it is probably a good thing that the evening I have gotten to hug the last person on the list of possible huggings happens to be the night before I leave for Washington DC.
perfect timing.

re-packing

a small goodbye to St. Marks Church

the most beautiful stained glass windows have already been sold. 

soon the church will be boarded up.

25 Diciembre 2011

i get so frustrated, so often, with the individuals I work with's inability to fix things that don't work.

when fetching the peppermint ice cream from my grandmother's basement freezer last night I had to pull off stacks and stacks of magazines that hold the top down, then replace the stacks.
time consuming
inefficient
but how she has always done it. the lid doesn't close right.

23 Diciembre 2011

After over-preparing myself for reverse cultural shock, I have been back in the states for 4 whole days now.
the hardest things to get used to are not what I expected.
Like, throwing toilet paper into the toilet and not the wastebin. that motor memory is having trouble re-recording that one.
Or, being able to get in the car and go buy anything I want to whenever I want to. I must have spent about 20 minutes just standing in front of the school supply aisle in target (good quality supplies being something I have been searching for all over the country of Peru for for my students). "They are right here," I kept saying to my brother, "I can just buy them."

the things you would think would be weird seem to fall into place.
like driving
or being with family and friends.

in that aspect, it feels like I never left.

but, the most unexpected, is music.

While in Lima, during an In-Service-Training about 6 months ago, I touched a piano for the first time in a year. My fingers were frozen and forgetful. I couldn't get a single line of music out of them. I was overwhelmed with heat and fear. "Use it or lose it"
I began morning the loss of the pianist, like the ballerina.
I dreaded seeing pianos. they filled me with fear and longing. I didn't touch one again until today.

I went into the basement and pulled my books out of the bottom of a cardboard box. Scott Joplin was on top. Then Chopin said hello. Then Debussy, Mozart, Bach, more Chopin, more Bach (I had my favorites). I started with some old Hanon finger exercises and then opened Beethoven's moonlight sonata. Anticipating an excruciating hour of working out every single note on this four paged piece I went through the c# melodic minor scale. The first run up, then back down my fingers were idiots falling onto the white keys from the black dominant scale. My ears were confused.
second run.
third run.
wait
that didn't sound so terrible
suddenly, my fingers went through the scale a forth time and something was awake. they were ready.
I looked at the notes to the piece, unable to to verbally tell you "that is a g#", but my fingers just laid themselves on the first keys. I let them go.
They played.

The relationship between the piano music, my fingers, and the piano left my consciousness behind. they played without me.
My eyes communicating directly with my fingers, excluding any mental processing, allowed the piece to come. not perfectly, but it came.

as I realized what was happening, my brain started to get jealous and try to jump in,  my eyes began to water, and my fingers began to fumble. I pulled the reigns of consciousness back and my tears dried and my fingers kept going through the piece, beautifully.

the more my awareness leaves, the more my torso sways with the music, the better I play.

final c# cord, with that dissonant e

my arms go straight up in the air in fists like a goal was scored and my brother, on the other side of the house hears, "They still got it!!!!"

17 Diciembre 2011

Headed to The States for the holidays (after about 4 days of travel i will actually be with my family in Ohio).

In the meantime, lets thank gray for his contribution to the afterschool program:

This week focussed on self-esteem, compassion, and mindfulness through the use of story-telling through puppets. It was a HUGE hit, and it would not have been nearly as successful without the theatre.

Thank you Gray!

15 Diciembre 2011

the completion of the final section of VALE was consummated with a closing ceremony and party.

With the help of some good friends that are close-by Peace Corps volunteers (the risible Tim and the awesome Mario) and darling Gray, it was a huge success...

they learned what is, how to make, and to love "pipza"

11 Diciembre 2011

took the camera to the fields today…

10 Diciembre 2011

Today was the huititi festival in Chivay. Locals from all over the canyon came into Chivay to compete in the traditional dance contest. Peace Corps was invited to be the halftime show.

Gringos in traditional dress, in itself, give the community a giggle.

Gringos in traditional dress, dancing traditional style in an arena gets some laughter and applause.

Gringos in traditional dress, dancing traditional style in an arena, with lifts and jokes gets a packed full arena on their feet whistling, clapping, screaming, and cackling…

link to video (on fb): http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=862566442818&set=t.21102445&type=3&theater

9 Diciembre 2011 take two

the program was a little slow this week because the students have exams coming up, and a bunch of my youth had rehearsals in the evenings for the huititi festival they will be competing in this weekend.

