El Último ´Taxibat´

As I was leaving Chiapas, it was very hard saying goodbye to all the friends I have made in Damasco and San Cristóbal (or that is, 'taxibat' and 'adios', respectively). All the people I have met this summer have been very welcoming, and have graciously invited me to share in their lives. I hope that someday I will be able to return and visit them all again.

The last few days in Damasco showed me a wide variety of what the people are like there. On Sunday, the family I was staying with as well as the community leaders of Damasco organized a surprise going away party for me. All of the women that we built toilets for were in the kitchen cooking the dinner, and I ate with the men who received the toilets as well as the community leaders (I would have liked that the women ate at the dinner table as well, but that is a long time change before women will ever eat at the dinner table as equals with the men). Then on Monday, my final day in the community, I was provided with all sorts of food and coke by people wanting to see me off ( I ended up drinking about 3 liters of coke the last two days!). Everyone was so nice, and didn't want me to leave, it seemed like the perfect day to end my time in Damasco. However, then about an hour before I was about to leave the community for the final time, a rather sobering experience occurred that reminded me that life in Damasco isn't just children's smiles and Coca Cola. While we were working, the wife of the albañil walks up to us crying. She proceeds to tell us through her tears that their neighbor, of only 16 years old, was murdered the night before. He was working in San Cristóbal as a bootleg CD vendor on the street, when at 8pm some people strangled him with his own belt. They still didn't know yet who did it or why. I could tell that it really hurt the albañil to find this out, especially since he has a son about the same age. Yet, all he did was ask for the next day off, to go to the funeral, and then proceeded working as if nothing happened...he wasn't wanting that I saw him suffering. Its one thing I sometimes forget when I see all the smiling and happy faces in Damasco , that it hurts peoples' dignity to let other people see their suffering. They would rather that people see their happy side, even though they are unemployed and can't possibly support themselves financially (or even just food wise) on their tiny plots of corn and beans. For this reason, people will provide me with a coke almost everyday, even though their daily diet consists of mainly corn tortillas washed down with a corn drink called atole. And to be honest, I don't really want to see their suffering either. It's much easier to get through the night not seeing the suffering of hunger and sicknesses (especially after knowing that it is the free trade practices of my own country that are partly to blame for making the indigenous campesino life in Mexico almost impossible to be economically sustainable). It's important not to take everything I see at face value and try to think of things from the standpoint of the community. All in all, life in Damasco is very multifaceted and would take much longer than 3 months to completely understand it...and perhaps, as an outsider, it would be impossible to ever completely understand.

Reading my first posts on the blog, I realize that I was a little optimistic about what we were going to be able to accomplish this summer, in regards to organizing the community. I was hoping to have more community organizing involved with the project, but this didn´t really happen for a few reasons. First of all, the community is already fairly organized with their assambleas every saturday and the cargos in the community. Second, the organization COPÍN wasn't really set up with this in mind, which makes it harder to change. Third, the men of the community are busy most of the week harvesting their crops or working in San Cristóbal, so there isn ´t much time throughout the week to have meetings (I´ll get to the women later on). As a result, the best time to make announcements about the project was during the weekly assamblea...but these were only announcements, and didn´t have much input from the community. In addition, I got the feeling that Mateo, the community leader, didn´t like us taking up his meeting (or basketball) time with our anounements. Fourth, the native language of the community is Tzotzil, and not Spanish, so their meetings were all held in Tzotzil, which made it very difficult to know anything that was going on. And lastly, I´ll put some blame on myself, I don´t have a clue how to approach organizing a community. I have had previous experience with community organizing, but mostly as a bystander and not as the one actually organizing the organizing. I had the fear that if I started any organizing, the community would feel it was a waste of their time and it would end up making the community lose interest in the project as a whole.

However, putting all that aside, I am very pleased with how the project has turned out and feel like this summer has been successful. I´m not going to delude myself into thinking I was hammering out justice, as the Pete Seeger song goes (even though my arms are awfully tired). After all, all I was doing was building dry toilets for people. But I feel like the project was well worth it, even though the project was largely just a charity project. One of my worst fears going into this was that the community of Damasco didn´t want dry toilets and this was just going to be another project of outsiders coming in and building something that we thought was important, but wasn´t really important to the community. The Mexican government has built plenty of expensive chicken coops that look like dry toilets. But luckily, all the people we have been involved with in the project this summer have been very interested in their dry toilet and have contributed the mano de obra, and all but one have contributed the sand and gravel. I think the word of mouth from the previous toilets helped to increase demand for the toilets. So the final count for the summer is 7 dry toilets built, which makes a total of 16 toilets including the ones built by Amanda 2 years ago.

