Paraguas

Pues nada que ver. Mucho ha pasado en todos estos años de viaje, que ya van seis! In-cre-i-ble!!!!!! Y si, ojala un día escriba todo todo!!! Pero resulta que ahora me urge escribir y compilar info sobre mi sanación.
No me identifico en nada en escribir en inglés y por eso lo rechacé. No sé si escribir en portugués o en español, y se me hace más el español porque estoy segurísima que mis compatriotas tienen cero dificultad en leer en español. Pero chance unos días me salga en portugués! Al final no importa, lo que importa es abrir esta ventana hacia mi experiencia, chance para ayudar a alguien más, pero seguro para ayudar a mí misma.
Es un paraguas, un cambio, en lo que han leído en este blog, pero no en su esencia: hablamos de un viaje hacia la tierra y un viaje hacia el corazón, hace nosotros mismos. El camino es el mismo, somos uno. Seguro que van a salir mucho de mis viajes mientras escribo, y si no, es porque algo más saldrá.
Pues resulta que, como muchos en este aquí y ahora, tengo un cáncer en el pecho izquierdo, el mismo cáncer que mi hermana tuvo hace seis años atrás; ella con 31 y yo con 34. Para mi lo veo como un “waking up call”, una oportunidad para reconectar conmigo misma, para conectarme a mis otras dimensiones. Estoy segura de que me voy a sanar, pero el cómo será el más gran viaje.
El 10 de noviembre (2014) supe que tenía un fibroma que tenía que sacar y hacer la biopsia. Estaba en San Sebastián de Río Hondo, con mi familia ecoaldeana, en un lugar de reconexión increíble en mi viaje. Decidí regresar allí porque estaba muy perdida en mi camino, y necesitaba de encontrarme – el universo no perdona! Lo que uno quiere, uno encuentra! – vine huyendo de Australia, en donde viví por casi un año y en donde no me identifique para nada. Oz me ofreció trabajo y yo acepté de inmediato; necesitaba de un hogar, un lugar con que me identificara.
Después de hablar con la curandera de  Xochitla, conocida por ya haber curado muchos canceres y muchas otras enfermedades, a la partera de San Mateo, con Ani – nuestra curandera en San Sebas, he decidido que la mejor opción sería sacarlo y en mi país; quimioterapia y radioterapia no están considerados en mi tratamiento en una primera análisis y que regresaría a México para seguir tratamiento (que empecé el 12 de noviembre).
Con el conocimiento que teníamos, el tratamiento resultó ser el siguiente:

1)      El tratamiento de la curandera de Xochitla que se basa en distintos compuestos y tés que contienen: laurel, caléndula, hierbabuena, neem, anis, polen, pitiona, palo de Brasil, romero, pitaya, ajo, noni, matarique, pimienta cayena, cilantro, toronjil, waco, agave, sabila, lima, naranja, chile;

2)      El tratamiento de doTerra, una empresa que produce unos aceites esenciales de primera calidad y grado terapéutico certificado, con el blend de frankincense (Boswellia frereana), citrus sinensis, Cymbopogon flexuosus, Thymus vulgaris, Satureja hortensis, Eugenia caryophyllata, Melaleuca quinquenervia, incienso y sándalo; y con otro blend de helichrysum, lavender, thyme, marjoram y peppermint

3)      Los suplementos de doTerra Long Live Vitality Kit y complexo B 100 y Vitamina C 500, 4 veces por día; mas aloe vera, moringa, linaza y guanabana

4)      Una dieta totalmente, 100% cruda.

Poco a poco, veremos. La otra parte del tratamiento es la mas difícil: mucha yoga, meditación, pranayama y terapias de relacionamiento. Poco a poco, ahí vamos.

"Narrowing"

And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do…

Wizard of Earth Sea

San Cristóbal de las Casas

Here in San Cristóbal everybody comes to “help”. Everyone has this amazing project, this amazing idea they see is going to improve the life of indigenous villages. Let’s think about it… what is an amazing idea? And what is “improving life conditions”? But better, what is “help”?

