OAXACA FILM FEST..COFFEE LECTURE...DENTIST

       Tuesday I spent running around doing nothing while Adeline cleaned the apartment.  That evening I returned to the Opera House  to see Mustang, a Turkish Movie about 5 young teens caught having fun, punished, re-educated and rebelled. I forgot it wasn't in English and only Spanish Sub-Titles so lost the meaning...

Certain Documents Require Typing by Law

      Wednesday I attended the Gay breakfast again.  This time my friend Hector showed.  We agreed to get together when Chris arrives for lunch or something.  He helped her out shopping last year. Ted, who runs his B & B brought three of his guests visiting Oaxaca from England.

Restaurant is like an Art Gallery

       I had a Noon appointment with the Dentist to start removal of my crown.  I brought the photo of my mouth to clarify which tooth was he working on.

 I had wanted to replace a cracked crown but he was replacing my Metal crown.  Metal is no good in your mouth so I decided to get that taken care of. He started but gave up when he discovered the Metal was hard? Duh.  He cut a hole in it then said it would take 4-5 sessions and a new bur to drill into the crown to remove and replace it. Not much I could do at this point.  

        I went to lunch,

bought some REAL yogurt with no sugar and returned home before leaving again to attend a lecture on coffee at the library.

        It was a full house.  The lecture was given by a man who arrived here from San Francisco in 1976 and lived in a remote village with an extended family in a one room house with a dirt floor and an out house 300 meters away.  He was a Tea drinker and hated coffee but all they drank at every meal was coffee out of large bowls.  They fed it to the babies with bottles.  He acquired a taste for it out in this remote jungle.

        He decided after 6 months to get a job so was accepted at a rehab center in Oaxaca for paraplegics, people with spinal injury, and handicapped people that required therapy.  He bathed them, helped them in and out of harnesses, wheelchairs, and beds. The Cuban Doctor that ran the place didn't like him and when he moved on, he recommended this person do so  too.  

         There was an opening for a physical education instructor at another school for handicapped children that had been experiencing discipline problems with the blind children.  They had policemen living on premise to help and thought a Phys Ed teacher would help.  The female administrator introduced him to all the teachers and explained he would come around each day and take their class out for Physical Therapy and on weekends for wheel chair races, soccer, etc.  These are Down Syndrome, blind, Palsy, children with lots of problems.

        He fell in love with the administrator and after dating he wanted to marry her so took her to some land in the mountains he was considering buying to build a home on.  She said it was too cold and she could never live there and took him to meet her father and his coffee plantation.    She was the last of his 12 children he raised while developing his plantation in the jungle with no roads, electricity or water.   He built the roads, put in canals systems, and expanded the plantation by buying a German Plantation near by when they sold to return to fight for Hitler in the late '30's.  He married her and 6 years later took over the plantation when the father passed away.  It was producing world class coffee recognized by premier world coffee buyers as one of the best. 

       The plantation was on the side of a steep mountain and the coffee trees were grown in the shade at different altitude.  Everything was done by hand.  The pickers that arrived in October for the harvest were families, including children, they got paid by the amount they picked. They had to tie themselves to ropes in some areas to avoid falling of the mountain.  Mexico and the world is suffering a blight that has destroyed 90% of the crops in Oaxaca.  The government has pledged all this money to help the owners but it is siphoned off to corrupt middlemen and never gets to the growers. The pickers have gone to Canada, USA and into urban areas to seek employment and aren't as available as before. So the future is bleak.  He gave us samples and when I returned home I realized I had his coffee that I haven't even tried yet.  It was being sold by University students to raise money for their extra curricular activities when I bought it.

9 Naked Virgins adds a nice touch.

      I saw a German movie that night ...a sort of Monty Python spoof but done by Germans in German with Spanish Sub Titles.  No more of these for me. I ate my Cubana Torta I picked up on the way home, and went to be.