. Blair, Aedan and I ended up having another delicious meal (It´s a good thing we´re doing a lot of walking!) on the zocalo. Blair had one of Oaxaca´s famous chicken moles, and I had pollo emapanizado (breadcrumb-crusted chicken). Aedan had black bean tacos. Then we treated her to a Starbucks-like mocha frappachino that cost 26 pesos for sitting through the morning´s lengthy lectures without complaint. While she was drinking it, I thought that there are not many in the state of Oaxaca who would spend that kind of money on something so frivilous. Not when their day´s wages are 40 pesos. I don´t think we´ll be buying any more frappachinos.