What in the end I see here are people trying to set up their utopia of “another world is possible”. In every street of San Cris there is, at least, a NGO. Most of people of NGO’s are foreign people, and a lot of the money in San Cris is in these NGO’s, which also means that plenty of jobs are here also. But these jobs are, at least, half for foreigners. First of all, this is most hypocritical. If people are here because they believe in the autonomous movement of indigenous people, shouldn’t most of the jobs be for them?

And then I ask: if you have a utopia, have you at least tried it in yourself first? Or at least in your most direct net of relations? And even if you tried it, do you really think that it applies to everyone? Who says that if you do A, people are going to answer B? I can see the beauty in a lot of social movements, but what I can also see is their arrogance. You have to ignore a lot of the reality to believe that communism/fascism/ anarchism/capitalism is the answer to all of us. Should we really be searching for an answer? Is that the way? And one answer? How many realities exist? Here I applaud zapatismo movement for their consciousness of not define a way – caminando preguntamos – and, more important, listen; that is one of the bases: listen the people. No one knows the answer, so just be conscious in your walk.

Another thing I don’t understand is projects for “improving life conditions”. There are millions and millions of Euros spent every year under this umbrella. Some of them come here to Chiapas. One that I’m now making part of the advisory board is the United Nations Program to “strengthen democratic and effective management of the water and sanitation in Mexico to support the Millennium Development Goals achievement”. I was most surprised to observe that the goal was to introduce the same water management “first world” has, the same that has 40% of water loss in supply and huge problems in what concerns residual water treatments. Plus, the project doesn’t consider the implementation of water treatment plants. Result? More water demand; more polluted water in rivers; and more dependency of people in a technology that could never be appropriated by the people. For now on, they will always be dependent in whatever matters water management.

I can think in millions of ways to “help” in this case: there are so many things they can do with local resources, by their own hands – biodigestors, dry toilets, water captation systems, systems for water re-use, etc. Technology that can be appropriate by people.
And also, I ask: isn’t it better to spend all this money in the “first world”? We are the ones who really need help to clean our water, air, and soils; we are the ones who really need help to reduce our water demand. The only help I can see that indigenous people really need is stop polluting their world; polluting it with contaminants, products, advertising, drugs, ideas. Is respecting AUTONOMY.

And another, do they really need help on the health system? And what about the “first world”? We have an huge amount of our population dying with cancer! Who says that is worse to die with diabetes than cancer? What about helping them by not taking away their indigenous medicine knowledge? Or taking away their biodiversity where there are all the medicinal plants? Who needs help?

I’m not saying that there shouldn’t exist NGO’s, I make part of a few and believe in them and in the people that work for them. Also, I really find amazing the amount of people that are here and are really engaged in helping, it’s an amazing atmosphere. What I think I’m trying to learn is to be conscious. Conscious in my walk, in the consequences of that walk. And learn to walk respectfully. Perhaps seeing it as a dance can be easier. Learn how to dance all together, to respect and enjoy other people’s movement. To adapt to new songs rather than try to teach everyone to dance your way: who told you it’s right?

In the end, as much as I learn, the least I known what to do. Is this a bad feeling? The most I observe, the most I see it isn’t. As Fernando Pessoa says, “knowing is the unconsciousness of ignoring”. I don’t want to ignore what surrounds me; I need to become aware of it if I want to learn. I think I am in a de-learning period, which I guess it can be most helpful.

Alternativas para vivir: Foro Nacional de Tecnologías Apropiadas

This last month I went to a Forum for Appropriate Technologies: ideas, equipment and attitudes for the good life (http://www.unitierra.org/foro/), held in Oaxaca and organized by, among others, Gustavo Esteva and Rolene Walker (the pilgrim for Walk with Earth, a walk from Australia to Chile, for the beauty of Earth). The purpose of this forum was return technology to the people, was human’s appropriation of technology.

Since industrial revolution technology somehow changed the role to serve humans, it went from a tool to a goal; was transformed into the salvation, the wellbeing, rather than a mean to achieved that. The result? We forgot that the goal was wellbeing for all and replaced it by access to internet or a shopping mall right outside our door.

