Jennie Gershater is a petite woman of thirty-two with riveting brown eyes, a pert nose and an athlete's lithe body. The fact that she had joined a group of five hard-charging men in Flagstaff and driven to Mexico in a fetid van with three dogs, multiple video cameras and a hoola hoop spoke to her fortitude. But she was also a spiritually conscious graduate of Naropa University from the politically, environmentally, and socially correct town of Boulder, Colorado, who didn't drink and couldn't quote Borat. I had no doubt she'd be able to handle the barrio. But could she handle us?
When we got to the Palacio on Monday, Mike had taken me aside. "Jennie lost it, right before you got here. Just burst out crying in the van."
"What for?"
"'Cause we weren't wearing our seatbelts. Her cousin died in a car accident a few years ago because he wasn't wearing his. Dude, she freaked."
"I'm not sure how this will go," Jennie confided to me on Wednesday morning. We were driving to the barrio, where she and her brother were scheduled to teach the children about the panels twice that day. Mati sat in the back seat without speaking. "My Spanish isn't very good," she continued. "And I'm shy."
Jennie and Mati were our education specialists. Mati taught children about the environment with what he called "enviro-tainment camps," while Jennie had finished her Master's in May.
"In what?" I asked.
"It was a dual concentration in dance/movement therapy and body psychotherapy," she said. "Technically, my focus is community-based somatic counseling and psychology."
I had no idea what she was talking about. Naropa, psychosomatic therapy, community-based movement, enviro-tainment: this brother-sister duo approached things differently than I did. But Mati had been charismatic with the children yesterday, and Jennie, even if she didn't party with us, sure smelled good. Plus, she would make a great designated driver.
Jennie and Mati had expected a couple of dozen schoolchildren for their lessons. There were eighty in the first class alone.
The vast steel roof above the cement floor of the central schoolyard served a single purpose: to provide shade for the kids. It was the middle of January, and perhaps 75°, but in the direct sunlight it felt warmer. I couldn't imagine what it would be like in September. "Imagine 110° with 95% humidity," a local had told me the day before.
The teachers corralled the students into a broad U beneath the roof. Boys gathered in gender-specific clumps; girls did the same. Many of the boys had product in their hair that inverted their cowlicks. The girls giggled and whispered to one another as they settled into place.
The faces watching as Mati set up a solar panel were typically Mexican--black or brown hair, brown skin and brown eyes--with few exceptions. One young girl had strawberry blond hair and blue eyes. Another had big pouty lips and a concentrated expression that broke apart radiantly when she smiled. A boy of perhaps eight watched the proceedings with blue eyes, his wool-knit hat pulled low over fair features. He could have been an American from the 'hood.
In fact, in their t-shirts and sweatshirts, dresses and blouses, sneakers and jeans, the kids could have been from anywhere. It was easy to forget the context of their lives... until you walked back outside, into the barrio.
When the teachers had successfully herded the children into order, Jennie began talking in Spanish. She spoke tentatively at first, watching the translator for corrections. As she talked, Mati began jumping around the semi-circle, acting out concepts--the sun, the wind, electricity, light--and encouraging the children to mimic his behavior. When he had made a complete tour of the semi-circle, he returned to the front, where Khyber helped him hook a small black electric fan to the positive and negative wires of the panel. It began instantly to spin.
The children were riveted. Gone was the squirming and jostling that had characterized their assembly, replaced by concentrated faces. A chubby boy in a red sweater stood up and asked a question, his face focused in thought, the color of his sweater standing out in marked contrast with the blue walls behind him. The girl with the pouty lips swiveled to watch Jennie's answer.
Jennie's Spanish seemed to move deeper into her body with each passing breath. She gesticulated, finding individual children in the sea of faces and coaxing answers from them. Mati did a quick run around the circle, slapping hands in exuberance. The kids cheered.
Twenty minutes passed, then thirty. The children of Fatima's Vicente Guerrero de Guaymas Primary School were engaged.
