Mexican Oil, Mexican Corn: Two Reports

My husband sent me two links today. One is to an NPR article about the politics and problems besetting Mexican oil, and the other is to an article about many aspects of food here. I think they are both blog-worthy.

The Mexican oil article is rather disquieting. Looming Energy Crisis In Mexico Stirs Debate is the title, and things don't get any cheerier after that. I think of Mexico as a country that HAS oil, but while that is true now, Pemex has been enough of a cash cow for the government, according to the article, that reserves could run short as soon as seven years from now. Funding that could have gone into improving long-term oil production has been diverted in a variety of ways. Of course "could run short" is not the same thing as "will run short." We'll see.

Here's another bit: "Despite being a major oil exporter, Mexico imports 40 percent of its gasoline because Pemex does not have the capacity to refine its own crude." I knew that importation was occurring, but I didn't realize it was that high a percentage of the gasoline. Oddly, while gas prices at the pump up north have done their big climbs, our prices have only gone up a little. That's because the federal government here in Mexico subsidizes gas prices at the pump.

Turning to corn, Corn Patches and Dispatches:Notes on a recent trip to Mexico is an article that ranges from milpas (cornfields or small farm fields) to Wal-Mart. Some (but not all) of the comments were interesting too.

Mexican Cat Misty

There are plenty of Mexican cats, since spaying and neutering are pretty rare here. One of them lives with us:  Misty, shown here exploring a bouquet. She came into our lives through an unlikely series of events. In 2005, we were living in the charming small town of Bernal, about an hour from the city of Queretaro. We rented a house, fixed it up, and thought we were going to live there indefinitely.

One day, a small kitten turned up in the inside patio of a an American friend of ours, chased there by a huge tomcat. His houseguest fed the little waif, but it couldn't stay long as our friend was quite allergic to cats.

I enjoyed holding the pale orange kitten, who was quick to purr in my arms. When the kitten was offered to me, I could think of many reasons to say no, but my heart yearned for her. Kelly was inclined to be rational -- who needs a cat when they are planning to go back to the US for a few months? But our landlord (who lived next door to our rental) was willing to feed the kitten while we were gone and nobody else had turned up willing to take her. Tossing her back onto the street was not an appealing option.

So Kelly and I agreed that Misty would become ours. She was a dear little thing, and very entertaining as kittens are, chasing balls around our house and back patio. Other cats could easily get into the patio via rooftops, and twice we came home to find she had literally been scared sh*tless by one of the large cat bosses of our neighborhood. It was quite a mess to clean up, and Kelly created a little covered cat area in the patio where she could be outside, with her own door inside, and sheltered from the bullies.

Spaying Not Easy

We thought Misty was younger than she must have been, for very soon she went into heat. Once that was past, we looked into having her spayed. A vet in a larger town could do it for 1500 pesos, about $150 US. A retired vet in Bernal was going to do it for a more reasonable price, but after some time he confessed that it had been some years since he had spayed a cat, and he was concerned that his skills might not be up to it. By then, we needed to go back to Colorado, where we would sell our house, pack things up, and return to Mexico. We found a local horse-and-cattle vet in Bernal, who gave Misty a "birth control" shot not available in the US, but he had never spayed a cat. He said he would come by and give her the shot while we were gone, but he never did. Luckily, the housing Kelly had created for her kept the boys away.

Departure and Reunion

I was in tears when we left her there, but I had to agree with Kelly that it was the best thing to do. Once back in Colorado, we did succeed in selling our house, but everything took longer than we expected. It was half a year later that we came back to Mexico in our little RV, with LarryDog. This is when fate intervened by bringing us to Lake Chapala, where things unfolded and we ended up buying our house here.

When we finally went back to Bernal to get Misty, it was no surprise that she hid under the bed and wouldn't come out. We slept there that night, and I woke in the night feeling her climbing over me and purring gently. We were friends again, and she was a good little traveler back to Lake Chapala. Getting her spayed her was simple and inexpensive.

So now Misty lives with Moonlight, our part-Siamese cat we brought back from Colorado the next year, and our two dogs. Misty keeps them all in line. Just yesterday there was a startled yelp from our Rottweiler Lola as Misty whacked her for some infraction. Misty has had enough large animals bothering her; now, she's the boss.

Dogs at Lake Chapala

It's a dog's life, all right, as our sleeping Lola demonstrates here. She's the Rottweiler we got a year ago, at the age of about 6 months. We got her from a woman who had gotten her from one of the three animal rescue organizations (all foreign-run) in the Lake Chapala area, and then realized that three dogs was really enough for her!  We heard that Lola had been turned in to the Animal Shelter by the foreigners who had bred her, so she has never known life on the street. She is a total love, but her presence and deep bark do have a good deterrent effect on would-be ne'er-do-wells.

