por eso el diablo muy triste esta

Well, Thanksgiving came and went and I didn't take any pictures of the spread that we ate at a new friend's potluck dinner party (that seemed awkward), but I did take a photo of the pizza I made out of my leftover chickpea gravy:

I am very proud of it. I'd never made a pizza before, and the dough was pretty perfect at first. Tony helped by doing some fancy tossing moves that I probably would've messed up. He is a great enabler of my baking habit. Today he and I also spent hours reorganizing shelves and moving things around. I guess on my part I am feeling disoriented because we don't have to go into the office until Monday, which means we have nothing to do. I know it probably seems silly to complain about having nothing to do in a new city, but there's a lot of stress about expectations, money, making ourselves feel at home here, getting used to Mexico in general, and not knowing quite what the future holds. It's also hard for me to deal with missing my family (this was my first Thanksgiving without them) and nursing some gloominess without dwelling on it. I think we are making the best of it, for the most part.

Last week, I went on a tiny beach vacation with my coworker. I would put up pictures, but really I only took a couple of photos for my own documentation purposes, and visually it wasn't a very interesting vacation. Mostly I lazied on the sand or in the water and read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which took a few chapters to build up, but has turned into a really good book (at least for now). I read something in the NYT quoting someone, the basic idea was something like "If you have a library and a garden, you have everything you need." I guess in that respect my needs are basically covered here--we have a constant flow of books, everyone is constantly reading and talking about books, which I enjoy. We also have access to a few markets, not even including our silly, stupid local supermarket. We've started our own sprouts and stuff like that, and I've heard there are some urban gardening projects happening that I think I might get involved with. So yeah, the city is getting more familiar, slowly.

I am also beginning to nest a bit. I have trouble with this, because I am used to the chaos mentality of leaving everything packed: "who knows how long I'll ever be anywhere?" These are some photos of little angles in my room:

closet

My parents sent me a package of warm clothes. Winter is descending in Oaxaca, and though it certainly isn't as cold as it was in San Cristobal, it's still pretty cold at night and early on. I put the clothes away today, but as I did, I tried my best to smell out my parents' house in there, that soapy warmth. I guess the clothes had travelled too far for too long: they just smelled like box and air. I endured Thanksgiving with the help of my friends, but today I couldn't help trying to track down the old silly "december music" that we'd start listening to around this time on the internet, and I found my favorite one (this isn't a video, just the song): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RttPmVJiXc

This is another picture:

dresser (Tony and I have started draping our rival hipster gang keffiyehs around random things in the house. They never stay anywhere for long.)

Tony helped me move stuff around and hang the awesome Zapata poster I got in Chiapas. It says "Nos vemos en el 2010"--the centennial of the last revolution, and bicentennial of the other one. The government is using this event to build lots of highways (which of course cut through indigenous communities whenever possible) and do lots of other big projects that are all titled 2010, for example "Ruta 2010". Some folks anticipate another revolution (unlikely). At the beach we talked to someone about 2012 and they started rambling about the events leading up to 2012 (which apparently began sometime in 1980 or something?), and underground city-dwellers, fourth dimensions, and shamans. This person was certainly engaging in the quite popular Puerto Escondido drug culture, but you know?

We've been throwing around some Buddhist writing lately, which is making me feel better about my expanding and shrinking world and life and feelings. I've adopted a way of joking-but-not-joking about things that is Buddhist, Zapatista, and CrimethInc-y. It helps. Thinking about the Abejas and trying not to hold in any anger or anxiety helps, too.

Whatever works!

I hope, if you find yourself reading this, that you also find yourself happy and warm, because I would like to send out as much happy warmth as I can over the silly internet.

"It's Not About You, Hipster! Now Keep Clapping!" (or, "The Great Chiapas Rundown")

When you first step off the bus in San Cristobal de las Casas, you might find yourself under the impression that you are in a lovely, colonial town in Latin America. It is imperative to your survival in Chiapas that you do not let yourself be entirely swayed by this impression. I've probably mentioned the pre-recorded marimba music playing from loudspeakers hidden in trees, I know I've griped about the hippie zapatourists, and all that whatnot.

