Claudia and I on top of the mountain
Dan walked past one of the new chicks the other day and on his way back he saw it squished with its guts hanging out of it's butt, so we think someone stepped on him. In the amount of time it took him to tell us, the little bugger was discarded somehow by one of the compañeras.
This week at Oventic some of us planned our vacation weeks. I will be in Oaxaca City for a few days starting 3/7 and then end the week in Mazunte on the southern coast of the state of Oaxaca. Claudia, Hannah, Nick, and I will swim in the clear water and go harpoon fishing. It'll be great, and after that we're going to Tlaxcala for the next few weeks of our semester.
I learned how to do a simple stitch with a backstrap weave this week. It felt like lanyard for grownups. I hope to finish the bag before we leave Oventic. It's really a pleasantly repetitive process once I got over the difficulty of learning the steps as they were told to me in Spanish.
We went to an autonomous municipality yesterday called Magdelena de la Paz and I've decided that the word “autonomous” is just as elusive as a collective or co-op in the US. It seems like they're autonomy exists in the way that they are collectively reject any involvement from the government because of the lack of rights and respect Mexican bureaucracy grants them. This reminded me of our class earlier in the week.
My notes read,
“* - but how do we change? Not by modifying current system, but 1. by rebuilding alternatives to capitalism at community levels and 2. fighting exploitation through cooperation at local levels
in Zapatismo: the state loses relevance, therefore loses power”.
Autonomous communities are the first steps towards this.
At Magdalena de la Paz, we visited a weaving cooperative, a metal shop, and a tiny schoolroom. I bought a small patch of a burgundy flower with one coral leaf embroidered onto it that probably took a lot of time and patience, yet it only cost the equivalent of less than $2.
Today we hiked one of the smaller mountains overlooking the caracol of Oventic and sang “...and the green grass grows all around...” and learned about how infertile the land is and how houses with red roofs are part of some government project that gives them out (yet barely anything else...). The skies were clear and somehow even at the top I heard a rooster crow.
I'm back in San Cristobal for the weekend and guzzled soymilk on the street when we discovered it at some natural foods store. Before today I was reconstituting powder with water and simple syrup.
PS: I met another Sara(h) Louise this week. She was staying at Oventic for their language school program and had recently worked on this documentary, Crude Independence, about oil drilling in North Dakota:
"...through revealing interviews and breathtaking imagery of the northern plains, Crude Independence is a rumination on the future of small town America—a tale of change at the hands of the global energy market and Americas unyielding thirst for oil"
trailer below:
P.S.S:
Read The Velveteen Rabbit with illustrations here.
“
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
"
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