One thing I would have liked to have seen happen with the project is a woman's empowerment component. However, I don't know if that will ever be a part of the project. The women of the community are expected to stay at home, make food, take care of the house, and take care of the children. They don't have any say in the community meetings every saturday , and hardly any of them even show up to these meetings. While women are not empowered in the community and are not treated as equals of men, that isn't to say that women are treated completely without respect by the men. Most of the men I saw treated the wives well, and beating one's wife was considered an offense punishable by a day in jail as well as a fine. However, taking the project to such an extreme would require a lot more than just 3 months, and I don't think the members of the organization have enough free time to take on any additions to the project of such a scale. Also, as a male who doesn't speak Tzotzil, it would have been almost impossible to begin any dialogue with the Tzotzil speaking women, especially since I don't know if the men would appreciate me talking to their wives without them.

Had I had more time with the community, I think I would have considered throwing out the idea to the community of a tortilla making cooperative. On account of the U.S. flooding the market with our subsidized corn, corn growers are forced to sell their product for ridiculously low prices...one hectare of corn might fetch about $150 US for the entire year! And in addition to that, almost all the tortillas sold in Mexico are from a monopoly called Maseca, which owns almost every single tortillería. With this monopoly, they can charge whatever they feel like for tortillas, a staple food in Mexico, and as a result, the price of tortillas has more than doubled in the past two years...its now 90 cents US a kilo in most places. If a tortilla cooperative among the communities was set up, then they could possibly bypass the sell low/buy high cycle that dominates their lives. I was talking to one person in the community about this, but he thought that Maseca would almost certainly shut down any competition against them...so maybe a cooperative would have more political resistance than I thought.

One thing I would like to be worked on as the project progresses past this summer is that the project be a Damasco project and not a COPÍN project. What I mean by this is that the residents of Damasco see the project less as a charity project for them, and more as their own project that they take ownership of and are responsible for. I
don't see it as possible that all of the people in Damasco will be able to afford their own dry toilet...one person couldn't even afford sand and gravel...so the inherent charity structure will most likely always be present, but I want the project to become less of a charity project as it progresses. I saw positive steps towards this as the summer came to a close. Juan said that he would put up his own blocks and wood for his toilet, the community was able to come up with albañil without me finding my own, and the second albañil said that once he was finished with the final toilets this summer, he wanted to construct his own dry toilet at his house. Hopefully more people in the community will begin to take matters into their own hands and not just wait for their name to be picked. On a side note, the second albañil told me an interesting thing about building his own dry toilet. COPÍN has a bunch of extra separating toilet seats lying around from when Alex bought too many toilet seats about a year ago. So the albañil saw these toilet seats and had told his wife about them. Then, about two weeks into construction he asks me "I was wondering if you could give me one of those toilet seats to build my own dry toilet. My wife has kept telling me "When are you going to ask them if you can have one of those seats, I want to have a dry toilet!" This shows that while the women don't have much power in the organization of the community, they do have influence over household decisions, such as building a dry toilet.

This summer was such an enriching experience for me, and I've learned so much about the culture and history of indigenous peoples of Mexico as well as project organization. I'd like to thank everyone that has shown an interest in the project throughout the summer, and I hope that I've been able to provide a glimpse of what life is like in indigenous Chiapas. Some things that I'm not going to miss now that this summer is over include:

• Hitting my tall head on every single door frame, tree limb, bus ceiling, store sign, clothesline, you name it ( I feel like Gandalf visiting the tiny houses in Hobbiton)
• The many, many days spent, Pepto in one hand and suero(rehydration fluid) in the other
• Coming home wet every other day
• Waking up to find myself covered in flea bites

But there are many more things that I am going to miss;

• All the children calling my name and saying "bye" to me every day
  
• Sitting down for Coke breaks with the families every day
  
• The hour long bus ride every day listening to ranchero music, packed like sardines with Tzotzil men and women carrying a wide assortment of artesanías, produce, chickens, etc. (however, on they days the driver chose to listen to evangelical preachers in Tzotzil, I would have to put that in the ´Not going to miss´ category)
• Seeing indigenous women walk with pride down the streets of San Cristóbal
• Getting to learn from all the great people that I've gotten the chance to meet in Damasco and San Cristóbal

Colobal for everyones' support throughout this summer, and
Taxibat!

