(Editor’s Note: Tim Woodward recently returned from Mexico. This is the first of two columns from the trip.)

SAYULITA, Mexico – “You’re going to Mexico? Do you really think that’s safe?”

You get that a lot when you’re planning a trip to Mexico. People wonder about everything from the drinking water to cartel violence. “El Chapo,” the country’s most notorious cartel leader, was arrested the week before we left so the news was awash with reports of cartel violence.

“Maybe you could cancel and still get your money back,” a well-meaning friend said. “The drug dealers do horrible things to tourists down there.”

In Sayulita, the reality couldn’t have been more different. We’d been there before and were impressed by just how safe it was. It’s a small town on the Pacific coast – peaceful, old-fashioned, almost quaint. Except for more tourists this trip – it’s been discovered now – little seemed to have changed.

A Canadian who spends a month there every winter laughed when I asked him if there was cartel violence in Sayulita.

“The cartels are the reason it’s so peaceful here,” he said. “They have two rules. Don’t hurt the local businesses, and don’t hurt the tourists.”

I had serious doubts about that. If you believe even half of what’s been reported about them, the cartels are guilty of outright butchery. The thought of El Chapo or anyone like him being a peacekeeper struck me as ridiculous.

So I asked Rollie about it.

That would be Rollie Dick, a Sayulita institution. When he retired as a school principal in northern California, Dick moved to Mexico to chase his dream of running a restaurant. He knew nothing about the restaurant business, but his hard work and charm have made Rollie’s one of the town’s most popular hangouts. The food is great, the prices reasonable and laughter is always on the menu.

When a customer while we were having breakfast there made the mistake of asking whether the restaurant’s water was purified, its fun-loving owner shouted – loud enough to be heard half a block away – “a glass of the bad water on table six, please!”

When I asked him about the Canadian’s absurd notion of the cartels as peacekeepers, Rollie’s response surprised me:

“I think there might be some truth to that. A lot of people here think they sense the presence of the cartel. I’ve never seen evidence of it, but I think it’s possible. Bad things rarely happen here.”

Whatever the reasons, Sayulita is an oasis of tranquility. When you arrive at the nearest airport, in Puerto Vallarta, you’re mobbed by vendors offering everything from crafts to taxi rides. When you arrive in Sayulita, an hour’s bus ride away, you’re mobbed by no one. No vendors, no timeshare peddlers, no pressure. As you schlep your luggage through town, stopping for a cold Pacifico or Corona en route, people smile at you. Real smiles. They seem genuinely happy to have you there.

Electric streetlights are a relatively recent phenomenon. Visitors are told to bring a flashlights to negotiate the streets after dark, good advice as most of the streets are dirt or cobblestone and the sidewalks have bone-jarring drop-offs where you least expect them. I’m told that a few years after the lights went in on Main Street, they were temporarily voted out. Too much modernity.

Life is simple there. We slept with the doors open to the deck and the night air. No need to pack an alarm clock. Roosters wake you up at sunrise.

Our morning entertainment was drinking coffee on the deck and watching vendors hawking their wares – from bottled water, fruit and shrimp to propane gas – on the road below. One of the neighbors still rides a horse to work.

We were waiting for a bus one day when a little boy – he couldn’t have been more than four – grabbed one of our suitcases and rolled it to a different spot. It was his way of telling us that the bus didn’t stop where we’d been waiting. He didn’t hold out his hand or ask for a tip. He just wanted to help.

Another day, when my wife left her camera sitting on our table after lunch, our waiter chased us down and returned it to her. The same thing happened another time when we forgot some change.

Mexico isn’t safe? No argument – depending on where you are. Border towns are best avoided, and it’s smart to check the State Department warnings when planning your trip.

But in a place like Sayulita, you’re safer than you’d be in a lot of U.S. cities. My favorite story about it is that of some Boiseans who went there for Christmas. When it was time for the local kids to break open a Christmas piñata, they deferred to the Boiseans – saying their kids should go first because they were guests.

The cartels didn’t have anything to do with that. They were just good kids. Good kids growing up in a place that, for whatever the reasons, is as safe and idyllic as where I was lucky enough to grow up – a then little town called Boise.

