First Hand Account of Wilma in Cancun

Though not the most current of events, the below is an intense account of Hurricane Wilma from my friend Josh who was in Cancun at the time.  In loads of detail, he recounts his experiences, compares them to New Orleans, tells of the utter uselessness of rich, lazy American tourists, and applies his public health education.  I should also note he was only in Cancun to get a connecting flight, not to go to Senor Frogs or anything. 

So enjoy.  It's really long, but definitely entertaining:

I arrived in Cancun on Thursday afternoon and the hurricane was expected to arrive during the night.  I knew that the hurricane was coming to Cancun, but I assumed that it wouldn't be there until Sunday.  The reason was that I had been watching CNN news the entire time in the Miami airport, and CNN igrnores the impact of natural disasters on countries outside of the US.  According to them, the hurricane was coming on Sunday because it was coming to Miami on Sunday.  So I flew into Cancun, and did not know how close I was to my first hurricane until they told me that my flight was cancelled at the Cancun airport.

They gave me a coupon for a free stand-by flight as soon as the airport reopened.  At the time, I had know idea that it would take 10 days.  They also gave me the adress of two places where I could stay for free.  Somehow I assumed that I was getting hooked up because they cancelled my flight.  I was expecting a hotel reservation with free food.  They told me to take the bus into town, and then ask someone to direct me to the places that she wrote down.  But when I got into the center of Cancun, I discovered that no one had the faintest idea where these refuges were.  They sent me back and forth all over town. Then someone told me that the two addresses were on opposite sides of the city.  Moreover, there was no hotel or reservation.  They simply gave me the locations of two random refuges from the hurricane.  They further told me that there was a closer refuge nearby and I might as well just stay there.  Meanwhile, the city was starting to close down.   It was drizzling, and the wind was starting to swirl and pick up. 

I made my way to the refuge.  It was a huge gymnasium filled with 3 thousand people on individual mats lying on the ground next to their luggage.  After a little hassle, I got the military guy guarding the door to provide me with a mat and a blanket, and after a few minutes of searching, I finally found a place to sleep in the very corner of the gym.  I met a guy about my age named Brandon who was from New Mexico but had been living in Cancun for three years.  He'd left home when he was 13 and has traveled all over the world working with tourists in every country.  The air inside was thick and suffocating.   It was going to be a long couple of days. We both liked to excersize, so we found a park and did some pull-ups.  After, we walked back to the refuge and saw that a group of 20 Mexicans in the refuge had started a soccer game.  It was first team to one goal, winner stays on.  I joined up with a team and we won three games in a row.  The wind was picking up and carrying the ball all over the field, the rain started coming down harder, the tourists were huddled inside guarding their luggage.  The Mexicans were outside playing soccer.

Eventually the weather forced us to stop the game.  Most people were inside, but it was still safe enough to stay just outside the refuge under the overhang.  The air was suffocating inside, so we stayed outside as long as we could, watching the storm develope.  Eventually, we had to barricade the doors. 

The refuge was incredibly well stocked with food and water up to the ceiling.  We had a full kitchen staff providing three meals a day, and tons of fruit to snack on at any time.  I thought of the refugees at the Superdome in New Orleans who were told they had to bring their own food and water.  Most of us had no opportunity to bring our own food and water, and if not for the planning and coordination by the "Ejercito" (the Mexican military operation for huricane relief), we all would have gone hungry.  It turned out that I ended up in a refuge with most of the tourists from the four star hotels from the beach. The reason is that Mexicans don't live in the center of Cancun, they live on the outskirts of the city and commute in to work.  So the tourists took refuge in the center.  But I asked the ejercity and the Mexican kitchen staff about the conditions in the refuges for regular Mexicans.  They all said that every Mexican had access to refuges with food and water, and that there were refuges all over the city. Every school and public building was a registered refuge, and the ejercity made sure that there was food and water available to all.  How was it that a country with far less resources than the United States had no problem providing a major city with food water and shelter during a natural disaster, while the United States acts like there's nothing that can be done, and that the responsibility falls on the citizenry to protect themselves.

