Stephanie Harper

Stephanie Harper is a student at the University of Colorado-Boulder. She is an English major and intern for the Women's Wellness Project of the Farrand Academic Program.

Stephanie Harper, Jacques Pankove, and Chelsea Bear

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A Brick to Lay

It began with a twenty six hour bus ride, taken straight from the parking lot of Abiding Hope Lutheran Church, down through the endless desert of the southwestern United States, and into the mountain region of Mexico. The bus droned on with about thirty of us inside, ranging from high school teens, to adults, to young children, thrown together on that Arrow bus which was a hideous swirl of orange and purple that looked as though it had come straight off of a Beatles album. I sat amidst a motley bunch of individuals, most of whom had never performed a decent day’s worth of manual labor, headed to an indigenous mountain city in order to erect a small adobe building for use as a nursing home for a few of the town’s eldest and most cherished citizens. The bus hummed with the vibrating anticipation of what awaited me. The term “adverse poverty” hung over my head, as I lay curled in my seat, watching the line between the desert sand and the blue sky on the horizon blend together into eternity. My life up until now had been that of a sheltered, suburban teenager, and now I was propelling myself into an extreme world of the unknown. But, I also knew that there were 29 others thinking the same thing, and this provided some comfort on the long road ahead.

Creel, Mexico is the direct opposite of a town like Cancun.  The town is barren of resorts with glistening beaches, or even hotels with lovely pools, for that matter. Instead, guests stay in a hostel containing small room with not enough beds for everyone to sleep in, within a building half falling down and home to the types of critters you wish lived outside. However, in a Creel hostel, all the guests sit down for two or three meals a day and are fed more food than the women who are cooking it eat in a week. Here you come to love the taste of lime, because putting it on vegetables supposedly helps kill off bacteria in the water used to rinse them, and there is the suspense of never knowing what’s in the soup. Imagine my surprise when I spooned up a bit to find the eyes of a fish head staring at me. 

I stepped off the bus, with my pillow in hand, and into the warm sunlight of a March afternoon. I stood before a colossal yellow building, whose largest feature was the rusted bell that tolled every Sunday in the crisp morning air. It rested in the spire of the town church. The party was greeted immediately by the man who is the cornerstone of the town of Creel, the mayor, Fernando. He welcomed us all into his city with the warmth of an old friend and guided us to the hostile where we would be staying. As I walked to the door, so warped it was unable to close completely, I noticed a couple of native children, in their flowered skirts and outdated sweat suits, following in the wake of our party. These children, Alma, Carla, and Mario were an inseparable part of our group for the rest of our trip. 

The first walk to our work site was a harrowing experience. We moved past the small card board looking huts that the decedents of the Tarahamara natives called their homes. I was later informed, when I went to the cave that a few Tarahamara elders called home, that they were the indigenous people who hid in the mountains when the Spanish invaded Mexico. Their descendents, who inhabited the town of Creel, now lived in these small homes with tin roofs and dirt floors. I walked past them and I was moved to tears. I did not understand how anyone could survive living like this. I couldn’t imagine a life outside of my three bedroom home, with all its utilities.  There was no explanation for the smiles on the faces of people I passed, feeding their chickens in front of their decaying excuses for a home. 

Later on my trip, when I went to the one room home that supported Alma, Carla, Mario and their ten other family members, I was even more bewildered. They had absolutely nothing. They had no money, no valuable material possessions, and only one bed between the twelve of them. But, they lived happily. Their house, dirt floor and all, was a place of incredible warmth. I stepped inside and I could immediately feel it.  But I sensed something beyond this world that hung in the air, grabbed hold of me, and wrapped me in its arms. It was the warmth of being in a place where a house that contained no material possessions was full to the brim with love and family. I breathed it in. It was like breathing mountain air for the first time, untouched by the pollution of city life, of city ways. I have never felt anything like it since.