Duraznos y Coca

I´m about to start my last week on the project, and its so strange thinking that I probably won´t ever see this place again. I´ve learned so much and met so many interesting people throughout this summer. The last four toilets are continuing to proceed, although I´m sure I´ll have to leave a few of them for the albañil to finish without me. All the families have been participating with the mano de obra...as well as in the provision of duraznos (peaches) and Coca-Cola to the hungry engineer. In one of the families, the son Pedro is providing the mano de obra for his family. He is actually the same age as me, which sortof feels like putting a mirror up to myself. At the age of 19, he left his family, took the dangerous road to the U.S., and worked for 3 years doing brickwork in Atlanta, Georgia. So while I was busy studying (as well as some partying) at the University of Texas, he was building the arches to McDonalds. He returned this May, because he was missing his family, but thinks that he will have to return to the U.S. again, since he can´t get any good jobs in his home. I was rather surprised to find out how much it costs to travel to the U.S., the coyotes (the human transporters) actually ask for $2000 U.S. for the trip! That´s as much as 3 times more than my round trip ticket here! How long does someone have to work just to make up the amount of money they just spent on the trip alone?

Talking with the new albañil, Miguel, I found out an interesting part of the organization of the community. In this community, as well as in most Tzotzil communities, the members of the community have communal duties, called ´cargos´, that they have to do every week (by ´members´, I of course am only referring to male members of the community). The word for cargo in Tzotzil is ¨nichimal abtel¨, which means flowery or sacred work. It is considered a position of high respect to serve your community through cargos. The community appoints a person to their cargo for a full year, and if the person refuses, they have to pay a fine of $30,000 pesos ($3,000 U.S.). In Damasco, no one yet has refused to comply with their cargo. The different cargos in Damasco are Agente Municipal, Water Monitor, Highway Cleaning, Education Committee Chair, and 6 policeman. Miguel is currently the Water Monitor, which he was appointed to on May 2, which entails making sure the spring water is clean that feeds the piped water to the houses. All the people with cargos must be present at all the asambleas on every Saturday...although there seems to be more basketball than official business going on at these meetings. In the community of Chamula, the cargos involve a whole lot more drinking of trago (liqour), but I think since Damasco is mostly protestant converts, many who don´t drink, there is not as much trago at these asableas (although the community leader Mateo is drunk just about most of the time). Even though women traditionally do not have cargos in Tzotzil communities, it is not because they are not wanting to serve their community. In all the Zapatista bases, they have women in charge of cargos such as heading a weaving cooperative or a baking cooperative. I asked Miguel about women having cargos, and he replied that no women in Damasco have cargos. I didn´t probe the subject any further...I have to admit that I´m a little afraid to approach delicate subjects, being seen as the radical feminist foreign intigator.

Miguel was telling me that on Thursday his wife was going to San Cristóbal to receive poverty money from the government. This is one example of struggle between charity and justice, which sortof pulls strings between my heart and head. At the government offices of San Cristóbal, the government of Chiapas will give money to poor indigenous people. Every Thursday you can go look at the long line of women lined up going through the plaza, waiting for their money. In the case of Miguel´s family, they will receive $400 pesos (about $40 US), but the amount of money changes depending on how many kids the family has. Its so hard to have an opinion on the program. On the one hand, it is a pure charity project. It has at its aim to reduce poverty, but doesn´t do anthing to change the causes of povery, but rather just creates a dependence on the government(which I´m sure the government doesn´t mind). In fact, the way it is set up actually encourages people to have more kids (in order to get more money), which only means more malnourished children. On the other hand, it means that people like Miguel´s family will get to eat something other than beans and tortillas once in a while (not that I don´t absolutely love beans and tortillas, but you´ve gotta have more nutrition than that). I guess the question to answer is; are poor people better off because of the project? I think I would have to answer a tentative ´yes´, but I would think there has got to be a better way to use the money to aleviate poverty. But then again, it would be a government project, and the Mexican government sortof has the reverse Midas touch, where anything it touches turns to crap. It´s quite easy to criticize something without offering a solution (as a just did), but I don´t know of a solution. Its not like Miguel´s family isn´t trying to make a better life for themselves. In order to make ends meet, Miguel has worked in Florida has a gardner, away from his wife and family, day in and day out for three years. In fact, a son and a daughter of his even joined him up there to work as well. And now, Miguel is working for me for a measly $170 pesos ($17 US) a day... the $400 pesos a week adds up to more than 2 hard days of work for Miguel. And the problem of poverty has much deeper roots, in that indigenous people who have lived as sustinance farmers for centuries now have to compete on a world market with the scales heavily tilted against them. Perhaps a better use of the money would be to give low interest loans to people...or fund more weaving cooperatives. But there has gotta be some massive change before they can even think of reducing poverty...and until then, I don´t really see a problem in Miguel´s family getting to eat chicken on Friday.