Attempting to make a difference

Iram Parveen Bilal

This past spring break, when all my friends were going to Vegas, Hawaii, and the Grand Canyon, it seemed less exciting to go to Mexico for community service, but I convinced myself to do so and that I should feel good about helping others. Thus, I went!

Sure enough, it turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected. Tecolote was the site of our work, and we were involved in tiling the bare cemented floors that we had to sleep on, painting the community center, playing with orphans in the local orphanage, and painting houses in the nearby slums. The Caltech Y has been arranging these projects for the past five years with a woman in Tecolote, who in turn works with a community-service department in San Diego. She picks out projects for us to do, and then we go ahead and take charge.

It was really an adventure to learn how to tile from scratch: cleaning the ground, mixing the cement, laying out the tiles, grouting the cracks, and then washing the tiles. And then painting in the hot Tecolote sun was not very easy, but with a great team of 15 we were able to pull off almost everything with a perfect example of division of labor and specialization of tasks!

In the times that we had to rest and eat, we walked around the streets of Tecolote, which are such a contrast to the much-hyped Tijuana. There are slums almost everywhere you can see. The two aspects that I felt much shock about were, firstly, a huge dump of hundreds of cars on a nice green hill and, secondly, wild dogs present at a frequency of at least every 30 feet.

The former, according to local citizens, is the way the government gets rid of cars left on the streets unattended. The latter I have no explanation for, except to say it is not an easy vacation if one does not like dogs because they are wild and everywhere.

Having done only the painting and tiling, I cannot really say much about the orphanage except that the director informed us that the kids really liked the visit. One wonders if they would ever say otherwise, though. I mean, they have a different group coming in every month or so, and they pass out some candy and play with the kids, but that is it. Surely, even that makes a difference.

However, on these trips one thing that always comes to mind is, can we do more than just tile a room or paint a small house? The answer is that we are limited by the director, and at times one might wonder about the system of matching the real needs and the jobs that are allocated. It could be that someone is actually holding back on people trying to make a difference because they want certain areas to be left undeveloped so that they can make more contracts with other community service groups. These were questions that rose in my mind, because I wanted to do a lot more and there were a lot of factors that I thought needed improvement, but we could not do anything about them as the director had not asked us to.

Hence, the inflexibility of what one could do was a little frustrating at times. However, whenever frustrated, one could always turn to the ever-tasty, authentic, and extremely cheap Mexican cuisine. One could have the biggest meal, burrito, or combo plate and a drink, and the bill would only be $3.
It was a short, four-day trip, and on my return I had time for some other plans I had made for spring break. Tecolote made me tired, humbled, and satisfied with a little ounce of helplessness and gratefulness, partly to the Y and mostly to God!

Caltech junior Iram Parveen Bilal is a writer for the California Tech.
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