Some reflections of a while ago.

I was born from a very hard-working mother. During my childhood, my sister and I would only get to see her on the evenings after her long shifts. She was a busy logistic manager at a jean manufacturer facility for an American company, on a small town an hour from Merida city. She hired many nannies to take care of us. My life as a teenager was easy, and my main concern was to play video-games with my friends and little else.

Until college, I was educated on private institutions. I then got accepted to fully government funded: Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan (UADY) to study Physics Engineering. Students didn’t have to pay tuition but a small fee per semester. This created a lack of competitive staff and facilities, and many professors struggled teaching. It was a common conversation topic among students, how not to learn but pass a class. Many students cheated with no repercussion, but many others learned truly by themselves. What really changed me was observing how some students, faced some sort of financial hardship - even if they lived with their families.

I remember on my high school years, driving to my swimming club, and every single evening on the Calle 60 intersection with Avenida Garcia Lavin, a father would be selling flowers to drivers at the stoplights. His two teen children would be doing homework at the sidewalk under the streetlight. I saw them so often, many people did, but I never bought a single flower from them.

One hot winter day, when I was 19, a friend from Michigan was coming to celebrate New Year’s with my family and to tourist Yucatan. A couple days before the arrival, I was waiting on another stoplight and spotted a man selling some appealing sky lanterns. I opened the car window and hollered. The guy rapidly approached, and while whipping off the sweat off his face, he told me the price -$200 pesos (~$10 USD) for 2 of them- I paid him, and he started eagerly thanking me. It seemed he was about to cry. He made the sign of the holy cross, and disclosed - This is the first sell for the day. God is blessing me today, thank you so much.

When I came to the states to study at the University of Wyoming, I was saturated my first couple months. The institution was very well funded compared to UADY. There was so many -activities, clubs, gatherings, parties, opportunities, duties- I remember being very anxious for missing out, and on top of that started working. I had only worked the summer before arriving to the US as a barista in a cute little cafe, a very calm job - here I was a laborer at the understaffed university dinning center, not a calm job. At the beginning I was trilled, since I was learning how these big kitchens work, and was meeting a lot of people. 3 to 4 weeks later nonetheless, I wanted to quit. It was an obscene amount of work sometimes. But what really changed me was the unfamiliar (to me) juxtaposition with the other exchange students who where my very close friends at the begging. Almost none of them needed to work. They were simply enjoying their exchange year. I would spot them eating together, and sometimes they would spot me too back at the kitchen and you know, kindly wave. I wished I could join them - with a fancy meal plan, and without my working uniform. These were the days however where I sort of started understanding what privileged means, and recognized that I have been rather mostly entitled most of my childhood.

I’m currently 23 years old, and while I have a whole life ahead of me, I’ll sometimes cry (while listening to “sad” songs) when ruminating my naive childhood and its subsequent years. Every given day I’ll understand a little more why, years ago things happened the way they did, why parents behaved the way they did, why I grew up the way I did.

I sadly realize everything is meant to be the way it is.

My life until I moved to Wyoming.

Perdí a un amigo.