So in this forum you could touch technology and take its arrogance away by transformed it into the tool. When you do this you can actually see the goal – ex. clean water – and then see the opportunities in your environment, your resources. After, you have several ideas that will be leaded by the attitudes of who will benefit from the technology. In the end we all need clean water but that doesn’t mean that we all have to have the same water management, rather, you should think about how to do it with respect to the environment. As different ecosystems have different abilities to deal with the same problem – water management – we also should think that different societies act likewise. What are the dimensions of this obsession for uniformity? What are the other faces?

The western society is obsessed by uniformity – we should all eat the same, do the same, hear the same, feel the same, see the same; in the end, buy the same, since that is the goal, that’s what we are. It is an unhealthy behaviour and this is clear when one can see we are ecosystem, we are earth, and we all make part of the same thing. And like “monoculturing” earth is killing it, do the same with societies is also destroying them. We should rather be cultivating biodiversity.

Only a biodiverse world can provide the conditions for all life, including human life. Whenever we try to do otherwise we create diseases. Social systems aren’t different. Whenever we try to make everyone be the same all over the world, we create diseases as anxiety, unhappiness, violence; we are creating negative externalities, as we do with our economy. But there’s no such thing as externalities, since we are all in the same earth. So we’re living with these externalities, in other words, we are poisoning ourselves.

So we should grow biodiversity – of nature, of ideas, of dreams, of people, of movements, of costumes, of common sense (as Descartes amazingly identified as the most best distributed thing in the world, since we all have it, but each one have its own!). So we should stop wanting everyone think the same, fight for the same, react the same, dress the same, judge the same. We have to grow integration, integration of us all, of all our differences and stop poisoning ourselves by uniformity and exclusion.

But how it is a world that we all make part of it?

Project aside

Of course I don’t even know where to start!

As expected, community didn’t accepted very well the project – the house, the ecotechnologies, the backyard, in the end, what were we doing there. On top of that, the person that was supposed to live with me in the house never arrived. The best scenario to start over and do it the way it feels right to me.
The house the committee gave us is just beside the secondary school teacher’s house. There are three of them living there: the teacher of agronomy, farming and manual work; one woman, two men, from Monday to Wednesday. So I decided to stay with them, those three days, every week.

Since I arrived the community there was something I couldn’t bare: garbage everywhere. You cannot walk in the woods without seeing a coca-cola bottle. And this isn’t only in this community. Why? What happen to the concept of respecting Nature?
I realised then that there was a new recycling project in the secondary school so I went to present myself to the director and volunteer myself to make part of that project (after all I’m an environmental engineer!) and started to get involve in this problem. So what is happening?

Beverages such as coca-cola where introduced in communities something like 30 years ago. It seems like they have more sugar content than in other markets and also they are cheaper. Nowadays these communities (even in the middle of Lancadona jungle) really believe that Coca-cola makes part of the culture. As well coca-cola bought several water supplies (I can’t drink any water from México that doesn’t belongs to the coca-cola company) and they don’t allow governmental campaigns against beverages and “junk food” since they give job to an important percentage of population. Older indigenous people of Lancadona jungle tried to implement a project where whatever bottle that comes in, has to go out by whoever brought it. Coca-cola Company didn’t accept it so it was a failure.

So we have an average of, minimum, one bottle per person per day. Where can I recycle my PET bottle? Where can I recycle other types of plastic, aluminium, batteries, etc? Well, I cannot! There’s no recycling in Mexico at all. The most you can have is selling PET and aluminium to people that then sell to other countries. All the rest you produce goes to a dump without any type of environmental standards. And this is the very best you can have; in my community all the schools have the garbage at open sky, next to classroom.

If you walk in a very clean community in Mexico you can be sure that what they do is burning what they produce immediately or putting in a hole in the land (wherever they find the place) and burry or burn it, since communities normally don’t have access to municipal collect once they don’t pay taxes…

Why? Because there is no such thing as garbage. The word doesn’t exist as we conceive. All that God gave us is from Him, so it belongs to Him; this means that earth is going to embrace everything as it does with organic remains. There’s no concept of recycling, no word for it also because it also doesn’t make sense. There’s no such thing as environmental managing. Tseltal doesn’t have translations for these new concepts of living. And one cannot go back to what it use to be, we have to find out an intermediate solution, one that respects community way of living and the environmental standards of world globalization.

