the problem is

The only reason I even met my husband is because he had the nerve and the need to cross that bloody river from Juarez into El Paso. I thank him everyday for becoming an illegal alien in the U.S.

So now he's an immigration agent. The problem is that immigration is not just a branch of goverment. It's a business.

Immigration

In one of life's amazing ironies my husband recently got a job with the Mexican Immigration authority here. Government jobs are fucking hard to get in Mexico. You need connections normally. But this time they were hiring a bunch of agents at once so they actually advertised for some of the positions.

After all the hell that Immigration caused for him in the U.S. it's very strange for him to be working as an Immigration agent here. I think his experience with being an illegal and then a legal immigrant in the U.S. makes him over-qualified to work in the field of Immigration.

Frankly my dear...

I've been reading Heather Armstrong's blog Dooce. She's hot! And inspiring. Her frankness puts me at ease.

Don't put chile on the cat

He meant the kitten. He didn't want me to put chile on the kitten. Why I would, I don't know. He's busy this minute slathering Habanero sauce all over a big pile of potato chips...since I have a "beingpettingconstantly" kitten in my lap I can see why he worries.

This one would be the 11th? Or would he be the 9th? We've been steadily getting the streetcats here neutered. Getting them neutered has meant feeding them enough that we could catch them. Which of course means feeding them when they are hungry, which is all the damn time. Now we have this beautiful crowd of slightly overfed streetcats lazing around the property.

This kitten is the last (we think) surviving kitten of the recently spayed Mama-Cat. He was born directly after Hurricane Ivan, 6 weeks ago. Her other adult offspring are here regularly, waiting for meals, submitting to some abbreviated and somewhat forced affection from us humans. Most, but for this baby, are too old for adoption (and too fearful of humans) so we keep feeding them.

So we face into the future. Into the day (tomorrow?) when we will force this baby off on some stranger. Perhaps he'll go to someone who won't treat him well? Someone who won't neuter him? Someone who won't love him? Shit. He flops in my lap. Babiness. Sleeping without regard for his surroundings. Then he wakes and looks at me with those sweet little blue eyes. Sweet little white kitten, angelic. His belly is bigger than his head.

Mexican Labor Practices

We came here from the US 15 months ago because the INS (US Immigration) told my husband to get out or they would throw him out (more on that story later). He is Mexican, which is why we came here.

My husband is 42 and is an architect. There is a building BOOM here (aka an environmental disaster). My husband is fully bilingual. He qualified but cannot get a job in his field to save his life, a huge part of it is age discrimination.

I do not know the labor laws in Mexico. But the help wanted ads literally say things like this: Wanted: Architect, male, married, height over x, white, experience x years, age 25-30, no children.

The don't want you if you are short (this place is full of Mayans who are shorter than my 10 year old). They don't want you if you don't have European ancestry. Often they don't actually care much if you are any good at what you do. But if you are older than the boss, forget it.

Inside Palace Resorts

A while ago my husband got a job. Something of an accomplishment here in Mexico where it is legal to discriminate based on age, sex, marital status, height, you name it. He is in his 40's. Ninety percent of the help-wanted ads specify someone under 35.

So he got this job working for the Palace Resorts. The Resort was south of Cancun down near Puerto Aventuras, which is 70 miles away or so. The Resort provides bus transportation to and from Cancun for it's employees. This is nice, but since they do not pay their employees enough to afford to buy cars they have no choice but to "be nice" and provide transportation.

During his orientation he was given a copy of the company rule book. The rules state clearly that he was not allowed to bring a walkman on the bus (or use a cell phone or wear sunglasses), so he's got a 2.5 hour per day round trip commute and he can't listen to a radio. He tried reading on the bus but the shocks were so bad that he quickly got a headache. Everyone else on the bus just slept the whole time. He soon understood why. They were being worked to exhaustion, they needed the extra sleep.

A normal workweek for employees of Palace Resorts is 6 days a week and 10-12 hours a day. Add on 15 hours a week of commute time and you've got 80 hours into your job there. And you can't afford a car on what they pay you for those 80 hours.

In Mexico the minimum salary for an employee is under $200 usd per month. Many of the jobs at the Palace Resorts pay the minimum salary plus tips or commissions.

The first day my husband came home and said "No one there is working from their heart, no one." The people he met working there were so desperate and poor and overworked that they could only look out for themselves, service to the client was secondary.

