The Mija Chronicles

Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border

poverty

Could you give me your food?

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Yesterday, in a burst of stupidity, I decided to walk home from Roma — where I’d been working on that freelance story — to our apartment in Cuauhtemoc. I was hungry and tired and didn’t feel like squeezing myself into the Metrobus. (The thing was so crowded, the doors had actually closed on one man’s belly. Off the bus went, the guy’s stomach sticking out in the night air.) Turned out walking was a worse idea — my laptop bag dug into my shoulder for 30 minutes, my knees ached.

Anyway, I happened to be carrying a to-go container with some leftovers from lunch. As I hurried through the streets, a little girl came up to me.

“Can you give me your food?” she asked. I said no before I even realized what she was saying.

A few minutes later, a teenage boy selling roses approached me. I started shaking my head.

“I’ll give you a rose as a gift,” he said, “if you give me your food.”

Suddenly I realized that among the sea of people hurrying home from work, nobody carried any to-go containers, anywhere. I was the only one.

I said no to that boy, too, and felt like a horrible person. When I got home I dug into the salad and tried not to think of how long it’d been since they’d both eaten fresh produce.

A water crisis in Mexico City, if you don’t have money

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Last weekend, the city’s water crisis was all over the news. From what I gathered — and I’m still figuring out how to read newspapers in Spanish — the government planned to shut off water to certain neighborhoods during the last three days of the month, in order to conserve and fix problems with the water system.

I couldn’t ever figure out which neighborhoods would be affected, so I assumed we’d wake up Saturday morning without water. Which, for us, isn’t that huge of a deal — we have purified water to drink and cook with. (And showers, eh, they can wait on the weekend.)

So on Saturday, I turned on the faucets. They worked normally. Then I looked at the paper online. Some of DF’s outlying neighborhoods — where people can’t afford to buy water — didn’t have any.

The fact that these people had no water and we did made no sense to me. If you’re going to shut off water for conservation purposes, why not do it city-wide? I told this to a friend of mine, and she said the city would never shut off water in our neighborhood. Too many embassy employees live here.

Suddenly I felt bad for being so blase about the lack of water in the first place. Of course we can buy our own. We just walk down the street to the supermarket, or tell our doorman we’re out, and boom. It’s there. It’s so easy to forget that there are thousands of people who can’t do this.

Of course, this raises the eternal question about Mexico, which is why so many people here still live in poverty, while the rich — or even solidly middle-class — lead normal first-world lives. It’s part of what makes the city so chaotic and fascinating, with entrepreneurs crowding the subways and the neighborhood knife-sharpener whistling down the street. But the concept of having so much more than so many other people is a hard thing to get used to. I don’t know that I ever will, to be honest.

I was chatting with Lola, our housekeeper, the other day and she mentioned she had a 12-year-old daughter. “But only one,” she said. “I didn’t want another because it’s too tough in this world.”