So now I’m trying to develop an environmental project within this school, with foreign teachers that doesn’t speak their language, don’t believe they are going to change, don’t recycle; building a recycle project in a country where recycle doesn’t exist. Project aside, this is also what I am doing!

And I still didn’t share my first glances about this community… well, hopefully in the end of this week!

Gustavo Esteva

In late January I had the fortune to meet Gustavo Esteva. Gustavo is defined as “grassroots activist and a de-professionalized intellectual”; he is a simple straight forward man, very passionate and fair.

So there was I, a European-city-woman asking Gustavo what could be my role here. As you state this you already found out the answer, right? It just doesn’t exist, as I first felt, as I learnt also within my friends in Schumacher.

So very directly, Gustavo just told me that I couldn’t do anything and in fact, if I tried, that was a mistake. Shocked? No, that was just the way I felt about it all, about the way the project was developing, about my introduction in the community, about the work all these organisations do with the communities, about how the communities are right now.

I don’t want to be unfair with all the organisations, people and with my own organisation and my own job, but it just seems that colonisation is still going on. Who am I to say that this is the right way to live? For sure most of priests also thought that teach the word of God was definitely the right way and I can see it was a mistake now. So building eco-technologies is a positive or an harmful approach?

So Gustavo was telling me his own experience and he was just trying to explain me that change has to come from the inside since I cannot enter entire in someone’s body to cure a disease, because that will kill the person. That’s also why he his defined as a “de-professionalized intellectual”, since he also disbelieves in teachers and students. How good can a teacher be if he doesn’t learn everyday from his students? And how good can a student be if he is not able to share his knowledge?

But in the end a question just couldn’t leave me, despite I agree with Gustavo in all: if change is from inside, how do we explain Che Guevara and SubComandante Marcos?

In that same night I went to CIDECI, an Indigenous Centre for Integral Education. Gustavo tried to make me an introduction by explaining me that in CIDECI they don’t believe in teachers or in classrooms or in all the classic way of teaching. Knowledge has to be free. We can understand that for knowledge to be free it cannot be confined to a specific formula to be disseminated, since we are all different and we all learn by different methods. So I ask, is knowledge free in our society? And does free as to do with free colleges? Are they the same thing?

In CIDECI you have what they call dynamic self learning. You are your teacher and who decide what, where, when and with whom you want to learn, in your own time and space. Its all experiencing, since we are all in this new era where caminamos preguntando.

In that night Gustavo talked about the Zapatista rebellion and about power, saying that they don’t want to take the power since power is not something for someone to gather, power is a relation so it has to be distributed; if you don’t distribute power – as you do it with love, happiness, sadness – you fall in domination. He made a good analogy between power and capital.

We developed a relation with capital based in possession, rather than in distribution. And when you think about how economy rose, you realised that money was just to help transactions and not something for you to possess. Money was really just a mean, something to be distributed.
But somehow we developed an unhealthy relation towards money and decided that you just have to have money and distribute it the less you can, as if you could be happy by cage your love. If you gather something for yourself, no matter what, can that really make you happy?

Something I really enjoyed in his conversation was about the difference between collective and community (this is a hard job to do in English since they mean the same, so I will try to do the best I can!).

So collective is what capitalism is able to do: generate groups of people that are organised by an external strength, creating individuals. In communities we are not individuals, we can’t since we don’t represent an “I” but rather an “us”. In communities I'm not Joana, but rather the daughter of Maria, the aunt of Marisa; we represent a link of relations, we represent a net of relations, we represent, in the end, the community. So we just have to fight against this way of seeing us as an individual and start see us as a net of relations, as an “us”.

But how can we do this? Well, first of all, by not being arrogant. We are arrogant when we think we are going to change the world, we are arrogant when we cannot see our scale, the scale in which we operate. Are we really the change we want to see in the world? if not, how can we change it? So start by yourself and then operate in your scale – your networks of family, friends – and start to build communities and change your “I” to an “us” – can we do it?

Tomorrow is going to be my first night in the community, my first meeting with all the teachers from secondary school… For sure I will learn a lot!

