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?