 

Tim Woodward’s column appears in The Idaho Statesman every other Sunday and is posted on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

 

Every so often you witness something that makes you realize how much the world has changed. A recent incident in a Boise restaurant was such an occasion.

I was having lunch there when three teenage girls and one of their mothers slid into the adjacent booth. The girls began to commune with their smartphones while waiting for their order to be delivered.

“Look at this!” one would say, holding the phone so her friends could see it.

They watched in silence, occasionally punctuated by a grunt or a giggle.

“Check this out!”

Another phone extended, another silence. Eventually all three girls more or less dematerialized into their phones. The mother ate her lunch in silence, feeling, as my mother used to say, like two cents waiting for change.

I related to the mother. When we were those kids’ age, we actually talked when we went out with our friends.

This is not to say that kids today don’t talk to each other. They do, as anyone who has been to the mall or a high school event lately will attest. But they seem to spend as much or more time communicating with or through their devices than with each other. We’re a device-oriented society. By that I mean that devices have become a dominant force, if not the dominant force, in daily life. And increasingly, those of us who aren’t device-oriented are the social equivalent of, well, two cents waiting for change.

How omnipresent are our devices? Last month, I attended a junior high school band concert at which almost none of the parents were actually watching the performance. They were watching their smartphones film the performance.

A young woman I know was texting on her smartphone during labor recently, thumbing messages between contractions.

A frequent visitor to our home is on her smartphone from the time she arrives at our house for a visit until the time she leaves. She’s on the phone when she walks in the door, on the phone when we’re trying to have a conversation or watch a movie, on the phone when she walks out the door. Occasionally she’s talking to someone on the phone, but more often she’s texting, tweeting, Googling or Facebooking. She considers this normal behavior. My wife and I consider it rude.

But then, we’re dinosaurs. What Baby Boomers consider rude or obsessive phone behavior is perfectly acceptable among members of the X Generation and all but obligatory among Millennials.

The demise of the actual dinosaurs – we haven’t quite matched that  distinction yet – may be the ultimate cautionary tale. Adapt or die. And God knows we’re trying to adapt. But, as anyone who didn’t grow up with digital toys and smartthumbs will tell you, it’s not easy.

My wife has had her smartphone, a different brand than mine, for well over a year and I still have trouble answering it. In the age of Pre-Digital Innocence, answering a phone was easy. You picked it up, said hello, and that was that. With my wife’s phone, you have to press an icon, slide another icon, enter a code, show it your birth certificate and submit to a retinal scan. I’m exaggerating, obviously, but not by much.

Facebook is a continuing mystery to me. Nothing on my page has been posted by its originator – me – in months. My daughters and granddaughters post things on it, my friends post things on it, for all I know Lady Gaga is posting things on it.

I was taking some pictures on my smartphone last week when suddenly, with no prompting whatsoever, the images changed from color to black and white. Happily, a seasoned, tech-savvy authority was standing two feet away. My 16-year-old granddaughter.

Voice recognition and auto correct make me crazy. A few paragraphs earlier in this column, the word “behavior” was auto-corrected to “beaver.”

When I’m correcting mistakes in texts or e-mails on my smartphone, its cursor goes everywhere but where I want it to, then opens a window that doesn’t but might as well say “nice try, stupid.”

The solutions to these problems no doubt are simple enough that I could  end the frustration with some study and practice, but the truth is that I just don’t care enough. Maybe that’s the biggest difference between everyone else and dinosaurs like yours truly. And besides, I found an eminently satisfying solution of my own recently. I threw the phone across the street.

The curmudgeon in me is tempted to grump that the devices that permeate our lives will spell the demise of human interaction. But that’s too easy and  pessimistic, to say nothing of wrong. Curmudgeons undoubtedly said the same thing when telegraphs were invented. Technology isn’t stifling conversation; it’s  changing it. Instead of having to write letters, make long-distance calls or run to the library for information, all the girls I encountered  at that restaurant have to do is click. The world is at their thumb tips.

But I still say there’s nothing like a good, non-digital conversation.