The Project

I’m working in the Training and Education Centre on Health and Ecology for Peasants (CCESC) and make part of a ten people team – a nutritionist, two doctors, a nurse, a health promoter, an agronomist, a translator and three volunteers. We receive (little) financing for a project that aims to reduce the undernourishment, obesity and diabetes (one of the major death causes in the area) on Chiapas’s communities.
These problems were caused by the changing of alimentation habits and physical activities. Traditional food products like beans are being replaced by pasta, oils, fried food and sweet beverages, inclusive from the first year of life. Indigenous communities hold the greatest consuming records of such drinks (drinks that, in some cases, are cheaper inside the communities then any where else!).

The project was designed to fit a community scale basis for further dissemination in the rest of the communities of a municipality, since one of the major problems founded in communitarian experiences of educational support is that of being established uniformly, without concerning cultural relevant differences. Nevertheless I ask: and reproducing a project of a community to other, even in municipal scale, is efficient?

So the aim of the project is developing an educational strategy mainly for women with children up to six months that consists in the construction of educational material for a healthy alimentation based in the traditional concept of a good life – Lekil Kuxlejal – and of local production.

For achieve that the project consider the implementation of a house model with a backyard. This house model should have a good example of a stove – since in most of the houses the food is cooked directly from the flame of the burning wood and without chimney – a dry latrine and an efficient water capitation system. The backyard should be an example of ecological concern, so there’s a compost system and a greenhouse.

Despite the fact that this should be built with the people (since is for the people), it was the municipality that chose the community and since results must be presented, all this was done mainly by the CCESC team and without the community participation (and even knowledge about what was going on!)

In these weeks since I arrived I was participating on establishing the house model as well as being aware about CCESC main activity and the situation of Chiapas’ communities.
Many doubts were in my mind from the first moment – how come something totally from outside can make a positive change in the inside? Is a greenhouse the appropriate solution? Is by someone from outside start to give the example about how to live in the community, that the people that actually live in will plant their food and have healthier behaviour?

And a lot of information was give it to me by CCESC director – one of the most brighter and kind person I have ever met – information about development governmental projects, immigration and emigration consequences, the importance of breastfeeding, the consequences of an unhealthier alimentation in the first years of life.

And by this information I got more concerned about what the consequences a project can have.
Government-sponsored complementary feeding nutrition programs are often based on instant industrially prepared foods with high energy, protein and vitamin content. This has enormous consequences for the community.
First of all, administering the majority of these products require the dilution in potable water, which is commonly unavailable raising the risk of contamination and infection. Also, this kind of food has high contents of sugar, making the children more dependent on sweet food, leading to greater risk of diabetes and obesity.

But this isn’t all. By giving this food to all the families (which is an enormous expenditure for these municipalities and the country), it makes not only that the mothers stop breastfeeding their babies, but also stop giving them local food. And since are the women who take care of the backyards, of the family food, they find no need to do so, since the message is that industrial food is better than their own. Also it makes all families more dependants on governmental help, therefore, poorer. Of course other elements contribute for this abandon.

So in the end we find communities that have the highest consumes in beverages, stop caring for their land, their backyards, changing their alimentation, increasing waste, loosing identity, loosing resilience, loosing their freedom. Is this help?

But who am I to judge?

These weeks we could capture the attention of students which got involved with us and helped us whenever they could. We hold a workshop with women that able us to discover with them which products are in the region (in their backyards) and when to plant and harvest. Around fifteen of them offered to help us on our backyard by giving their knowledge, time and seeds.

With CCESC’ director I was able to decide what was really going to be my investigation. Therefore I will try to understand the role of these backyards for lekil kuxlejal. I’ll try to understand the differences between families that care for they backyards from those who don’t – are they healthier? Happier? More confident? More satisfied? And try to understand why some are leaving their backyards and what seem to be the consequences.

So in the end I am helping on arranging my house in the community since I’m going to live, in part time, in the community. And my job is learning, learning from them since I don’t really know what I have to offer them or even if I should offer something in these terms. I just want to listen, to be aware, and to make good relations that help me on learning more from these women.

In one hand I see myself very useless, on another, I see myself as a new open notebook ready for a new story. What have I learnt that can really help others?