There are a few things to talk about when you talk about southern Mexico, and maybe you know these things, because I guess I sort of knew these things, but it is different to know things and see them, so there.

A street in San Cristobal

So, for starters, Oaxaca and Chiapas, despite holding vast amounts of Mexico's natural resources, are basically the two poorest states in Mexico. This coincides with the fact that they also hold the highest percentage of indigenous populations in Mexico. There are sixteen "most common" indigenous dialects in Oaxaca alone, if that gives you any idea of the scope of it. Many of the folks living in Chiapas, even in a largely tourist-y area like San Cristobal, don't speak much Spanish at all. This is maybe the first thing that made me feel "weird". I had to confront a lot of my ideas about why the Mexican government would ignore the needs of such a large number of people, while simultaneously realizing that, just like all over Latin America, it's easy for us mestizo folks to push the indigenous communities to the back of our minds, because, after all, they could come down to the cities and conform to acting like the rest of us.

So, while that was "hard" or whatever, I felt even worse for thinking that it was a big deal at all, because no matter what my little crisis of emotions was like, it's nowhere near the issues many people in the small communities in Chiapas have to deal with.

At the same time, amazing things are happening. Collectives for artisans and coffee growers are forming and growing. We got to sit in on a meeting for a coffee collective in Simojovel (a small town I mentioned earlier). It took three hours to get there. We had to take a taxi up curvy mountain roads to a certain stop where a bus would pick us up. At the stop, we waited in the cold at a store where taxi drivers were taking breaks, joking around in a language I couldn't understand while eating shrimp Cup o'Noodles with tortilla chips.

When we got to the collective, the whole meeting was in Tsotsil, in a warehouse full of sacks of coffee, with delegates from each community sitting or lying on top of these sacks. Even though I couldn't grasp most of what was happening, I appreciated the indigenous tradition that we would experience a couple more times, of not ending a topic until everyone who wanted to speak had spoken. Consequently, the meeting took forever, but we still got to speak to the president of the board for a few minutes, and we bought some of their delicious coffee (which is that "Mind, Body, and Soul" stuff you folks buy from Equal Exchange back in the States). In small communities in Chiapas, they drink coffee with most of their meals. They make it kind of weak and black but very sweet, and it's delicious hot with a bowl of black beans, their insanely spicy hot chile salsa, and a big pile of homemade corn tortillas (they don't even bother giving you utensils): the meal we ate most often.

Also in Simojovel, we went to the amber museum, which I thought was mostly boring. The man working there offered us some terrible fruit-nut thing called cacate. The nut inside the shell starts out tasting deliciously nutty or chocolatey, and then becomes horribly bitter. We asked about the health benefits of amber and he said that was superstition, and that only Jehovah really knows things. Then, he added that a thing that isn't superstition is that pregnant women lose the ability to fry chicharron adequately. He has seen this, and he knows it to to be true.

I know I hated on the zapatourists a whole lot, but the truth is that many of the people who come to Chiapas from elsewhere are doing important work. In the wake of government injustice and pretty blatant violence against small autonomous communities, many people come from all over the world to do human rights monitoring and "accompaniment" with the people in the communities. Many people in the community that we stayed in, Tzajalchen, seemed grateful just to know that people in the world knew about them and cared, just to know that they are not alone. On that note: in Chiapas, "autonomous community" does not mean that a community has chosen to side with the Zapatistas. Many indigenous communities have simply not wanted government intervention for many years, finding that the government's help is often insufficient and politically motivated. Instead, many are finding ways to do things like build the schools and clinics the government has failed to provide on their own. In this undertaking, only some communities have fully embraced the Zapatistas. Many, like the one we stayed in, sympathize with the EZLN but don't believe in taking up arms.

