Border Update: Poo and All the Rest, VOL VIII

To Those Good Folks With Whom I Like To Exchange Stories, share ideas,
mutually engage in real work, visit and generally keep up to date:

We moved down to Nogales the day before yesterday. We’ll spend a few days here at the Casa de Misericordia (House of Mercy), which serves as the BorderLinks compound and neighborhood community space, and then, on Friday, we’ll move in with our host families. We’ll continue reading, writing, and project-ing for our classes, which will now meet at the Casa. So, we’ll spend most everyday, during the day, at the Casa. (The Casa is a compound consisting of a dormitory (18 beds) with a cafeteria downstairs, a day care building, an office building, a classroom building, all made of concrete block, plus a flower garden, and basketball/soccer court.) Throughout our time in Nogales, we have two hours, three times a week with a Spanish tutor.

Everyday at lunch, a staff of three ladies and a couple of volunteers prepare and serve a noonday meal to one or two hundred neighborhood kids who’s parents work in the maquiladores, Free-Trade-Factories, (or maquilas for short) and, so, can’t come home for lunch. The plan is for us, semester students to eat with the children most days. Yesterday, the meal consisted of pasta salad and refried beans with crackers on the side and a cup full of sugar water colored red; that is, “juice.”

Lest you miss the irony, know that I’m hypoglycemic. My blood sugar rushed upward and, promptly, crashes if I eat sugar or basic carbohydrates. Basically, if I understand it right, my pancreas is on steroids, so whenever I eat anything related to sugar, it releases insulin with the force of Niagara Falls. For about twenty minutes I feel like I took speed: I start sweating, my face gets all red, I feel like I could conquer Everest, and my vision becomes incredibly clear. Then everything reverses: irritable, lethargic, apathetic, uninspired, and my brain becomes really foggy and slow. The after effects last up to a day or two. Frijoles (beans), pasta, crackers, and punch. Pues (Well).

So I got out a can of tuna. Looks like I’ll be eating a lot of it these next few weeks. “Hey Nathan. What’d you have for lunch today? Eh?” Tuna. “How about yesterday? Tomorrow?” You guessed it. Heck. If you’re considering a career path in canned fish, let me know.


I believe that we are called to take steps to the margins of society. I believe that we have a responsibility to know about and experience the underbelly of the global economy, to know the people on whose backs we ride. We all, in one-way or another, catch piggyback rides at others’ expense. It started, if not before, in middle school—everywhere. And due to our global influence made possible through cheap energy, we can, incredibly, ride the backs of others on the far side of our own continent and far side of the globe.

As I was saying, I believe that we are called to take steps beyond our privilege, however it might express itself (wealth, age, association, coolness, race, gender, southern-ness, whatever). We are called to ride the wave between comfort and panic. We are called to hear and tell stories with folks we don’t know and we’d be unlikely to know because of the various walls that divide us. We’re called to offer mutual aid and support across the boundaries of division because we can create a world that is better for all involved.

Yeah, but the truth of the matter is that philosophy, ideas, whatever—although it may glow with justice and goodness, Listen—it’s not easy. Eeeesy. This is not my regular life. If you’ll allow me, once again, a moment of irreverent honesty, I’ve got little bit of reality to share with you.


The truth of the matter is, I still don’t know the family I’m going to be living with for five weeks. I haven’t met them. I don’t know their name. We meet on Thursday night; we move in on Friday. During lunch, I wonder at the four year old kids speaking Spanish: they’re vastly ahead of me. I keep catching myself flabbergasted by their skills. How can they know all those words? I think. Then, I remember they grew up with the language. My Spanish is improving, but, lord, I’ve got a long way to go. I’m hypoglycemic, and the people here eat beans and tortillas. I have a clear mind because I live in an affluent family in the most affluent country the world has ever known.

So, aside from my concern about where and who I’m living with, language, and food, I also carry concerns about having concerns: “Nathan. You’re going to deal with it for five weeks, tops. You get to go back to your posh life. Deal with it. If you were born in most any other place in the world, you’d just learn to live with a foggy brain. You’d read four times slower because you would eat carbohydrates because if you didn’t, you wouldn’t eat—But I’ve got projects and continued reading on the border.” The tension pulls back and forth. And then I think about language: “Nathan, really. Don’t you realize that tons of folks all over the world move to other countries and regions out of necessity and can’t speak the language yet. They’re learning as fast as they can, but they don’t necessarily have the four people you have that speak their native language with whom you can relax and speak without thinking.” I feel my body tighten. Before and, moreso, after meals, my belly feels stiff.

