So we have been back in the United States for almost a week. Now that we are back, I feel more safe in giving my opinion on some of the things we experienced without any repercussions. The first thing to mention is the city we were living in. We lived in Guanajuato City, in the state of Guanajuato. Actually we were living in a small suburb of Guanajuato known as Noria Alta.
Little did we know, the state of Guanajuato for the past few years, has been the most violent state in all of Mexico. We wouldn’t have known that if family members didn’t text us once in a while after reading an article in the New York times speaking to that. While we lived in the state of Guanajuato, dozens of police officers were murdered throughout the state by the cartel. The cartel in the state mostly stole gasoline from gasoline trucks, and various pipes that supplied it all over the region. A few weeks before we left, a drug cartel stormed into a nearby town of Irapuarto, and executed 28 men who were living in a drug rehab. This all went down when we were vacationing in the Yucatan. That made me a little nervous when I read that. On the way home from the airport, my close friend, Steve asked me if we ran into any dangerous experiences in Mexico, and I honestly said no. The only time I was shook down for money was from the Mexico City police.
The first month we were here lots of friends and family urged us to move back because of the violence they were reading about. Bonnie asked the owner of the grocery store across the street what he thought about the violence and the cartel. He said where we lived was very safe, and that we really shouldn’t be worried. The police here were armed to the teeth. They drove around in pickup trucks, with police in full riot gear, holding onto their machine guns, and occasionally a turret machine gun installed onto the truck.
I’m not going to miss seeing the police armed as if a war is going on in the next town over, but they are armed that way because there is a war going on in the next town over. There’s also a war on the police in the state, and I still pray for them every day for their safety, and you should too.
Our kids went to a private school called Instituto de Guanajuato. It’s a great school, but they crossed the line with me and it gave me a bad taste in my mouth for the remainder the kids were there. Before they allowed us to enroll, the school psychologist wanted to have a family interview. The interview was a total head fake, it lasted a few hours of our entire family sitting in a very small room, asking us questions that were not relevant, such as learning each child’s developmental stages, (when they were potty trained, when they crawled, walked, first words), she didn’t care about those answers, she was watching us deal with our kids conflict. That’s why they put us in a small room and asked us monotonous questions. The kids put hands on each other a lot, got into loud screaming fights, and we put them in the corner. Putting a child in a corner was as if we punched them in the face with a closed fist. The psychologist was horrified, and afterwards we had to have a second meeting with the administrator of the entire school, the psychologist, and another person to discuss our disciplining our kids. I was seething the entire time but through grit teeth said “I’d be open to any guidance you could give us in disciplining our kids”. I really wanted our kids to go there because it was so close, and the teachers were all really great.
I think I referenced wanting to get that off my chest after we had this second meeting. I’m still a little angry about that. By the way, we kept putting our kids in the corner. I don’t think a school has any business telling parents how to discipline their own children, unless we are seriously physically abusing our kids, they need to stay in their lane.
The hardest thing about this trip was seeing our kids start a new school, and be the new kids. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for new students, and watching our older three kids walk into their class for the first time, seeing the fear in their eyes really broke my heart. That’s why when there is a new kid in my kids school, I order them to be friends with them, and I go out of my way to welcome the new family. In second grade I asked a new kid to play soccer during first recess, and we ended up becoming best friends soon after.
Our third child is a handful. He doesn’t pay attention that much, but he wears his heart on his sleeve and he will always tell you how he feels about anything. I will never forget the look on his eyes of sadness or fear when he walked into his class. As he walked into his class, he noticed all the back packs were on the bench outside, and before he walked all the way into class, he came back outside and put his backpack on the bench as well. He isn’t a detail oriented child, and when I saw him do that, it made me feel so sad for him. He was concentrating so hard that morning, that he didn’t want to screw anything up. All the kids did a fine job assimilating to their own classes, I randomly would walk in to the school early and watch them play with the kids during recess, they seemed to get a long with their classmates well. But that was easily the hardest part of the trip.
The pandemic shut the school down around the same time we vacationed in Mexico City. Bonnie took over online schooling while I worked every morning through the afternoon. The kids were not used to this, and neither was Bonnie. Bonnie has a hate relationship with technology, and the school gave almost no guidance on how to integrate technology into the schooling. They just expected our kids to do the exact same amount of work they were doing before the pandemic. This was a fatal problem, and the parents did rise up and demand less obligations on their kids. Some days were better than others, but Bonnie was a real champ and I was proud of the effort she put in.
We planned to fly to Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and maybe Cuba during this trip. The pandemic closed all of those countries. We did the best we could, despite all the restrictions. When in the Yucatan, we actually went through a checkpoint that took our temperatures. The airports took your temperature three times before you could board a plane, and they had each person fill out a medical questionnaire under penalty of perjury. They didn’t do that in the States.
In another seven or eight years we are going to do this again God willing. We won’t be going back to Mexico, I think we will be heading to Ireland. Overall I’m very glad we had this experience. I was talking to my daughter about the trip and she told me that she enjoyed it alot. She also told me that she doesn’t like Frida Khalo’s art, she said it was too sad, and I agree with her. She was able to really experience her art, and we took her to her house and she got to see her art studio. That’s an experience I’ll never forget.
I don’t know the depth of how much this trip affected each and every child. Maybe I’ll blog about it when it creeps up into conversation. At this point I am tired, and won’t be keeping this up anymore. I will be looking around at different businesses to see if they can publish this in a book for my kids to read later on in life so they can remember the trip. I’m glad we experienced this trip, for all the stumbling blocks in the road, it was a great trip. Now we are back in the real world again and that’s a welcome change, at least for me. I’m glad you followed along with us, and please pray for this transition period as we unpack, and clean our house, and unpack some more. I’m grateful to God that he protected us while in Guanajuato, and thankful that we made it home. This was an amazing, Six Months Abroad.
Our Family Adventure 