His job was to sell tour packages to the guests of the Resort, he was also supposed to help people who already had tours booked with their reservations. When they hired him they explained that he would get a commission on each tour sold (they also said his shifts would be 6 hours long, not the 12 that they turned out to be). They did not explain that fully 50% of the people who he would be helping already had tours included in their stay package. So he expected to make a commission of most people at the Resort but instead only about half the people arrived at the Resort without a pre-booked tour.

The job involved confirming and booking tours. If someone had a tour included with their room then my husband needed to help them make an actual reservation. My husband quickly learned from the other sales reps that he shouldn't waste a single minute on the people he couldn't make a commission off of. When the guests were in line to check reservations or buy tours the reps could tell from their bracelet colors and the papers they held what their status with the hotel was, anyone with "tours included" was gotten rid of as quickly as possible.

The process of booking or confirming a reservation was a lengthy one. It involved trying to call numbers where overworked people were too busy to pick up the phone. It involved trying to use an antiquated online booking system which wouldn't stay up. Often the reps would tell the guests who had tours included that the tours were full for that day, without looking it up, just to get rid of them.

The Palace Resorts does what many big hotels around here do, they sell timeshares. They call it something else and they dress it up but it's the same concept. They call it membership. The people who buy the highest level membership, the Premiere Membership, are supposed to receive the best service from the Resort. All the golf they want, all their tours included, all inclusive. The Premiere members wear a specific color bracelet. To all the sales reps selling tours anyone with a Premiere Membership bracelet on must be gotten rid of as quickly as possible because there was no money to be made off them. According to my husband the people with the highest level memberships got the worst service! I'll bet they didn't explain the pitfalls of Premiere Membership during the timeshare sales process!

The tours themselves are to all of the cool spots around here, the ancient Mayan ruins at Tulum, Coba and Chichen Itza. There are tours which take people to swim with dolphins, go parasailing, deep sea fishing and there are tours which go to the eco-parks at Xcaret and Xel-ha.

Tulum is a small set of Mayan ruins and they are right on top of a cliff overlooking the beautiful Caribbean Sea. The beach there is one of the nicest in the world! When locals go to Tulum they don't consider going without a bathing suit. When Palace Resorts tour groups go there they are not given any time to enjoy the beach, they get off the bus, they have a guided tour and they get back on the bus. When my husband worked there he repeatedly heard the sales reps tell the guests that "it is not advisable to swim at Tulum, too many rocks". There are rocks but they are not IN the water, they are in the cliff. At the bottom of the cliff is just a pure white-sand beach lapped by the lovely Caribbean.

The guests of the Palace Resort at Puerto Aventuras often complain that the beach isn't very nice at the Resort. It's rocky and there's not much sand. But if you take the tour to Tulum you don't want to swim because there are rocks!

After nearly a month of learning the secrets of the sales reps my husband was exhausted. He earned something around $180 usd total for his time there. He didn't make any commissions because he quit just at the end of his training period. He decided that being trained to get rid of people as fast as possible while providing little to no service was not worth 80 hours a week of his life.

More bitching about lack of hurricane preparedness

The local press is reporting that the hotels in Cancun were built to resist Category 2 hurricanes. During the watch for Hurricane Ivan, which was category 5 at the time, they did not evacuate the hotels. Those tourists have doubtless since gone home since, not knowing that the city put their lives in jeopardy.

Today Hurricane Jeanne is preparing to hit Florida. They are saying Floridians should prepare for 3 weeks with no power. It makes me wonder how long we'll go without power when we're hit.

The Cat Thing

Once a long time ago I had a cat. She died. I never got over it. She died suddenly, within a few days. She was a little sweet calico that looked like a pile of dirty rags. Her name was Olivia, which became Livy but morphed into Merpie because of the way she would make merp sounds when she talked to me.

Three weeks ago, on a Friday while running in the Parque Ecologico Kabah I heard a mew. Then another. I rounded the corner and found a tiny little calico kitten. She rushed to me. I couldn't find a reason for her to be there in the middle of the park by herself. I heard no other kittens mewing, and there was no mama around. I scooped her up and brought her home where she purred her way through a bowl of kibble. I installed her in my office with food, water and a litterbox (away from my other cats), then I went back to the park to finish my run.

My husband came back that night from a trip and started with "we can't keep her" (we have 3 other gatos living IN the house and more strays that we feed). So I've avoided getting attached, well, I've tried. But she's so friendly. She's the kind of cat that gives cats a good reputation. She's all love and adoration. She's a ball of love. She's a permanent furry hug. She's lying in front of the monitor right now listening to my typing and to Eddie Vedder croning "Strangest Tribe".