So we were all crowded into a big gym.  Me and Brandon talked a bit, and I used my cool flashlight that wraps around my head (thanks Dad) to read and write.  Then the roof started leaking over my head.  I luckily found a new dry spot.  But there were others that weren't so lucky. Some people just got really wet and uncomfortable.  Others slept in garbabe bags to stay dry.  Others slept huddled in a corner, and still others just had to stand up all night.  The smokers occupied the front room and further contaminated the stench that we all had to breath. The line to use the bathroom was over a half an hour and the line spilled into the smoking room.  The hurricane supposedly hit us between 2 and 4 in the morning.  But to me it seemed like the hurricane lasted for three nights and two days.  Every night it picked up, and during the day it was a little more tranquil.  The wind howled and shook the building all night as rain dripped in through the cracks.  You could hear trees getting ripped apart outside.  I eventually fell asleep. The next day it was still too dangerous to go outside.  Me and Bradon did some push-ups, ate breakfast, and then read a little bit.  I discovered a back closset that was flooded up to my knees but that had vents to the outside.  We hung out in this back room, enjoyed the fresh air, and watched the hurricane through the vents.  The streets looked like rivers.  There were branches of trees lying everywhere.  All of a sudden, a huge tree came crashing down and landed on the road. I snapped some photos through the vent.  I my view was any indication, the city was being ripped apart.

I volunteered in the kitchen helping to prepare the meal.  Most of the kitchen staff were workers at the 4 star hotels.  They had more comfortable sleeping conditions in the kitchen, fresher air, and were getting paid.  It was the only time the hotel workers would have it better than the tourists.  The food preparation was just assembly line work.  I made some friends and hung out in the kitchen for the rest of our time in the refuge.  I showed them my picture album of life in the United States.  Many of them were thinking about immigrating, and were very interested in my story of the life of immigrants.

All of a sudden, part of the roof, in our big concrete gymnasium blew off.  We were told that the Ejercito would arrive in 20 minutes and that we were all going to leave in the middle of the storm.  I grabbed my bag,  made myself a rainsuite out of garbage bags, and pushed my way close to the door.  I never saw the initial break in the roof, the whole building was shaking and the roof was creaking.  I wanted to get on the first bus out of there.  Twenty-five people at a time, we boarded buses which drove us away from the center of the city, further away from the storm.  I took pictures of the city streets through the windows of the bus.  You wouldn't believe that they are city streets, they look like a swamp.  After a twenty-five minute drive through the storm, we took refuge in the classrooms of an elementry school.  Everyone was tense.  I was glad that the Mexican military was watching over my refuge and not FEMA.

Each group of 25 was crowded into an elementry school classroom. All we had were little student desks to sit in.  In the afternoon, the storm had died down a bit.  The funniest part was the trips to the bathroom. The classrooms were in two parrallel lines with a concrete yard in the middle.  The wind was going straight through the yard, parallel to both rows of classrooms.  From our side, you had to cross the yard, perpendicular to the direction of the wind to get to the bathroom.  All afternoon individuals and groups would run through the rain, across the yard to the bathroom.  As nighttime approached, the trip became dangerous.  People started going to the bathroom in groups of five.  Sometimes a big gust of wind would come along and knock everyone over.  Personally, I recommended that everyone walk around to the side of the building and squat against the wall.  But most people seemed to value their privacy over their safety.

As night time approached, there was one question on everyone's mind:  Would the roof and the windows hold. Luckily, the windows were parrallel to the direction of the wind and the rain. If not, there's no question we would've been in for an even rougher night.  Sometimes, the whole building shook.  Rain dripped in regularly through the wooden blinds.  The floor filled up with water up to our ankles.  It was too dangerous to open the door and try to push it out.  We sat in our desks, trying to sleep, sleeping occasionally.  I lit the room with my flashlight and did some writing.  We talked a bit.  We were hungry and thirsty.  We had no food and water.  Our last meal had been breakfast. It was clear that it was too dangerous for anyone to come and bring us supplies.  Luckily, we made it through the night.