Many foreigners who live in this area adopt Mexican dogs, and it generally works out well. The main caveat would be to use your common sense about what size dog to get, relative to your ability to handle it and to give it enough exercise. Many of the dogs who have known hunger and the street life are immensely grateful to humans who adopt them. (It's hard to know sometimes if a dog is homeless or just belongs to a family that lets it run, but my impression is that while there are a lot of street dogs in this area, the shelters  and their spay/neuter programs have made inroads into the problem.) Many Mexicans are real dog-lovers too.

These dogs may come with some emotional baggage, so patience may be required. See another of my websites, training-dogs.com, for lots of information on training dogs with pain-free, positive methods.

Another bit of advice would be to take your dog to a good veterinarian for an exam. If you have other animals at home, you might do that even before taking your new friend home. In this area, we are fortunate to have quite a few very good vets who speak English.

If you are driving down, you can bring your dogs with you. We did this with LarryDog, our now-11 mixed breed from Colorado. Here, he's demonstrating a trick where he waits to eat the bits of dog food on his paws till he gets told "Okay!" He needed to be in good health and to have a vet's certificate saying so, plus he needed a very current rabies shot and paperwork to prove it, to get into Mexico. In typical Mexican-style bureaucratic fashion, you don't know if such paperwork is really going to be needed and in Larry's case, it wasn't. At the border, he was barking his head off, guarding our little motorhome from the uniformed Mexican official, and the man asked if the dog bit. Assured that he didn't normally, the man just asked if we had any drugs or guns, and when I said no, that was it for LarryDog's border formalities.

I've heard that going into the US is much the same. The requirements are pretty much the same, and as a middle-class Mexican friend of mine said, "It's easier for dogs and cats to get into the US than it is for people!" Quite a few foreigners have adopted dogs here and taken them north with little or no problems.

There are a variety of pet-sitting options here, from Doglandia, a boarding facility run by a very caring foreign woman, to in-house pet-sitters, to having a trusted maid or gardener either come by or stay in your home. The most popular sitters are often booked way in advance.

Flying with dogs internationally can be done, but I don't know anything about how easy it is. Neither of my darlings shown above would qualify for being squeezed under my seat in the cabin of a plane, and I would be very reluctant to subject them to a journey in a crate in the luggage bay.

You can get a decent array of dog foods and toys here, though I do miss the more holistic foods available up north, and I make part of our dog food. Interestingly, LarryDog suffered from a terrible itching problem in Colorado, no matter what we fed him, and that has gone away completely here!

Another time, I'll talk about cats.

Two Mexican Adventures

Bits of my past are reflected in the two websites I've visited lately.

I'm a Stanford graduate and the alumni newsletter often has interesting articles. But I must admit I was surprised to come across one about a group riding bicycles across the state of Jalisco, where I live. By the time I read the article, they were long gone, but still I found this an encouraging point of view on what some young people are doing: an ecologically-minded rock and roll band bicycling through Mexico!

As a long-time Quaker, I'm on the email list of the American Friends Service Committee, which for almost seventy years has done a summer work camp in Mexico. This year, it's in the Sierra Norte de Puebla. This link was written before the project began but gives you an idea of what they do:

http://www.afsc.org/latinamerica/int/mexicosummer.htm 

And there are photos here of what's been going on this year.

http://picasaweb.google.com/MexicoSummer/MexicoSummerProject2008

I know that most of my readers are not of an age to be candidates for this project, but maybe you have family members or young adult friends who might be.

In any case, I do like reading about young people taking on such worthwhile projects!

Mexican Fireworks

Fireworks are a way of life here in Mexico. Most of them are the really noisy kind, but sometimes there are displays that are quite beautiful.

In June, our town of San Juan Cosala and all other towns with San Juan in their names celebrated the saint's day for Saint John the Baptist. This was preceded by nearly two weeks of loud fireworks, often late at night or very early in the morning. We foreigners tend to grumble to each other about all the racket, and I even know Mexicans who don't like the noise. For myself, I found it easier to accept the noise when I learned that the traditional purpose is said to be getting God's attention. Hey, I work on that myself, though way more quietly!

Kelly went down to the plaza on the night of the pretty fireworks and got some photos. I combined some of them here:

This design is on t-shirts, sweatshirts, etc., at my Cafepress store. This is a nifty website, where you can sign up for an account at no charge (or a modest charge if you use, as I do, the premium account) and upload your photos or artwork. They can be put on several dozen different items such a various t-shirts (including an organic cotton one), sweatshirts, note cards, etc., which you or others can then buy. They are quickly manufactured when someone orders them. Very cool... I have been using this for other websites of mine, but plan to add a bunch of Mexican t-shirts over time!