However, declaring your community autonomous and nonviolent makes you somewhat of an easy target. The government has had a ceasefire with the Zapatistas since almost right after their uprising in 1994, and although it has violated terms of their treaty many times, outright conflict hasn't restarted. Instead, there is low-intensity warfare all over Chiapas (Mexico is second in number of delegates sent to the SOA every year, Colombia is first). And there was the massacre in Acteal.

The new church at Acteal (the first church still stands)

In 1997, a community in Acteal populated by a prayerful nonviolence group called las Abejas ("the Bees") found themselves terrorized by a paramilitary group. Men, women, and small children, many of whom were in their tiny wooden church at the time, were shot at for six hours. No help ever came. The survivors identified many of the murderers as members of neighboring indigenous communities, presumably payed off by the government to do this terrible thing. Now, the government is slowly releasing the killers, arguing that due process was not followed in their trials. However, the "intellectual authors" of these crimes have never been prosecuted. Now, the murderers want to return to their homes among the community members, and they are scared.

They aren't fighting back, though. Some say that if it is the will of God, then we have to be okay with the killers coming back. When the leader of the board of the Abejas explained to us the origin of their name, he said, "Bees work, and their are reigned over by a bigger bee. We too work, and we live in the reign of God. Like bees, there may be a bigger, busier world outside of ours, but we live and work here, with God."

And that's that.

any old lie will do

Don´t worry, folks! I´ve been taking very fastidious notes on my great Chiapas adventure so that I can write a long entry explaining the whole thing once I get back to Oaxaca (only two more days left on this delegation!), but today is my day off and since, unlike my coworker Tony, I value slowness and the ability to sleep in and take photos much more than any old Mayan ruin, I´ve been lazying about town. I got to really shower today, unlike most days when I shower half-assed-like. The constant wearing of woolly hats has made my head itchy, and since, like all my other bizarre personal problems, I told Tony about this, he bought me some special itchy-head shampoo at the Museum of Mayan Medicine while I was in Tzajalchen. I used it for the first time this morning and it smelled like a combination of cigarette butts and fish. I think this may have been a joke.

I just realized I lost my woolly hat. I´d be happy about this, except that that hat is basically the warmest thing worth wearing in San Cristobal. San Cristobal, on that note, has hugely stupid weather. It is cold in the morning and in the afternoon, very cold at night, but in the middle of the day, it becomes uncomfortably warm, even hot. It makes it so that you have to layer for three different climates, and then carry around a big enough bag to hold the extra layers when you don´t need them. Maybe this is why the hippies wear their stupid baggy pants, but those don´t even seem that helpful. Whatever.

Well, there´s more day-off-ing to do! Onward!

We take walk-in dreadlocks from 10 til noon

Backpackers are everywhere! And they keep on showing up at the organizations we have meetings with! The same people! This town is too small for all of us, guys, come on. At least in Oaxaca we can hide in the multitudes.

Our delegation came in today and so far, so good. I saw an amazing presentation on zapatismo today by a woman named Marina Pages at an organization called SiPaz. It was seriously genius in action.

In a few days, we´ll head out to Tzajalchen. Time is not flying, but maybe it will start to?

The Great Chiapas Stomachache

Greetings from Chiapas!

Chiapas is an adventure in ways that I am not ready to articulate yet. I think I will need to process some more before I am ready to really talk about it. I am learning things about myself, among them how much I need to process things before I am ready to talk about them (I NEED TO PROCESS A LOT).

It´s colder, for one. San Cristobal is pretty touristy, for another. I actually had no idea it was such a hot spot.

I keep having moments where I deeply appreciate this opportunity, because I am getting to see things that even the brave tourists probably can´t see. I´ll write about that in more detail once I´ve processed.