But, we did practice story telling which lead into telling the story of your life and journaling and reflecting. This week they took home the journals they made from recycled paper a few weeks ago. They were so proud a few of the girls hung their journals around their necks to show off what they had done…

9 Diciembre 2011

This week has been delightful. Gray decided to come back to the canyon for a little while. While I continue running the after school program in the evenings, by day we have been working at the house. We built a new door and patched the chicken wire in the walls of the coop, then lured the chickies into their new home with greens and corn. The 3 hens and 1 rooster are comfortably set up in their new, hopefully permanent, home. Doña Juana and I split responsibilities in feeding and watering them. After only three days in the coop, they started to lay again. No more wild chickens wondering around the house and laying eggs everyplace from the garden to the shit hole!

With the chickens put away we could plant a garden before the rainy season starts. Gray surprised me with about three seasons worth of seeds, and we began tilling. It took about one full day to clean all of the garbage out of the space that could be used as a garden. I even found an antique coin amongst the manure, broken glass bottles, and plastic bags. By the time all the soil was flipped and watered, it was time for me to go teach. When I got back that evening I found Gray building walls for a tiered garden. It is going to be  a lovely and productive little space.

The following day, we planned to plant, but the water in town had been turned off yet again. So, I continued studying to get my TOEFL English teacher certification, while Gray continued perfecting his garden walls. That evening the family came home from the fields excited to see what we planted only to find some dry aerated soil. Hopefully there will be water tomorrow.

Which, there was. We planted spinach, lettuce, cabbage, chard, carrots, green beans, red peppers, radishes, beets, parsly, mint, and cilantro. The woman who owns the corner store has already insisted we sell her spices when we harvest.

This weekend, the Peace Corps volunteers in the canyon will be dancing in the huaititi festival in Chivay. So, I will dress myself up in pollera and traditional hat, and bounce around in the streets for a few hours to build some relationships in the district capital.

3 Diciembre 2011

Today, while franticly shopping for the last few weeks of the program I ran into the typical cat calls on the streets.

One, particularly boisterous individual yelled across the street, in Spanish, “Do you speak French, beautiful?”

Normally, I ignore the philanderers, but for some reason, “No, ugly!” spilled out of my mouth in Quechua. To which, other individuals walking down the pedestrian filled road stared.

One elderly woman next to me stared at my face in shock, uncertain of what she just heard. I smiled warmly and asked, “Hi, how are you?” in Quechua. To which her mouth dropped and with a huge smile she began spilling a response of, “I am well, I am just doing my shopping…” and at that moment she slammed right into a wall that jutted out into our walk and her bags of shopping spilled everywhere. Not caring what-so-ever she continues in quechua, and then briefly, every time someone walked past exclaimed, “The gringa is speaking quechua!” And I am just as surprised as they are thinking, “ha! Yep! The gringa is speaking quechua!”

1 diciembre 2011 take two

This week I have felt exhausted, and this has only been invigorated by feelings of guilt that I am taking this exhaustion out on my students. I can feel that I am not patient with them this week. I am not handling the classroom with the grace I am so proud of, but with tension, and frustration.

Something about the program has to change, and it is the daycare center quality that it has become which makes learning impossible due to age ranges and learning abilities. This is to be attended to in the months to come.

But, today, I was listening to Richard Davidson’s interview on Being the Podcast. Davidson is someone I have had my ears tuned to for years. I referenced him in my neurobiology final research paper on the relationship between cognition and meditation, I have read all of his studies, and next in line in my reading list is a book by Kabat-Zinn who has been his partner in crime in past studies. He is a professor at the Univerisity of Wisconsin at Madison, and , naturally, it would be a dream to study under him.

I could write for days about his interview, but, in brief they focused on the plasticity of the brain, and how meditation can retrain the brain, and therefore how you think and feel. He focuses on this in children in a sort of “after school program” he designed.

There are two parts to his program, Mindfulness and Compassion. I couldn’t help but think that focusing on these two themes would be extremely helpful in the disorderly classrooms of South America. We will see how I can work mindfulness and compassion into the week of self exploration, which is the final week of the program and takes place in two weeks. 

1 Diciembre 2011

Happy birthday dad!

Roxana came in my room last night for homework help and says, “Perla is eating the hens eggs before we get to them, so mom says we will have to tie her up in the house.”

I about exploded. We have had this chicken conversation before.