The next morning, it was still windy and raining, but it was safe to go outside.  There were two priorities. The first was getting food and water, the second was getting the water out of the room.  This experience illustrated another major lesson that I learned over the course of the hurricane.  The wealthy tourists that I was with, were good for absolutely nothing.  They would do no work, and would never survive on their own without assistance.  They really did nothing except complain all day.  Generally, the rich tourists from Mexico city were much better than the American tourists.  Even the Brittish and Europeans were better than the Americans.  I was also the only bilingual person and had to translate and make announcements in English and Spanish.  And to even help them, I had to take a lot of degrading treatment and abuse.  I tried to mobilize everyone to push the water out of the room. "With what?" one woman exclaimed.  "We have 25 people," I replied, just use your hands, come on! We can do this."  I got Brandon to hold the door open.  I got down on my knees and started pushing the water out the door.  Not a single person joined me, they just stood there and watched.  I grabbed a T-shirt from my bag.  I started on one side of the room and held the shirt stretched between my two arms.  I raced across the room and created a wave towards the door.  I wrang out the shirt on the concrete, went back in and started over.  I asked everyone to move all the desks to one side of the room to make my job easier, some helped move the desks, most didn't.  A half hour later I had the room pretty much dry.  To the credit of the spectators, they did give me an ovation for my work.

Next I went out to get food and water.  We were in a really poor barrio in Cancun with small concrete houses.  A few of the badly built homes had crumbled during the hurricane.  The dirt streets were flooded. I walked down to the corner store and bought 10 big bottles of water and 10 of juice.  The food selection, however, was only crackers, chips, and cookies.  I went with crackers.  I walked back to the room and delivered the supplies.  I made an additional announcement.  There was one nutritious food item in the store: eggs.  The problem was that we couldn't cook.  I told everyone that I was going to gather money, and go down the block and offer to pay the neighbors to cook food for us.  I went across the street and talked to a mother of 5.  I told her our situation. She agreed to cook us eggs, rice, and beans with tomato sauce for all 25 of us.  She only had one condition:  She would not accept our money.  She said we could pay for the food, but that the cooking had to be from the heart.  I argued with her until it would have been rude to argue more.  I told her that we were rich and that the money meant nothing.  Moreover, part of her house had fallen down and she needed to repair it.  She brought us the food which we gobbled up.  Her husband secreatly came up to me and asked for money.  I gave him some, but it was pretty obvious he was not going to spend it on his family.  He even claimed that he was going to work that day in spite of the hurricane and came home pretty drunk.  The family also brought  us a bed for one elderly Brittish man who was sick.  I gave him a tylenol and told him to drink lots of water.  They also gave us a squeegee to mop the water out of the rooms.  They continued to refuse our money.  I talked to a local store owner's wife who agreed to cook us a huge pot of fried rice for dinner.

I decided that if the family wouldn't  accept our money then I had to repay them in another way.  I hung out with the kids and showed them my pictures of America.  It was a relief to be away from the tourists. I further talked to the parents about the health risks after the huricane.  I told them that water sanitation would be questionable, and that it there was no potable water that they should boil it, particularly for the kids.  I explained that hand washing can avert diarreal illnesses, and that they should consider getting vaccinated against tetanus and Hepatitis A once the hurricane let up.  The mom thanked me for my advice.  Then I spent a couple hours with the kids helping them learn English.  Around 2:00 in the afternoon, the Ejercito arrived and delivered us a little bit of food.  But they said that they would not be back and that the roads had become too treacherous to navigate.  This was a very revealing moment about the mindset of our group.  Half the group complained that they wanted to leave the school.  One woman complained that the bathrooms were dirty.  I could see the exasperated look on the military man's face.  "Lady," he said in an forced calm tone, "I have been working for two days without sleeping, I have not even heard from my family.  This has to be a community effort.  If the bathrooms are dirty, you have hands, try to clean them."    

I joined into a conversation between two Americans complaining about the conditions.  One woman was blaming the hotel for not providing more assistance.  I asked her about her reservation.  Some people did not have their money refunded and I sympathized with them.  If they did not stay in the hotel, then they should get their money back.  But this woman's reservation had expired.  She only had paid for the day before the hurricane.  I asked her what obligation the hotel could possibly have towards her.  She replied, "I see your point, but I just feel that I've paid a lot of money to be here and I deserve better."

I thought that this comment, more than any other, summed up the position of the tourists.  "We're rich and powerful, so our well-being should be prioritized in times of crisis."  Some even felt that the Mexican government should prioritize the tourists over the citizens. Some felt that Bush should come down and evacuate us.  I pointed out that the Mexican government was doing far more for us under much more difficult conditions than the American government did in New Orleans. I further pointed out that our situation was pretty good.  We were safe, we had food and water, and if we worked together, we should have no problem making it through.  "Look, it's a hurricane.  This is about survival.  It's not about having the ammenities of normal life.  We want to have food, water, a sanitary environment, and hopefully be warm and dry.  I realized that I was in the middle of a public health huricane relief effort.  I was the only person in the group of 200 stashed at this school that was willing to work.  And I had the most worthless and pothetic group as my subjects.

