UMAR Huatulco Kicks Dengue Right in the Face

 

I popped in to UMAR one Saturday morning to work on some ongoing projects and saw the most intense insect control underway.   I've never seen anything like it.

 

The place is mostly deserted on the weekends so there was nothing to stop total warfare.  The few support staff could take shelter in any of the deserted buildings .  It was a beautiful sight with the sun barely penetrating the clouds. 

 

Dengue is always a potential threat at our low elevation, especially during rainy season.  As a man who has suffered dengue twice, I would sooner ride my scooter at night without a helmet than watch the sun go down at Chahue without wearing a little bug spray. Downtown, trucks come by routinely spraying the residential areas but nothing like this.  Our campus is in the thick of the jungle.

 

Some people don't believe in using bug spray and they may never catch dengue but all it takes is that one unlucky mosquito bite and you are off your feet for a week, if not dead.  Fortunately, our administration takes it seriously and takes advantages of the weekends to deal with the threat with total warfare.  

 

 

It looks to me like the mosquitoes lost.

 





 

 

Motofest 2010

Some fun things were happening in our town last weekend but some bad directions steered me the wrong way. Worse, I passed on those same directions on to other people. I missed the Motofest rock concert on Friday evening and almost the helmet awareness ride.

It seems to have been a wild Saturday night. One friend had lost the battery to his scooter earlier in the week. Another had the lock stolen to his. When I got ready for the ride early Sunday morning, my speedometer and license plates were missing. They were there. I just couldn´t see them. Somebody had sprayed them with black paint. Worse, the freaks sprayed a neighbor´s shiny truck.



There were no bikes gathered in the square when I arrived. Oh well. I was awake. It was a beautiful fresh morning. I gassed up for a nice ride on my own and that´s how I came across the Helmet Awareness Ride, more or less by accident. Somebody gave me a fresh T-shirt and we were on our way. It was a longer ride than last year. We circled through town twice, making a lot of noise. That´s how my friend found us. Luckily his girlfriend brought her camera along. Mine was broken.



I bought a new one right after the ride. Within minutes I ran into a pack of UMAR students down at Chahue. My first picture with the new Samsung. May it have better luck than all the cameras before it.

Licensed to Drive

Notice anything different?

My scooter has a license plate! There's even a card with my picture on it that says the Mexican government doesn't have any issues about me driving on their roads. I feel so grownup.

Very few people were driving with plates back in 2009 but they've become quite popular since the day the police parked three big trucks on a highway exit and confiscated 50 or more scooters within 2 hours last December. One of our teachers was unfortunate enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and had to pay to get his back. We all took our lesson from him. I couldn't take care of it right away. The license office was a crazy moshpit for 2 weeks and I couldn't navigate through that much of a frenzy with no Spanish on my lunch break. I rode around very cautiously until then, steering far from places that might make strategic road block locations.

I even have a helmet now. Took me a while to find it. The Dynamo shop carries them. I think they're moving quickly. There is a rumour circulating that, after plates and licenses, the next law to be enforced will be helmets. That's "casco" in Spanish.

So far it's a love-hate relationship. It's true they improve visibility because the shield keeps hornets and mosquitos from smashing into my face and tears no longer stream down my face from the wind on the fast lane back and forth to school. I've learned that ducking my head a bit keeps the wind from lifting it off my head.

Hearing is also improved. I suppose that's a plus. It means I can no longer listen to my MP3 player blasting rock 'n' roll in my ear. I was hoping bud ear phones would do the trick but the helmet flattens my ears when I put it on. I have to straighten them out again once it's on. Without a helmet or headphones, all a driver can hear is the roar of the wind in his ears.

The helmet came with an excellent bonus, a motorcycle girlie calendar. I thought that was so classic. The girls are pretty enough in their artificial way although a couple have had enough surgery done to make their original gender questionable and all of them look kind of cheap and high risk for STDs. They're nobody's muse . I just loved the sheer campiness of it. Classic garage. I stuck it up in my office without thinking and it probably would have stayed there if my more politically sensitive room mate hadn't tampered with it while I was in class.


Trust me. She's nothing special. She looks like the sort of girl who favors pot-bellied rednecks or the guy with the most coke in his pocket.

I thought the vandalism was hilarious but he made his point. This is Mexico and people just aren't as uptight about such things as home but this is a university and probably not the best place for it. I took it down. Now I have it pinned to my bathroom door. It's priceless.

And so are our heads. Helmets take getting used to but they're worth it. Everybody should wear one.