When I’m only travelling for a short time, it’s nice not having concrete plans or a routine. I enjoy waking up whenever, deciding in the moment what I feel like doing, and languorously following through with my desires.
But if I’m travelling for longer, that gets old really quickly. It’s tiring having to constantly decide what I’m going to do. I miss having routine, and people to talk to, and a sense that I’m doing something worthwhile with my time.
Which is why, after my two months of Spanish classes, I thought I’d try doing a Workaway.
Workaway is a site where people post volunteer positions, usually in exchange for food and board. Sometimes it’s with not-for-profits, sometimes it’s just a family who need help around the house, and other times it’s businesses looking for cheap labour, like hostels.
I was drawn to the not-for-profits. It would be a perfect way, I thought, for me to get to know a community while also contributing to it. I spent a few hours on the site carefully combing through all the options in Mexico, narrowing it down to 5 that I was really keen on, and shooting them long, personalised messages in a mix of Spanish and English.
….None of them wrote back.
So when an English school in Veracruz reached out to me and asked me if I’d like to come volunteer with them, and I saw that they had a plethora of gushing reviews in which previous volunteers talked about really getting to know the community and work on their Spanish, I figured I might as well say yes.
Of course, that’s when a few of the people I had messaged finally got back to me and asked if I was still interested in volunteering with them. But it was too late – I’d already said yes to the English school, and I didn’t want to flake on them at the last moment.
And I’m glad I did that, because my time in Veracruz really challenged the way I thought about Mexico. I got to meet lots of locals and talk to them about some really thorny issues. I got to see a city that in so many ways defied my expectations. And I discovered one of my favourite Mexican foods – tacos de guisado.
Veracruz
I spent most of my time in Heroica Veracruz, (usually called Veracruz for short), and Boca del Rio, the next city over – both of which, just to confuse people, are also within the state of Veracruz.
Both cities are on the coast, and in some ways they’re exactly like what you’d expect – there’s boardwalks that are particularly alive in the morning with free Zumba classes, rollerbladers, runners, and the occasional cyclist. There’s a plethora of fancy hotels right on the water, like the Hilton and Four Seasons. And there’s so many ginormous shopping malls. The fanciest one, Plaza Andamar, was right on the water, had a breathtaking view of the ocean, and was full of high-end stores like Desigual and United Colors of Benetton.
But if you go a street or two away from the malls and the hotels, it looks like a completely different place. Homes are largely made of cement blocks, often with bars on the windows. The buses are ancient US school buses in various states of disrepair that I don’t think would be considered roadworthy in Australia. A lot of streets don’t even have sidewalks.
There are a few museums around the Zocalo in Veracruz, but apart from that, there aren’t a lot of cultural landmarks or community spaces. It’s a world away from Mexico City, where there are libraries and galleries and performance spaces down basically every street.
In Veracruz, when I asked people what they did for fun, or where they hung out, ‘going to the mall’ was a frequent response. And while some of the malls were super luxurious and bougie, they also had signs about kidnapping – because Veracruz has the highest kidnapping rates across the country.
It was a lot to get my head around. I felt safe in Veracruz though, even when I walked around late at night. Everyone would talk to me – when I’d buy groceries, when I’d stop at a taco stand, on the rare occasions that I caught a taxi – and a lot of them would be really deep conversations, in which I learned about things like Indigenous rights in Mexico (in brief: Indigenous people there are treated about as badly as they are in most other countries around the world), and got schooled on how to roll my r’s.
At one point an old man who’d been chatting with me paid for my lunch (without asking me – I only found out after). When I asked students where I could find the best chiles rellenos, a few offered to bring me some when their mothers or grandmothers made them, and one student actually did bring them and left them at the school for me.
I only had positive experiences with people there, including the police and random strangers I passed on the street. And yet Uliana, one of the other volunteers, got stopped by the police and threatened, and they took all the cash she had on her. I’d like to think that I’m better at avoiding trouble, but maybe I’m just lucky.
The Workaway
For my Workaway, I was staying with Juan Carlos (JC), one of the students from the school. JC was an anaesthetist and usually worked from 2pm till either 9pm, or much later into the night, coming back at 6 or 7am.
JC was super sweet, and because he was a single man living alone and hosting two girls (me and Uliana, a volunteer from the Czech Republic), he’d moved into his spare room so that we could share the master bedroom with our own bathroom and a lockable door. He was always super careful about making sure that we felt safe and comfortable, which was such a relief.
When JC wasn’t working late, he’d go to English classes in the morning, and if I was teaching at the same school and at the same time, I’d get a ride with him. If we arrived early, we’d sometimes grab tacos de guisado from this little spot near the school.
Tacos de guisado are soooo good. They’re tacos filled with rice and maybe beans, and a type of ‘guisado’, which as far as I can tell is like leftovers, except not really. My favourite was albondigas – these phenomenal lamb meatballs in a rich tomato based sauce – and papas con queso – patties made of spiced potato and cheese, coated in egg and fried. Tacos de guisado are the bomb in Veracruz – they’re usually only 10p, which is ridiculous for something so good. And they’re so big, too, that you don’t need that many to fill you up.