“The answer is not, not planting vegetables because the hens will eat the seeds. It is not adding another tie to the kitchen door so the chickens can’t get to our corn. It is not tieing the dog up so she can’t get to them. The answer is keeping the chickens in the chicken coop and feeding them daily.”

“Verdad, no.” Roxana replies. Implying agreement, but we will see what changes.

After building the chickencoop last year, I have repaired it multiple times. 1^st when Don Juan took part of the roof to make a door for our bathroom when I insisted we need one. Then, when the dog used the chicken coop to give birth to and protect her puppies and ripped up some of the wire walls. Then, when Doña Juana took the new door off to cover the minure so it didn’t get wet in the rain (but not the wood, I don’t get it). I bought us new wire, and we have wood to make the door. Doña Juana took the wire and it disappeared, and I can’t plant vegetables for next year (which we need to be doing NOW), until we get that door on or I will lose all my seeds, like last year, to hungry chicken bellies. So, today, I used a ****ing blanket. I piled up some rocks, and tied the four corners of the blanket to where the door should be. How long will this one last? Will this motivate them to find the wire I bought and we can make a new door together? Why is this such a challenge to do an understand?

30 Noviembre 2011

Our street is completely dug up because the Mayor started a project to get plumbing in houses in the community that don’t yet have it. It is a great project because it not only wil do its job, but it is also providing jobs and bringing departmental money into the community.

Yesterday, they started digging to enter our house. It hadn’t even occurred to me that they would do this because we have a hole that takes away waste when you dump a bucket over it. Doña Juana comes to me and askes, “Did you tell them to dig here.” “No, I didn’t say anything.” Then she runs outside to stop them. I am thinking, “this never happens, shouldn’t we take advantage of the opportunity, have them install plumbing at the front of the house, and then when the family can afford it (and maybe I can help) we can put in a sink (for laundry, dishes, etc). Right now there is just a faucet, and a tire tub underneath that catches the water while we are using it. Then we dump it, and the water muddies the front entrance to the house and the street outside.

When Roxana got home from school I said, sure that she would agree, “You need to talk to your parents before it is too late and we lose our chance. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a sink?” Then, my darling Roxana, who is my lifeforce here, my brilliant inspiration and support, she who heals me threw me across the patio in one fale swoop, “But then it wouldn’t be like it was before.”

Figuratively I threw my hands up in the air , “Im done.” repeated over and over in my head. “I’m done, I’m done, I’m done, I’m done, I’m done, I’m done, I’m done.”

Why do I struggle to bring funding and programs here when they scream poverty if they aren’t even going to attempt to make their lives more efficient and productive so they can pay for things themselves?

Is it possible they shouldn’t change? Is it possible that it would be better to conserve their culture the way it is, and just bring them funding for what they can’t afford from their local government (medicine, fruits and vegetables, drinkable water)?

I had this same conversation with some of the teachers last night. Doña juana expressed a hug concern with me, so I brought that to the teachers I have “confianza” with. We sat in Meche’s dim room lit by a crank light. “Elvis parents took him back to the ranch.” Which means they pulled him out of school for weeks yet again. And I, like a fool, had just bought him socks, underwear, and more school supplies for doing so well in his studies.

With the week-long drunkenness his parents demonstrated recently.

With the black eye his mother carried because her husband beat her for sleeping with another man.

For leaving their three-year-old with a 90-year-old woman on the ranch while they partied.

For not feeding or attending to their children like any responsible adult.

The teachers and I decided it was time.

“OK, so if we report everything that we have seen this year, and his attendance rates to school, what will happen?”

“The police will go to the ranch, see the living situation, find them drunk, and take the kids back down the mountain with them. Swoop” Meche said.

“But do we want that? Are there other options that would be better? What is the orphanage situation like? Will he get an education there? Will he be properly fed and attended to?”

Hirma, “Yes, they have substitute moms that he will live with until he is 18. Then he can decide to stay there and work like a host parent, or he can go look for work if he wants. Sometimes, they get adopted too.”

Knowing Hirma has been looking to adopt for years, “You want Elvis and Ronni?” we all joked with her. “Why not?” she half jokingly responds, then with her next few words she picks me up off the ground where I had been tossed and brushes me off, “if I can provide for them, and they have a need, why not?”

They told me to walk over to the police station and find out what the proper steps would be to report what is happening, and then get back to them, and the school will help with any formal paperwork needed (grades, attendance records, etc).

