Los Intendentes

This blog has been on the list to write for about a year... so yeah, I think it's time I finally write it.  It may be offensive to some, so read with caution... though I don't mean to be offensive...

There are some janitors here at the IBM which is great, but I sometimes don't know how to interact with them.  This probably can be mostly blamed on growing up in the United States.  Now, maybe this is just my experience, but when the janitors are Latin, you don't talk to them.  Obviously because they probably didn't know any English.  I know a horrible thing to say, but there it is.  It became even worse when I came back from Honduras... mostly because now I knew Spanish but I didn't want to offend them if they knew English, but I also didn't want to embarrass them if they didn't know English.  So, I kept my silence.  I'm not sure if this is just a cultural thing to not talk to Latin janitors, but it's definitely a me thing.  I've always felt bad about it.  Now I'm here in Mexico and guess what, they don't have Chinese janitors or anything.  They're Mexican.  I continued normally at first and then one day I saw a co-worker having a full-on conversation with one of the janitors.  It was a completely normal conversation like they've been friends forever... and I thought... well why can't I do that?  I have nothing holding me back anymore... they probably don't know English and that's ok cause we're in Mexico.  So, I've started saying hi and being generally more open with them.  I'm not the kind of person to just start a conversation with anyone, so are we buddy-buddy?  No, but I'm much friendlier to them in general.

One last thing that I find interesting... there is still some discrimination against janitors even here.  They're looked upon as generally uneducated and maybe somewhat dumb.  I don't know why I find that interesting cause I guess Americans do the same (just more so with Latin janitors).  But you know what?  These people could be really great people and maybe they didn't go to college, but shouldn't they earn a lot of respect and kindness for having to clean up after us?  I mean, let's face it, we're not very clean sometimes despite how "educated" we may be.  I hope I didn't offend too many people, but these were the things I noticed only after a few months of being here.