Mike Chase stood in the yard when we returned home in baggy Carhartts and a loose t-shirt. He'd spent much of the day putting together the panels with a power drill and bolts. That assembly had gone well, but another problem remained. The Comision Federal de Electricidad--the Federal Electricity Commission, or CFE--didn't want us to tie our solar panel systems into the grid.
The CFE, Mexico's state-owned electric monopoly, controls and develops the national electric industry, and they didn't seem particularly sympathetic to renewable energy in general and our project in particular. Despite his best efforts, Mike still hadn't gained permission to connect the wind turbine to the grid; the negotiations necessary to connect the solar panels were perhaps more formidable yet. We had the advantage of El Presidente's support, but even El Presidente lacked the power to dictate demands to one of the most powerful state-owned companies in Mexico.
What if we couldn't get permission? Would it be possible to call the project a success if the solar panels weren't actually producing any usable energy?
Mike was on his cell phone, talking, talking. It was what he did best, but even he was up against distressingly deep layers of bureaucracy.
Late that night, for the second evening in a row, we settled in front of our computers.
The Guaymas Project was a trial run for Greenscool; provided it went well, more ambitious initiatives in more remote areas were to follow. Without media outreach, though, the chances of raising funding for future projects were nil.
We'd committed to posting video, blogs and photos about the project every day. Now reality set in: such work would need to be executed once the panels were installed and the teaching completed and meetings with municipal authorities wrapped up. We were looking at another long night.
Though I'd published and produced extensively in the past, I'd never attempted anything like this from the field. As I watched Mike shift the components of the home page for the seventh time, I was shocked at how easily it could be done. He was using iWeb, an inexpensive Apple product. It's not the sort of program you'd want to use to run a professional website, but for M.A.S.H.-unit type dispatches such as ours, it was ideal. We could create new pages in minutes and post them with the click of a button. This was guerilla broadcasting with an edge.
Kina sat over his computer in the main room, editing his photographic take from the day. Images scrolled across the screen: an eight-year-old girl, her expression achingly distant, peered at the camera from behind a whitewashed column. A single hand, fingers covered in warts, grasped a wire fence. The paint of a Coca-Cola mural peeled from a bright red wall. What had been, hours earlier, part of Guaymas was now snatched from that moment and shifted into ours.
Mati sat in front of his monitor, moving panels of video from the hard drive into a streaming montage. Kina had pulled together last night's clip in iMovie, but now Mati used the more sophisticated Final Cut Pro to create a three-minute representation of the journey down to Guaymas. A waving hand went white on the monitor, then focused back in on the Border Patrol truck in front of the van. Mike sat in the front seat, relating the details of the bribe he had just been forced to pay to get the backup panels into the country. Mati laid in a track by Michael Franti; before long, everyone in the room was humming the refrain.
I wrote. Before my company's collapse in October, I'd edited a climbing magazine, but although I'd spent the past fifteen years laboring over the sentences and narrative arc of alpinists and their adventures, now I was the one telling a story. The concentration necessary to create a single sentence was so intense I hardly heard the music playing from Kina's computer.
Mike walked from person to person, checking progress, a cigarette in one hand, a Tecate in the other. "You done yet?" he asked me.
I swam up out of an ocean of words. "No," I grunted. "Getting there." Then down again, into the depths of the page.
Mike Chase leaned in over Mati's shoulder.
"You know, I've never liked those Suzanne Summers-type shots of impoverished children. Too much of a bummer. You need to get the kids smiling in there or nobody will be interested."
Kina and Mike looked at one another, then looked at me. Mr. Chase, jovial bear, was absolutely right.
It was if we had all plugged into the same power source. The synthesis of our individual creativity into a greater whole was electric.
It was nearly midnight when we finished. With no internet at the house, we drove back to the cafe. Closed.
"Hey, look," said Kina. "The bar above it is open."
Mike and I bumped fists, laughing. Atop the cafe, the wi-fi connection was perfect. The Jack and Sprites weren't bad, either.
1 a.m. Home. I lay down on the couch cushions that comprised my bed and closed my eyes. Visions of the day--Jennie straightening her spine as she spoke, Kina focusing his lens on a leaping girl, words metastasizing on the screen in front of me--tumbled through my head. It seemed like hours before I dreamed.