The food is pretty good. I´m finding ways to make eating work. I´m not really a picky eater, but still. Yesterday we had one of my favorite meals the whole time at the workers´cafeteria in a coffee co-op in a town called Simojovel (a name which in Tsotsil means ¨field of ants up on high¨): beans, tortillas, eggs, and a bowl of chopped hot chiles and lime juice (basically my favorite food).

I am glad we´re moving so fast because I feel some homesickness starting to crawl in. Mostly I only hear from my parents (whine whine whine) and that´s sort of hard. On the other hand, I hear from my parents quite a bit, and that´s awesome! But I think that, combined with the coffee I´ve been drinking the past two days (not drinking coffee in Chiapas is sort of like deciding to tour some great wine valley and saying ¨nah, wine´s not really my thing¨), combined with the fact that the delegation arrives tomorrow, is the source of my stomachache. So I´m suppressing that, too, until I can process.

Until then--

The days off are going well! Yesterday we explored Oaxaca markets and today will probably be more of the same. We ate at my new favorite place, the naturista store I mentioned earlier. They had soy tacos al pastor, which were pretty good, tiny tacos with pastor-seasoned soy meat, guacamole, and lots of cilantro. We went to a huge market that sold some touristy Oaxaca things but then also mazes of random metal parts, appliances, cookware (ALL OF THE COOKWARE IS ALUMINUM. CAST IRON DOES NOT EXIST.), toys, and of course one black-light-lit stand where an apathetic young guy was blasting Mexican rock music and selling Ramones shirts.

Other than those adventures, we made ricey-beany-thing with a side of green beans, which was really comforting. Then! I actually made vegan brownies out of Abuelita chocolate! Personal triumph! Then I passed out.

Today, more wandering, and then preparations for Chiapas.

soy saves the day once more

Training is over!

Last night was way better and my higher spirits flowed into today, too. First, every night we've had a segment in the agenda called "In-depth Personal Stories", and we tended to go other places to do that. Yesterday, we went to a coworker's rooftop, where we could see most of the city, to tell our stories. After, I got two cell phones, a wfp one to use for stuff in Mexico, and then another one to use mostly to call home. I got the cheapest cell phones that didn't look like they were made of cardboard, and they are tiny and bricklike and almost identical. Then, we walked into a natural foods store. These are referred to as "naturista" stores and don't actually sell a lot of food at all, mostly loaves of dense, heavy-looking whole wheat bread and then a few shelves of vitamins and herbal supplements, henna, and other randomness. But then there was a near-empty refrigerator that had fake meats in it! We bought some soy chorizo and then one of my new coworkers and I walked to "Pizza Italia" and had some very not-Italian seeming pizza, which we purchased from an Italian man in a keffiyeh.

Talking to my parents after all that adventure was over was great. I miss them, but they were being really sweet and that makes talking to them much easier.

Today went well in terms of training, and our soy chorizo breakfast was delicious. We celebrated the successful training with a tres leches cake, and then we "decorated" our apartment, hung out, planned a bit of the day off tomorrow, and my roommate played Bob Marley while stringing up Christmas lights.

Then, we all played Apples to Apples and laughed a bunch, and since our ED has been down here for the training, she is heading out tonight and we joined her for a late meal. We went to a place really close to our apartment and ordered Oaxacan specialties, tlayudas (big, toasted tortillas filled with Oaxaca cheese (which is amazing) and other stuff--mine had black beans, onions, and mushrooms) and hot chocolate. They offered me bread for my hot chocolate (like, as a side) and I fell in love (because how can you not love a place that believes in bread as a side?!). They also brought out steamy hot bowls of a tomato-jalapeno salsa they'd just made, and a bowl of onions with hot peppers (tasted like habanero but looked very pale green and they left it seeded) and lime juice. The whole thing was delicious and now the combination of hot chocolate, good food, and general loveliness of the evening has me feeling warm and happy.

