All of us have, at one time or another, been warned by Wallace Shawn never to get involved in a land war with Asia. Only slightly less-well known is to never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line. While I felt that I understood, and even abided by these principles, the one that proved to be elusive was that you never play basketball in Mexico unless you are wanting a general reminder of why they overcame at the Alamo.
Sitting on a bench in Tecate, Mexico, feeling like I was about to vomit because I haven’t ran this hard in months, I looked around at my team of US Deportees (that was why they all spoke English) and wondered, “How in the world did I wind up here?” I wasn’t upset or depressed, I was simply amazed at the fact that I was 2000 miles from home playing basketball on a court sans A/C in Mexico with impossibly tight rims, and it felt as if I had stepped into some alternate reality. I felt that if I had grown up in Tecate (or had recently been deported from the States), this is what day-to-day life would feel like.
This is important because, running camps all summer long, I rarely get a chance to truly feel what it is like to live in the places where I spend 1/4 of my year. There is a buffer of safety and normalcy (at least what I know of normalcy) within the walls of our camp. And even though I leave these walls to go to the worksite, or get supplies, or even go to the beach, every reason I leave the safety net is always related to work in some manner. Often, in most cases, the safety net even goes with me in the form of a 150-person small army known as the campers and their leaders.
And so, standing under an iron hoop (probably steel nowadays) snagging rebounds as teammate Arte (who informed us he went to Penn State . . . State Penitentiary, that is.) cordially shouted, “Where’s My CHANGE? GIVE ME MY CHANGE,” I realized that I was here, playing basketball on a purely social level. This game of Mexican hoops in no way benefited the Mission. As a matter of fact, none of the campers or their leaders even knew I was here playing basketball (don’t worry, there were staff back at camp), and even if they did, it would not have made the slightest bit of difference in their trip. This was basically playing ball just to play ball.
And that is what amazed me.
In that moment I knew I had succeeded in transcending the “us” and “them.” It had become “me” in the midst of them. I was caught up in a slow moving Mexican Hurricane (actually, some of them where pretty fast).
Now, I’m not naive enough to believe that I was thought of as a brother Mexican. Derogatory curses from the other team based on my lighter-shade-of-pale skin reiterated this. But it was these very curses that excited me, because they told me I was in a place where these people felt confident and comfortable with insulting me. It meant that I did not have an entourage of 150 Americans with me as a safety net. I was truly out of my world and into theirs. And as small as that made me, it felt exhilarating.
Little Nemo had left the reef to explore the immeasurably big Ocean.
Peace,
eric