So two days ago we dragged the poor missy off to the vet (along with a neighborhood stray) to get spayed. What a nasty business, getting all opened up and chopped up inside. No babies for you my love. Somehow knowing that a cat or dog will never reproduce makes it's life seem more precious to me. This is it, no second chance, no baby to take it's place, no chaos of family, just this life, just this hungry little kitten who purrs her way through every meal. Grateful for everything I give her, even with her belly in stitches.

More Damage caused by Hurricane Ivan

Even though that rat bastard didn't even hit here in Cancun there was some very serious damage done. Everyday the paper brings more stories of beaches stripped of sand or hotels now closed because of damage. Three kilometers of beach in Cancun are GONE! This stretch of beach used to be in the heart of the hotel zone.

I heard today that the Avalon Reef Hotel on the north eastern tip of Isla Mujeres is closed for repairs. It's right on the ocean and must have gotten quite a whipping by the waves. In Cancun the waves were supposedly 3 meters high, Isla Mujeres is even more exposed so they must have been horrendous.

Some beaches around here got bigger, the sans rearranging themselves. I heard that Playa del Carmen has beach damage, but that Puerto Morelos now has wider beaches. The northern side of the Cancun hotel zone now has more sand as well.

What's amazing to me is that the hurricane didn't hit us. What if it had?

Some Background

What's to know? I'm a mom, a web designer, a wife, a runner and a computer artist. I live in Cancun, Mexico with my husband, an old grumpy dog and many cats. I'm an American, hubby is Mexicano. Dog is American as are two of the cats. The rest of the cats are Mexigatos.

Why do we live here? We ask ourselves that sometimes. We chose Cancun because we didn't have enough information. Or maybe because it has the best economy in Mexico. Maybe because we thought that many folks here would speak English (some do but I wouldn't say "many"). Or maybe because it has that lovely Caribbean Sea out there. Truly, we chose Cancun because we were in a damn big hurry to decide where we were moving to.

I'll explain more in a later post.

Independance Day in Paradise

Yesterday, September 15, was the Mexican independance day. The day these folks celebrate kicking out those damn Spanish who had made them slaves for something like 300 years. There are parties and public gatherings all over the country. The highlight of the evening is El Grito, which means "the yell".

Last night we decided to go hear El Grito live as shouted by our much malingered mayor, Chacho. Viva Mexico! Viva Cancun! Viva Quintana Roo (our state)! They followed this with fireworks. Quite lame fireworks actually. And lots of singing and music.

The city is broke. Hopefully this is why they didn't waste gobs of money on fireworks. Chacho has been locked in some kind of political battle with the Governor of the state for some years now. Somehow or other the Governor has been able to put a stranglehold on the city's coffers. Now the richest city in all of Mexico, can't pay it's bills. We get 2 million visitors a year and we can't pay our bills?

Hurricane Ivan

Ivan the Unpredictable blew through the channel between us and the western tip of Cuba this week. The two of us had been checking the National Hurricane Center website regularly for days beforehand. They kept predicting that he would go north. First he was going to head north over Jamaica, then over the middle of Cuba, then over Havana. But Ivan kept coming west towards us. They evacuated parts of Florida days earlier. But by the time it was evident that he was coming close enough to bother us there was no time to prepare the city. We had less than 24 hours to prepare for the possibility that a Category 5 hurricane with 160 mph winds was going to hit near us.

The hurricane didn't hit. We barely got rain. We did get high winds and some of the beaches in Cancun are now much erroded. A pier on the north side is history and there is other damage too. But nothing like the devastation we could have had.

They never evacuated the hotels (all of which are ON the beach) because they had NOWHERE else to put 30,000 people. Not only is there nowhere to evacuate people TO, there's only one road out of the city going west. The nearest large town is to the west Valladolid which is a over 2 hours away and certainly cannot take in all the people who would need to leave Cancun.

In Jamaica the waves associated with Ivan were 2 stories high. What would happen to the over 100 beachside hotels in Cancun if 2 story waves driven by Category 5 force winds hit? Anyone in one of those buildings would have been in grave danger.

Now forget about the tourists for a minute. There were only 30,000 of them. What about the 700,000 residents of the city of Cancun? Many of them do not live in concrete buildings, they live in palapas, wooden buildings with palm leaf or corrugated tin roofs. Their houses would just blow away.

The city of Cancun narrowly missed having a major tragedy on it's hands this time. But what about next time?