 

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday and is posted on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

 

 

“Henry, this check is made out to the county. Shouldn’t it be made out to me?”

“Henry, can I get two bus passes?”

“Henry, the coffee machine is leaking.”

Henry Krewer sits in the worn chair in the cramped office where he spends his days, dealing with seemingly endless questions and complaints. He has done this for a decade now. He is 80 years old. He looks tired.

“I am tired,” he said. “It’s time for me to be cutting back.”

This month, Krewer will step down as mission coordinator of the Corpus Christi Homeless Shelter, 525 Americana Boulevard. Considering all he does there, the title is modest. Krewer co-founded the day shelter in 2003 and has overseen almost every facet of its operation since then, from finances and administration to personally easing the burdens of homelessness. Need a ride, a meal, emergency money? Someone to fix a problem, be an advocate, break up a fight? See Henry.

He estimates that 100 people a day have used the shelter’s services since it opened in December, 2003. Krewer and his wife, Kathy, have been there almost every day of that time. She keeps the books, makes runs to the Idaho Food Bank and helps out in myriad other ways. If not for the Krewers, countless people would have gone hungry and not had a safe place to get in out of the cold. They don’t just talk about helping their fellow man. They do it  – six days a week, without pay.

I met them in 2002. A homeless man had drowned in the Boise River, and Henry Krewer wanted to talk to me for a story about what was and wasn’t being done for the city’s homeless population. He and Kathy were serving meals  at Community House then, and working to build what would become Corpus Christi House. His next stop after our interview was for a sleeping bag to give to a homeless man sleeping outside while dying of cancer.

It made an impression. When I retired from The Statesman three years ago, I joined the many volunteers who help keep Corpus Christi running. My contribution is small – a couple of mornings a month – but it’s been enough to learn how much the shelter means to those who need it.

I’ve seen people shivering after a winter night on the streets, grateful beyond words for a warm bagel and hot coffee. I’ve seen the gratitude on the faces of those desperate for a ride to a job interview or a doctor’s appointment as they joined one of the Krewers in their 8-year-old Toyota Prius. Time and again, I’ve seen Henry Krewer respond to an urgent request by reaching for his wallet and handing over his own money.

His response to those who say the homeless are loafers who live off of handouts:  “You can say that about any group of people, and you’d be right some of the time.”

He himself grew up poor in a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y. He became a Franciscan brother and says that “everything I am I owe to them. But I was limited to teaching, and I wanted to work with poor people.”

He moved to Canada and worked at a school where he met his future bride, then found a job “helping poor native people stand on their own two feet and get an education. I was very content there. But then Canada tightened up on immigration so we came back to the states.”

In 1976, the Krewers moved to Boise, where Henry became a chemistry and physics teacher at Bishop Kelly High School. (He has degrees in biology and endocrinology.) He was known as a tough teacher, which he defines as “having high expectations.” He worked as a soup-kitchen volunteer in his free time and in 1996 retired from teaching to devote the rest of his life to helping the poor.

“It makes me be real,” he said, his Brooklyn accent still palpable. “Saying you’re a Christian and living it are two different things.”

“… I’ve formed many friendships among the homeless. There are things we can do here for them and things we can’t. … We give them a home base, a place where it’s easy to be good.”

There are, he says, two kinds of homelessness. One is temporary – people who lose jobs and homes and need help before getting back on their feet. “Those people come and go here, and that’s a good thing. I just got a call from one who used to be here and is in Kansas now. He just got his contractor’s license and wanted to hire somebody from Corpus.”

Others are chronically homeless. Corpus Christi works with various agencies to help give them housing and continued support. Citing Utah,  which now saves several thousand dollars a year per homeless person by providing them with housing rather than operating shelters, he hopes for a time when Boise no longer needs shelters.

Until then, he’ll continue to volunteer at Corpus Christi “six days a week, but for a shorter time each day.” Marc Schlegel, a Mennonite pastor, will take over his post as mission coordinator. (The shelter is non denominational.)

“He gets it,” Krewer said. “He knows, as I do, that there’s a great satisfaction in doing this. It’s the difference between just going to church and living your faith.”

 

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.