Really what I’m trying to tell you is that I was constipated. Really, there’s nothing like it. Full. Over-full, all the time. My cup filleth up, except it’s supposed to subside. Except it doesn’t. “Oh, I think I’m going to sit down. Gosh, I’m wiped-out.” Laying down is no relief. Full. Over-full, all the time. And remember, I’m hypoglycemic. In order to control my blood sugar, I eat every few hours. So, I add a little more. A little more. Full. Over-full, all the time.

I think perhaps the most disappointing thing in the whole world is a full belly that just won’t let go in the moment, the judgment day of constipation, at the pleasant surprise of cool porcelain, on the pot.

My fellow students looked me over and asked, “Nathan. Are you alright? You’re looking a little…” but they never finished the sentence. Either they couldn’t figure it out, or they didn’t grow up in the house with a nurse as their mother. I hear that in some houses bodily functions are not dinner conversations. Well. I’ll let you guess about mine.


I apologize in advance: Early last summer (’06), I was getting into stories. I decided that I’d make my way into stories by writing down stories as I heard them or as I experienced them. I was in the mountains of North Carolina with my father. We were camping and going on hikes everyday. From the time he’d picked me up from school, I kept my eyes and ears tuned to stories, but I just didn’t see any. Anything I contemplated writing down was more like a summation of events, which are lists and, although they can be engaging at times, they’re not really stories. Then—

This one morning, I was making our lunch, spreading mayonnaise on bread making sandwiches or something, and my father walked down from the tent where he’d been sweeping it out. He walked kind of stiff legged like, and said, “Oh, um.” He looked at me with the strained eyes of a two-year-old which reveals the secret of secret places. “It’s like a snake that wants to get out,” he paused, “I mean BAD!” He waddled off to the camp bathroom. Struggling. He said something over his shoulder about if it started raining that I ought to put his clothes under the tarp. He, really, was in no position to make requests.

Okay, but that’s not all.

The next morning, same time. There I was fixing lunch again. Spreading mayo or something, when my Dad dropped a bag of ropes on the table, laughed and said, “S—time,” though I couldn’t distinguish his syllable. “What time?” I asked. “He he, SNAKE time!” he said as he heading for the bathroom.

And there it was, hissing at me in the face: a story. It was the first one I wrote down in my storybook- journal—ever. In spite of any insult you may feel I give my father in repeating this story, I salute him for it. It made me realize that the stories are all around us, and most of the time, story boils down to ten seconds of dialog with a good five minutes of build up. Stories. They’re our lives.


Saul Alinsky, the Chicagoan organizer with Back of our Yards, made frequent allusions to bodily functions and the bathroom. He justified it because he said, more or less, “Look. There are few things in this world that are truly universal. But everybody has to go to the bathroom. Everybody. So everyone can relate.” So perhaps I speak of the bathroom for you to understand. Or perhaps it’s because I grew up in the house with my mother, the nurse. Perhaps it’s because of our family’s medical conversations or my father’s loose orifice (mouth, mouth! Get your mind out of the gutter.) Or perhaps my thoughts are just preoccupied with the simple pleasures of life.


So, I’ve held you in suspense long enough.

I took a poo, and it was glorious.

I’ve since taken a few more. I’ll allow your imagination to fill in the blessed sighs of relief.


Today, I walked around with my Spanish tutor. He’s a fantastic man named Elias. Walking by the kitchen, he said, “Huele de tortillas” (It smells of tortillas). “Huele,” I repeated. “Pies” (feet), I said, “Pies huelen” (feet smell). Almost immediately, I asked him, “Como se dice,” (How do you say) “cuando pies huelen como un pescado se morio?” (when feet smell like a fish that died?) He told me the word is “apestan (stink).” Tus (your) pies apestan de pescado muerto (Your feet smell of dead fish).

I swear: humor is definitely one of the best ways to learn and communicate.

Nathan