A town of ten thousand people

In a town of ten thousand people, I was stupefied to learn that the most money a family makes translates to about five hundred dollars a year. On the main street through town, the small shops and restaurants that were almost completely deserted. It seemed as though they were there for us, for outsiders who didn’t live in the town. The only store frequented by townspeople seemed to be the grocers.  Everything else was hand crafted. By the end of my journey I was given a tiny basket made from dried out pine needles, that still smell of pine today, and a drum that was made of real animal hide and hand painted by a little boy in the town, among other trinkets of perfection. Admiring the time and the effort that went into such projects was like examining the threads of a spider web. The projects looked as though they could have taken days to complete. But, in Creel, that time ceases to be. Night and day comes and goes freely, but they do not encroach on the pace of living. It is slow and steady and, above all else, purposeful.

So, we began building. The concrete foundation had already been poured on a previous trip, and so we were left with the task of filling the foundation with rock, and then starting to place bricks for the walls. The rocks for the foundation, and the bricks for the wall, were in the yard of a man who lived down the lane from our site. So, in an old red pick up truck, whose bumper was tied on with a yellow rope, we traveled back and forth, hauling rock and brick. The rocks were chunks of cement, probably broken off from one of the many buildings that laid in ruin, nothing special. But, the bricks were individually packed and formed out of a mixture of clay and straw that dried in the sun. The bricks were a work of art. Handling them was tricky, for applying to much pressure would crumple them into dirt in your hands. But, I perfected the skill. I even learned how to mix mortar from water and mud. These bricks, so fragile and delicate, were strong enough to build the walls of this building we were creating together. It seemed impossible, and yet the possibility of it was unfolding before my eyes, as I helped to place the bricks and scrape of the excess mortar as it gushed out from beneath them. 

Many trials arose in the process of building. Things happen in Creel that would never be a problem in life in the suburbs. The town went a day without water when a rusted pipe beneath the city broke.  The red pick up truck broke rather frequently, or in a freak experience I was lucky enough to participate in, got run up onto the diagonal wire that fastens telephone poles the ground and stuck, leaving me and the other people in the bed to dive out before we fell. There are accidents like forgetting to brush your teeth with water from a bottle instead of a sink and praying to God you don’t get sick because of it. Ten things inevitably went wrong for every one thing that turned out well. Fortunately, I have found that in a city like Creel, the experiences that do go right are so profound that they cloud over the negative ones in an instant. 

About midway through the week, we took a day trip to an orphanage that was tucked into the mountains. The buildings were old and uncared for. The yard where the children played was riddled with scrap metal from old cars. Their toys were outdated and broken. One little boy was attempting to skate around on one leg, because there was only one roller skate to be found. And yet, all of these children smiled at us from the moment we arrived, to the time we left, as they ran after the bus waving. We taught them how to play Uno, which became an incredibly popular game with all the children in Creel, and they taught us… me… that there was nothing in the world to wipe a smile from their faces. I held a girl who fell on the rough gravel of the schoolyard in my arms as she cried for a few moments, and then, miraculously, was ready to teach me a new song in her native language. For the hours I was there, I forgot completely that these children were poor, that they lived horribly, because being with them, I saw that their lives were beautiful. 

Heading for home

After seven days of intense work hauling and laying brick, that left me sun burned and exhausted, it was finally time to get back on the bus and head for home. The night before I left, I sat with the three children who had become members of my family, bidding them good bye, and knowing that I might not see them again. I sat with Alma on my one side looking beautiful in her teal skirts, Mario on the other in his sweatshirt of some cartoon I knew hadn’t been on television for some years, and with Carla in my lap, as I played with her lovely black hair. And so we sat there, hugging and holding one another because I didn’t know how to speak the words I wanted to say in the language they understood. A tear rolled down Carla’s cheek, and I wiped it from her face, and kissed her on the forehead. It was one of the hardest good byes I have ever made because I was saying good-bye not only to the children, and their way of life, but to life as I had learned to live it while in Creel. And, I was not sure I was ready to get back to the fast paced and material existence of my own world just yet. 

So, on the bus the next morning, as we pulled out of the city and headed down the mountain, the clock began to tick again. The timelessness of Creel was disappearing the farther I got away from it. Creel was a place of impossibility, a place where I could build walls that should not have been strong enough to stand, but did, and I could find people who should not, by the standards I had been taught all my life, been able to be happy, but were. I do not see my life leading back to Creel anytime in the near future, but, from the gaudy yellow church that stood out against the clear mountain sky, to the orphanage full of smiling faces and hands eager to take my own, to the site where we created something literally from mud and dirt, Creel is within me forever.