I went to check on the other rooms.  I bumped into some hotel workers who had just arrived to help clean and provide food. Evidently, some of the other rooms spent the whole time pressuring the hotels to take responsibility for cleaning our refuge.  Their strategy had worked.  I mentioned to the hotel workers how rediculous this was. They at first responded that it was no big deal because everyone needed to help out and help clean up from the hurricane.  But after realizing that I had no love for these hotel guests, they acknowledged my point of view.  I grabbed my squeegee and we went room to room flushing out the water.  THESE PEOPLE HAD LITTERALLY BEEN SITTING IN WATER FOR THE LAST 7 HOURS CALLING THE HOTEL ON THEIR CELL PHONES AND HAD NOT EVEN CONSIDERED TRYING TO PUSH IT OUT THEMSELVES.  When we arrived, they were bitter and they took out their anger on us.  Since the hotel workers spoke no English, I mobilized the effort.  "All right, we're going to first move all the people and desks to one side of the room, and then back to the other."  One guy even refused to move, saying that he saw no reason why we couldn't just mop around him.

In another room, they made us stop mopping because they were having a team meeting about the situation and wanted everyone's attention.  I told their leader, "look man.  We're mopping your floor.  These guys don't even speak English, they shouldn't have to listen to your announcement."  The team leader said that the hotel had agreed to send chicken nuggets for dinner.  He said that the food was not enough.  He suggested that people call authorities in the United States to pressure the hotel to evacuate us.  After cleaning the rooms, I moved onto the bathroom.

It was disgusting.  I mopped out the floor, and moved on to the unflushed toilets.  The toilets, for the most part, were not broken. The tourists simply did not know how to use them.  The mechanism of a toilet is fairly simple.  Water enters, raising the water level, creating a downward pressure that pushes everything into a pipe.  These toilets worked the same way, except that rather than pushing the flusher, you had to pour the water in from a bucket.  But the tourists just assumed that these toilets were broken or didn't flush.  The electricity had gone down, so there was not running water in the bathroom.  I ran back and forth through the wind and the rain grabbing buckets of water from the puddles and trying to flush these stopped up toilets.  I got seven of the 10 to work.  Then I went room to room lecturing everyone on how to flush the toilets in English and Spanish. Fortunately, the humor of my speech and the fact that I had single-handedly cleaned all the bathrooms caused all of them to give me an ovation.  I ended the speech with, "we're in an elementry school which has also saved our lives, do we really want to leave disgusting bathrooms for the kids?"

As night time approached, the storm picked up again, but we had plenty of food and water and it was safe to briefly open the door to keep mopping out the water as it came in.  Around 11:00, with the storm raging outside, terrible road conditions, and no electricity on the streets, a bus arrived, and carried off people from a different room. I guy knocked on our door and told us to gather our things and that we would be picked up in 20 minutes.  I immediately told everyone in the room that I thought that this was the stupidest decision imagineable. The hotel, under pressure, had obviously sent down a bus to evacuate us because some people refused to spend another night at this school.

But to go on a bus ride in the middle of the night in a huricane with no electricity on the streets and trees fallen all over the road, was about the most dangerous thing imagineable.  Moreover, they were taking us in the direction of the hurricane, towards the beach.  We had food, water, a dry room, and our school and all of the sturdy homes in the area had survived as well.  I made my announcements in English and Spanish.  I said that I think that people somehow believe that by leaving this school we are closer to going home.  But we're just going to a different refuge, and we have to make the best of this bad situation until the huricane passes.  I actually convinced most people in the room that leaving was a bad idea.  Unfortunately, there were certain people who just refused to stay.  So the people in their group had to leave too.  Additionally, other people simply wanted to be in the hands of an authority, even an authority making wreckless decisions for our personal safety.  The final group wanted to stay, but wouldn't because everyone else was leaving.  So in the end, all 300 or so people left in the middle of the night except for two, me and Brandon.  We had tons of food, and moved all the desks together to make two giant beds. We had candles, and confirmation from neighbors and local stores that we could run to their house in the event of a crisis.  I was glad to be rid of the tourists.