I had to split my time between classes in Boca del Rio and Heroica Veracruz, and we’d typically have classes in the morning, from either 8 or 9am till 10 or 11am, and then a break until the evening classes started at either 4 or 5pm and went till 9 or 10pm. If I was working at one place in the morning, I’d usually have evening classes in the other school.
Getting from one place to the next was not easy. I signed up to V-Bikes, a bike sharing program, but the bikes were super heavy and slow, and had designated parking/pickup spots, none of which were that close to either school. I often used a V-Bike to get to Boca in the morning when I couldn’t get a ride with JC, but sometimes the V-Bike parking spot nearest to his place (a 15min walk away) wouldn’t have any bikes there, and then I’d have to run to catch a bus.
The buses didn’t have designated stops or timetables, they just ran a route. It’d take me almost two hours to get to the school in Veracruz on my own, with a considerable amount of walking and a few bus transfers, but only 40 minutes by car if I could get a ride with JC, who worked nearby.
Uliana, who was there just for a vacation, hated the hours, but I actually didn’t mind. It made for a simple life. I’d go to school, then read or listen to audiobooks in between, maybe also shop for groceries or practice Spanish, and then head to the other school.
Not having that much else to do was nice, in a way – I didn’t have any FOMO, or feel like I should be doing more with my time. When I was at home, I could practice Spanish with JC, or chat to Uliana, or cook. I made lots of avocado smoothies, papaya smoothies, and mushroom pasta.
Classes were fun too, for the most part. The teachers were charismatic and there was good group chemistry, so it felt a bit like hanging out with a group of friends. The students always loved that I could speak Spanish, so when they didn’t know how to say something in English, they could say it in Spanish and I could help them with the translation.
Occasionally the teachers would just sit me in the room and ask the students to ask me questions. That could be boring sometimes because the students would be shy and I’d get asked what my name was, and where I was from, 5 different times. To avoid that, I started asking the students questions instead. I’d ask them about what TV shows they liked, or what they thought they’d be like when they got old, or why they wanted to learn English. That made it a lot more interesting.
My favourite thing was planning (and running) a Conversation Club meeting. I started with a game, and then got people in groups to talk about things like ‘What are the top 3 things you’d like to change about your country?’, ‘What do you think Veracruz will be like in 100 years’ and my favourite ‘Are men and women treated equally in Veracruz?’ I’d been so worried that it would bomb, but it actually went really well. People were so engaged and passionate.
I was surprised at how many of them were worried about climate change and thought that Veracruz would end up under water. I loved that some of them brought up wanting better sex education in schools. And while a lot of the students were hopeful about gender equality in Veracruz, saying that it had improved a lot, I heard that in a lot of smaller towns, especially in Chiapas, families still kept women from going to school and married them off young.
There were other things that surprised me about Veracruz. At one of the schools, one of the teachers was trans, another was gay, and another was a very devout Christian, and they were all very open about these things. They all got along, and the students loved all of them. That made me feel hopeful – I’m sure they’ve all gotten grief over their identities and preferences and beliefs elsewhere, but at least in this space, at this time, it felt like people were accepting.
I had mixed feelings about the school though. On the one hand, I spoke to the owner, Aaron, and he told me that teaching English was really just the method by which he could create change, but that the actual change he wanted to create was exposing locals to different ideas and ways of living.
By bringing in international guest teachers, he wanted to inspire them not to just get a job, get married, and have kids because that’s what’s expected and ‘normal’, but to live more intentionally. To think about stepping outside their comfort zones and choosing a different path. I thought that was really cool.
But on the other hand, I spoke to one of the teachers and learned that he only got paid 60p/hr – about $3. And he only got paid for the hours he was actually teaching classes, not for all the hours of prep that he had to do – and because the teachers had to put together their own lesson plans and create all the learning materials like slides and worksheets, they did a lot of prep. That’s not really enough money to live on, and it felt wrong when I noticed that the operations manager drove a Mini Cooper.
I really hate that the way we judge business success is if it makes lots of money, and the costs are kept low – especially labour costs. I wish success was judged by how good a quality of life you can provide to all your workers, and how happy they are. Why is it that the people who work the most and under the worst conditions usually make the least money?
Regardless, the teachers were awesome and fun and funny, and very positive. I loved learning about K-Pop from Alex, who isn’t just obsessed with the music but also dances in K-Pop dance competitions. I loved Rick’s acerbic wit and sarcasm as we came up with dramatic and salacious scenarios for the students to act out. I loved chatting to Mary about religion and cute boys over cookies and wine.
And as uncomfortable as it made me, it was a good reminder that, no matter what barriers I come up against, I’m so privileged. There are so many other people who are just as smart and talented and capable as I am, but who don’t have the same opportunities that I do. I hope I can use my privilege to give a hand to people starting from a less advantaged position.
So is Veracruz a place I’d recommend people visit? As a tourist, probably only if you love hot weather and shopping. But I’d highly recommend doing a Workaway there, or finding some other way to hang out with the locals. I’ve never been made to feel as welcome as I was there.
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And of course, there’s a lot more outside of Heroica Veracruz and Boca del Rio. On some of our days off, JC took us to Orizaba, the pueblo magico where he grew up, and to Isla de Enmedia, a tiny little island which we had entirely to ourselves.
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So yea, on the whole, I’d say it’s worth going. Especially because you’ll get to eat the best tacos de guisados!
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The Way of the Potato 