Tomorrow, we're out to buy kitchen wares and I'll probably gather up some last things before my trip to Chiapas. Saturday will probably be more exploring, maybe getting around to organic markets. Through a friend of a friend, I met someone on facebook who lives in Oaxaca and today he invited me to a metal concert he is having on saturday night! I'm definitely going to try to make it out to that! Then on Sunday, I think I might go to a benefit lunch for one of our partner organizations and explore a small town called Mitla that is supposed to be really awesome. Then, back to the house, and then off to Chiapas, which'll be an all-night bus ride.

Exciting stuff!

tlayudas and internet

I thought for a long time about writing tonight because I am feeling whiny. I figured no one would want to read some lucky jerk who gets to up and move to Mexico complain about the minute details. Then I realized that maybe I would want to look back later and read about those things. Besides, this is the first time I've felt crappy since I was here, and I think I should document it. (Ever the documentarian!)

Today started out innocently enough. Actually, today started out well! My roommate and I went to the market and bought produce and cheese and tortillas, and we made breakfast for everyone. I had had nightmares all night last night, so it was good to get in the kitchen, which is generally a thing that makes me happy. During check-in, a couple of other people admitted they'd also had nightmares all night, which was kind of weird, but made me feel better.

The training today was actually pretty awesome. We talked about popular education, which is a thing I like, and rounded out the day with personal stories from a couple of people, which I also really enjoyed. The not-so-bright side of this is that we were basically "working" from 9 to 9, so there wasn't time for much else, including the photography show I wanted to go to.

I'm also beginning to feel weird about not cooking for myself. I just don't feel like I've been cooking enough and while I'm all for exploring Oaxaca's culinary amazingness, our meals have felt really rushed. Also, since we don't really have tons of money, we're basically eating at super-cheap places, which are easy to find here, but I don't know. It hasn't really been working for me.

I guess today I am feeling the way I felt early on into puppet tour, where I just felt out of place and weird and like there were too many feelings happening, and everyone was being too sensitive. And, much like then, I think this will all turn out great if I just take a step back from being so sensitive and find ways to make this work.

So, you see, it'll be just fine.

dia de los muertos

So, day one in Oaxaca is over. Our training began today and will go on for the next three days. If today was any indication, that means three more days of sitting around a table (with a couple of breaks) from 9 am to 6 pm, with the advantage/disadvantage of it being the kitchen table in my apartment, which means I don't necessarily have to leave the place.

We basically spent the whole day eating, which is not so bad. We had the typical Mexican big lunch, tiny dinner thing, which honestly kind of weirds me out. Lunch was pretty good mole and dinner was some sort of fried tortilla filled with potato, which is maybe the best idea ever. I got the world's most useless, tiny fork to eat it with, but still.

I actually just wrote a paragraph about things I was annoyed by, but they're boring, so I erased it. In short, there are some boring things I am annoyed by.

Today after training we went to the zocalo to look at what they call "tapetes" (which I've only ever known to mean 'rugs'), big sand sculptures on the ground, mostly of skeletons, which are then spray-painted. We also tried to go to one of the cemeteries to see how people decorated the graves of their loved ones, but they were closed by the time we got there. Fear not! There was a tiny street festival outside, with hilarious carnival games, horribly unsafe rides for tiny children, and lots of food (including doughnuts and bacon-wrapped hot dogs). Then, we started to head home but one of my coworkers spotted what looked like another event, with a stage, so we stopped to look at that. It was actually a dance happening outside of a church where you could get your cumbia on and get your picture taken with the grim reaper, dead prom queens, dead surgeons, other sundry dead people, or Montezuma (definitely dead as well).

I took my camera out, but I realized that I forgot to buy another crappy flash which I could then break, so I'm stuck with my even-crappier on-camera flash. It kind of sucked, but I tried to make the best of it. I guess I'm stuck mostly taking daytime photos for a while.

Anyway, life is good for now. So I'm going to bed.

Yay! Happy Dead Day! I hope you fed your loved ones and they will not cause mischief upon you!