Luckily, this story has an ending.  I bumped into a member of the group a week later, still trying to leave the city.  He said that all of them arrived safely after a terrifying ride, but the second refuge was even worse than the first.  The roof leaked, the food was bad, and the air was damp and stuffy.  "We should have stayed," he said. "Everyone was really pissed." 

What is the lesson to be learned?  While I was in Florida, I had a discussion with a guy who said that the people of New Orleans were parasites who had lived their whole lives off of the government.  Fox News, he added, is the only station bold enough to present this opinion.  He said it was their own fault for not evacuating, and that they needed to take responsibility for their own neglect.  The police imposed martial law and provided no help to the victims, and neighboring towns barred refugees from entering.  I can confidently say that if there was a similar relief effort in Cancun, that I might have died.  It is not always possible to secure your food and water as you move from place to place for protection.  There needs to be an organization and system in place to help people get through the storm.

Furthermore, it's interesting that the very people who talk about individual responsibility and resent the calls for government assistance in New Orleans, are completely helpless to fend for themselves when they are the victims and do nothing but call the authorities for help.  Moreover, it is interesting that unlike the victims in New Orleans, that they feel their wealth and privilege entitles them to assistance.

The next day, I returned all of the supplies to the neighbors, and me and Brandon caught a cab into town.  The town was flooded.  There was water in the streets up to our knees, and the locals were walking around checking out the damage.  Trees and signs had fallen everywhere.  Most of the telephone polls had fallen down.  There was not running water and electricity, and this conditions persists in most of Cancun to this day in spite of the rapid recovery effort.  Many buildings had been blown out or smashed to the ground.

And on top of all that, looters were sacking the entire city.  You could see the looters everywhere.  Grandparents, families, men, women, children, carrying five pairs of shoes or clothes down the street casually or big plastic bags of stuff.  It was so widespread that nothing could be done about it.  I went down to the shopping district to watch.  Wading through a foot of water, big groups busted down the metal door and people sloshed through the store grabbing every item, even the shelves, until giant department stores were completely empty. Every once in a while there would be competition or someone would fall and cut their hand on the broken glass.  I snapped some pictures and watched in amazement.

I'm glad that the Mexican government focused on the dispensary of food and water rather than use the resources to shut down the looting. Three people were shot by police, but for the most part, the military and government stood by and ignored the fact the the entire city of Cancun was robbed clean.  Clothing stores were targeted, but grocery stores and even pharmacies were robbed too.  The looting, although widespread, was strongly condemned by most people in Cancun, and was very disturbing for them.

Additionally, it had a very negative impact on the recovery effort. Government resources eventually had to be diverted to provide security.  There were shortages of critical items, and grocery stores only admit five people at a time creating lines of two hours to get food.  The entire economy and system of distribution was shut down. And for the most part, people were simply taking things that they had no use for.  Moreover, I believe that people should've directed their energy towards cleaning up the city and coming together to overcome the devastation of the storm, rather than breaking windows to steal T-shirts and shoes.

I didn't eat much more than a couple candy bars that day.  There was nowhere to get food except to wait three hours in line at the dispensary.  I slept in the political office of the PRI, the corrupt conservative political party of Mexico.  The next day I split with Brandon.  I wanted to live in refuges with Mexicans who lost their homes.  He wanted to find people to hook him up with food and housing and roam around the streets all day.  I went to the goverment civil protection office and volunteered to clean up the city.  Incidentally we went to the gym that was my first refuge.  They were replacing the roof, and I spent the day squeezing the water out of the blankets and mats.  That night, I made my way to a school in a Mexican neighborhood and lived in the refuge with Mexican families who had lost their homes.  Because there are many schools throughout the city, the schools were not very crowded.  There were about 40 people living in 8 classrooms.  Most rooms had a single family.  I was in a room with three random individuals.

I played with the kids during the day.  One day I caught a soccer game in the park.  The first day the families gave me food, but I ate very little because I didn't want to take from them.  I noticed that I had lost a lot of weight and that my face looked emaciated.  Getting food was tough and usually involved waiting in long lines.  I read the newspaper everyday to practice my Spanish.  I talked to all the families about their situation.  Most planned to rebuild their house little by little.  Others were setting up flimsy wooden houses for the time being.  All of them seemed so calm and optimistic.  They had faith that over time things would work out.

