Pay Day Will Come

UMAR is empty except for iguanas and security guards at the gate. We’re getting paid and don’t have to go to work. The word came to vacate on Monday afternoon. The students had already left and Mike was entertaining us in the air conditioned comfort of the Auto Accesso lab with a fun game for the classroom. The place was a ghost town within five minutes.

Luckily for me and my students, all of our midterm exams have been completed, except for a very few no-shows who I will be glad to take care of when we get back. Let’s hope their reasons for not arriving weren’t too serious. Now I have all the time in the world to get that marking done. When we all get back, I’ll be ready to print off the results for administration and carry on where we left off.

Tomorrow is pay day and not a minute too soon. Since discovering myself with 400 pesos total last Saturday, outside of my emergency funds, I have been living in austerity. I made the mature decision to pay 300 of that right away on the power bill. If they cut you off, you have to pay a substantial fine to get hooked up again and, besides, you don’t have power for a while and that’s not fun. OK. 100 pesos for a week. Ulp. Well, I have food in the cupboard, power and lots of clean drinking water. That shouldn’t be too hard. There is a welcoming dinner party for Li from China on Thursday, just in time. But a spontaneous dinner and drinks affair came up for someone’s birthday yesterday. I definitely had to bail on that one. One more day.

Today the unexpected happened. I ran out of gas. If I was tough, I would just go without coffee tomorrow morning. But I’m not. Neither am I ready to break down and hit the Canadian funds. I have been working here since January and it’s high time I had some new localized emergency funds put away. I have to live within my means. So I’m bombing up to school to get that coffee machine I bought for the office. I can use it as a kettle until the money arrives in the bank and get the gas tank replaced. Maybe I’ll find some loose pesos on my desk. I’m short exactly one peso for a pack of smokes and I’ve already dug between the couch cushions.

Look what I just found under the cushion of my desk chair. I’m going to invest this in cigarettes.

When I said I had plenty of food, I never imagined myself eating cold chicken soup or cold spaghetti sauce over dry uncooked noodles. I am so close to making it until pay day. I can’t give up now. Aw shoot. I just heard the “awooogh” of the gas truck. Nothing I can do about it.
Off to school again.
Here are two good reasons helmets are such a good idea in Crucecita.


Alright. Normally hidden wildlife is out enjoying the peace and quiet of a deserted campus. These pheasants didn’t even cluck away from me.






It turns out that maintenance staff and some clerical workers have been left behind. They must be classed as essential services. With so little work to do, these ladies went overboard on the cleaning, even arranging the loose papers on my desk in a neat pile with a paper clip. I was so impressed.