Learning her new job

For the last week and a half, Fran has been deep into learning her new job as a checker at the Mexican grocery chain, Soriana.  We don't think she has earned a cent for her training period, but on Thursday (day after tomorrow) she will take her position at her checker booth and put into practice the thousands of pieces of information they have been cramming into her head all last week and part of this one!

There is some suspense.  She will finish up her last computer study and exams tomorrow and has a meeting with the jefes (bosses) to receive the verdict about whether she has qualified herself for the responsible position of cashier.  I will confirm as soon as I know!

Fran had to temporarily postpone her studies at the Oaxaca Learning Center (only for the week and a half of training) and change her study schedule to agree with her new part time job.  We are hoping that her good luck in the job department will not greatly affect her chances of passing the exam.  On Wednesday she will visit two universities to confirm the dates of the entrance examinations.  Then she will sign up for both exams.  She thinks she can arrange to take the exam at the University she DOESN'T want first, as a warm up.

To those reading this blog who make see these events as fairly routine, please know that they are anything but!  Training at a huge grocery store with thousands of different products, codes for each one, and how to handle credit cards and other protocols is very challenging for Fran.  There is no food store in the village where she was raised -- everyone there grows their own limited crops in dry, hard land.

Now that she is living with me, we talk almost every evening at the dinner table about where she came from, and the life she used to live.  I don't see where she will find the time, but I have been urging her to write the story of her life in short vignettes, first in her native language of Cuicateco which is still her most fluent idiom.  Then she can translate it into Spanish, in which she has become quite skilled (considering she only learned it 2 years ago), and then I will translate that into English.

I am so tempted to repeat what she has been telling me, but let me give you just a taste.  There are no roads to her village, only a trail that goes off the main road about an hour away.  Because the labor in the family field is so intensive, family members often walk the long way home after dark, especially when there is moonlight to light their way.  They carry wood on their back for the dinner fire.  The worst threat they face in the region where they live are poisonous snakes of several varieties, and one night Fran's mother heard whirring sounds overhead as she walked loaded down with wood -- snakes leaping through the branches.  There is no medical care in the village, much less in the remote outback where most of the villagers tend their plots of land.  Villagers have lost limbs and their very lives from snakebites.  Fran told me that there is a kind of snake that you cannot kill by beheading it with a machete because the head will still come at you

One day, if Fran manages to find time between her "part time" (6 hours per day, 6 days per week) demanding job and her studies -- you may be reading about her life in her own words!