In my 6 days living at the refuge, electricity never returned and potable water returned towards the end but lines were two hours to get it.  I got along with everyone at the refuge, they really liked me a lot, especially the kids.  I also seemed to bewilder them.  They would frequently go up to me and ask, "Josue, que haces?" (Josh, what are you doing?) even if I was doing something incredibly obvious like reading the newspaper, cleaning, or even going to the bathroom.  But we had a lot of fun together and they liked having me around.

I decided that I should do my best to provide services for the people around me.  I bought a pot and a frying pan and started cooking my food.  Sometimes I would cook on the gas stove of one of the neighboring rooms, or other times I built a fire from all the fallen trees and cooked on the hot ashes.  I also started boiling my water so I wouldn't have to wait hours to buy small quantities of bottled water.  I also spent hundreds of dollars buying food for the other refugees.  The guys in my room were kind of helpless as cooks so I cooked for the whole room.  They were also drinking untreated water so I boiled water for all of us.  When we cleaned the bathrooms, everyone joined in and helped.  Another strange occurence was the fear of crime throughout the streets.  There may have been a few robberies of homes after the looting of stores, but the news media went wild with it.  One day there was a story of a block that stayed up all night in the streets with machetes next to a bon fire.

The next night, every block started doing it.  Every block had a rotation of people who staid up until 7 in the morning building giant bon fires from the fallen down trees.  The air was very polluted and asthmatics were starting to have attacks.  Moreover, their were giant piles of simmering ashes strewn thoughout the streets which increased traffic congestion.  The people were scared.

I went room to room to talk with each family about the health risks after the hurricane.  I always put it in the context of what I had been reading in the paper.  As I had predicted, there were outbreaks of Hepatitis A, diarreal illnesses, and tetanus.  I explained the diseases to everyone, encouraged them to go to the health center and get vaccinated, encouraged them to boil or chlorinate the water if it is untreated, taught them how to do oral rehydration therapy in the event of diarreal illness, and spent most of the time on hand-washing.  No one at the refuges washed their hands before eating.

But washing your hands was difficult, and for a while, I couldn't even do it.  First, you had to have a clean bucket of water.  You needed someone else to pour the water over your hands while you soaped.  You needed soap handy.  People were always using the buckets to lug water back and forth.  There was no system in place to make hand-washing convenient.  So if someone offered you food, you weren't going to spend 10 minutes trying to wash your hands, you just ate it.

Nothing in my schooling taught me how to correct this situation, but  I learned a lot about setting up sanitary systems while living with Scott, Woz, and Kristina.  If cleaning up is convenient, people are more likely to do it.  I encouraged people to keep a bucket of water next to where the food is being served with a cup and a bar of soap.  THe food preparer and server always needs to wash her hands, as do children under 5 who are the highest risk group. Children are the most vulnerable to illnesses, and they running around touching everything and everyone.  One person needs to pour the water for everyone as they line up for food.  I encouraged them to pour the water over a container and to reuse the water to wash clothes or to bathe.

Everyone was very interested in my health information, and many asked questions.  But my guess is that not a single family or person will change their hand washing practices in spite of my effort.  I learned a lot from this experience, and I've formulated a critical question for public health that I will attempt possibly throughout my life as a public health worker:  "What does it take to go into a community and get them to wash their hands?"

At first the question seems silly, and of course hand-washing is not the only public health issue.  But my job is to convince people that they should make the effort to do a number of seemingly trivial and inconvenient measures that reduce their risk of getting sick.  But most people are creatures of habit, and they tend to only deal with their health reactively, rather than proactively.  Furthermore, like all public health issues, hand-washing is related to many issues of privilege and social justice.  For example, it is very easy to wash your hands if you have running water and a sink.  When you live in regions where water is scarce, you do not want to waste your drinking water by washing your hands regularly.  Water quality is often determined by planning decisions that benefit industry at the expense of the poor.

But in spite of all of these obstacles, I still believe that people would be better off if they made a habit of washing their hands.  Some people might say that I'm paternalistic, and I'm imposing my own worldview on other people's way of life.  I would argue the opposite. I believe that it is dangerous, and even racist to say that lack of hand washing is a part of someone's culture.  If there is anything that the hurricane taught me, it's that the poor Mexicans put a far greater effort into maintaining a clean and sanitary environment than the rich white tourists.

Moreover, even me, the public health fanatic, was not washing my hands until I figured out a system to do it conveniently.  Finally, many of these families have never been educated about how diseases spread.  If you believe that not washing hands is a part of their culture, then you must also argue that wealthy white people have a culture of hand washing.  We are somehow innately endowed with that instinct.  My own struggles to wash my hands when it was difficult contradict this view.  I think that treating lack of hand washing as part of people's culture is very dangerous.  Some people argue that we should not give Tuberculosis, AIDS medication and antibiotics to Africans because they are culturally predisposed to neglect to take their pills and it will contribute to resistance.  Certainly, people are creatures of habit, but with the right information and system in place, I believe that most people are capable of washing their hands before eating.  Even though I don't believe I succeeded in changing anyone's practices, not a single person resented my time talking with them, and most of them appreciated my concern.

So I believe that it is possible to get people to wash their hands. The question is what does it take?  Certainly, having one talk with someone is not enough to do it.  There needs to be a sustained force that alters people's practices.  On the one hand, it seems like a daunting task.  Whenever kids want food, they run from the playground with their dirty hands and grab straight from the communal bowl.  There are strong forces that make hand washing impracticle or inconvenient, and made me think that there's very little I can do in this area. 

At the same time, there were a number of promising signs.  For a number of reasons, the fact that I stand out, the fact that I'm White and American, the fact that I'm confidant and charismatic, I have a lot of influence and people really look up to me, especially the kids.  I realize that I have the power to motivate and mobilize people.  They are also inspired by my hard-work, dedication, and commitment.  To get people to wash their hands, I would have to spend more than a week in a community.  I would have to have far more extensive interactions with people during meals and on a regular basis.  But ingrained practices change when people see the other way and start to think positively about it.  "Hey, that gringo who always talks about health and seems pretty healthy himself always remembers to wash his hands, maybe it's a good idea."

Comments

I sincerely doubt the authenticity of this story at all. This comment, in particular, is truly cliche bullshit:

"We're rich and powerful, so our well-being should be prioritized in times of crisis."

Come on dude, don't you think you could have come up with something a little less obvious? No one on the face of the earth is cliche enough to make that statement. It's like fabricating some encounter with a southern racist and claiming that, at some point, he used the legendarily racist phrase "nigger lover". Give me a break, no one talks like that in the real world (not anymore anyway).

Sounds like a large part of you story (namely how much positive interaction there was on the part of "rich white Americans", and by rich you undoubtedly mean simply middle-class people,) was bullshit to me. If they had helped out you would have undoubtedly lied about it, because "lol rich people are dicks, am i rite???"

[scott]

You're right...this whole post is fake. I was sitting around my place in Oakland, thinking, "how can I stick it to rich people?"

I had the brilliant idea of writing an insanely long and extremely detailed fictitious account of an event that happened weeks ago, attributing it to someone else and posting it now!

But drat, you figured it all out! I'm glad that there are such smart people as you to keep me on my toes.

Actually, in case there's anyone else as weak-minded as our anonymous friend out there, this is a real account of my friend Josh's experiences. Josh has written for this blog before, you can email him yourself if you don't believe me.

There's enough true stuff out there to bash the rich about, I certainly don't need to spend my time making things up.

[Mr. Twister]

How awesome to have had an experience that confirms all of our prejudices! a) wealthy people BAD HELPLESS b) Americans COMPLAINING USELESS c) Europeans GOOD d) American government ineffective, racist; Mexican government effective, caring. Oh, and the author is a big hero -- courageous, generous, helpful, empowered AND empowering! How thoughtful of him to carefully detail all the good he did for so many people.

Squatty, it doesn't make someone "weak-minded" to question something as obviously self-serving as this. I don't question that some version of these things happened -- but perception is everything. It seems your friend went in with, I'm guessing, a very strong set of preconceived notions about all kinds of things, and sure enough, the way his mind processed them confirmed all his stereotypes. YOU drive through a U.S. ghetto and see poor Black people there without work, victimized, disenfranchised. A racist drives through and sees lazy good for nothings who won't work, destroy their own neighborhoods by crime, vandalism, etc. I have no doubt that someone less prejudiced than Josh (AND less self-justifying and egomaniacal) would have interpreted events quite differently.

[adwred]

Yes, you are rite, rich people are dicks.

[dishinger]

Hi,

I live in cancun and your story seems to me to stretch the truth..

for one the storm effects started on friday and came full force friday evening.

Sunday morning a terrifying 48 hours later the storm was done. how many days was your storm?