The police officer with whom I have trust is on break in the city, so I decided I would rather wait a week until he comes back, than take a chance talking to the officers whose intelligence and macho-ness levels I am not aware of.

I took my computer to the police station because they have a generator and worked on the translated version of the curriculum for a couple hours, then tip-toed back into the house with no phone, no electricity, and no water, lit a candle, and read myself to sleep.

29 Noviembre 2011 take three

With no water, electricity, or phone service, I finished a good book this evening.

I read almost the entire book Living Poor by Moritz Thomsen in about 2 days, and somehow didn’t get to the last 10 pages until tonight.

I think it is a marvelous account of Peace Corps service from a devoted volunteer. Reading his book has helped me relax a little. Destress from my lofty expectations and be at peace with what I am able to do.

Some quotes from the book that might as well have come from my mouth 40 years later…

“ Peace Corps volunteers enter their new country so well briefed by their doctors on the hazards of the local foods, that their first meals are terror stricken experiences, gastronomic tightrope performances balanced between starvation and revulsion.”

“the fifty cents a day I paid for my meals was feeding the whole family, and probably even paying off a few old bills.”

“You draw your lines, ‘I will go this far.’ But it ends up that you are always drawing new ones.”

“ We used to discuss in training how to be nice and gracious while refusing to drink what we know to have been preared with unboiled river water and was probably swarming with wriggly gringo-killers. Bt it never occurred to us to wonder what to do when, after several hours on the trail, you get so thirsty that you don’t give a damn what kinds of a wriggly animal you are swallowing as long as it is a wet one.”

            Recent example: I know that the chocolate colored water that comes out of our faucet in the rainy season I should probably filter before drinking. But, the filter the peace corps provides volunteers is barely large enough to store water to cook for one person a day, let alone an entire host family (what, you are going to tell them they have to drink that crap water while you suck on crystal clear agua, I don’t think so). It takes the bucket about a day to filter itself as well. So, what do you do when you are hungry and thirsty and watching the filter drip drop one by one? Boil what you can from the faucet and swallow the dirt along with it.

“ I think anyone who has not lived the wholly public life of a foreigner in a small town, where every scratch and belch is noted with fascinated curiosity, cannot realize how essential it is to have a place to refuge where you can hide from time to time and reform yourself. “

“ As a newcomer to the town, I decided that drinking beer [wine] regularly, simply for the taste, would be ostentatious, and I gave it up, breaking my pledge at first only two or three time in moment of depression when I would sneak a quart of the lukewarm stuff into my house and sit in a dark corner living a private life.”

            recent example: I just had a conversation last weekend with some other volunteers about how sometimes, when we feel really depressed, we sneak cigarettes in from the city to lock ourselves in our room and smoke in an attempt to relax. Even the non-smokers!

“ I couldn’t believe that the music was really gay, or that the laughter in the street was really happy, or that the people could so easily forget their poverty or invest their sucres in a few hours of forgetfulness, knowing that on Sunday there would be nothing to eat.”

“there was a big fiesta coming up, too, and for three days no one would work but simply weave around in the street.”

            Recent anecdote: There is one family in town who’s kids appear to be on the lowest socio-economic status of the community. They are obviously malnourished and dirty, and one demonstrates attributes of an abused child in my opinion. Their parents are the padrino of the upcoming fiesta, which is extremely expensive, paying for the entire town’s festival. When I asked how this is possible, it was explained to me that they are very wealthy and save all year to pay for a party out of pride.

“I was a caricature of a Peace Corps Colunteer.”

Page 173:

“ Living poor is like being sentenced to exist in a stormy sea in a battered canoe, requiring all your strength simply to keep afloat there is never any question of reaching a destination. True poverty is a state of perpetual crisis, and one wave just a little bigger or coming from an unexpected direction can and usually does wreck things. Some benevolent ignorance denies a poor man the ability to see the squalid sequence of his life, except very rarely, he views it rather as a disconnected string of unfortunate sadnesses. Never having paddled on a calm sea, he is unable to imagine one. I think if he could connect the chronic hunger, the sickness, the death of his children, the almost unrelieved physical and emotional tension into the pattern that his life inevitable takes he would kill himself.

            In South America the poor man is an ignorant man, unaware of the forces that shape his destiny. The shattering truth- that he is kept poor and ignorant as the principal and unspoken component of national policy-escapes him. He cries for land reform, a system of farm loans that will carry him along between crops, unaware that the national economy in almost every country sustained by a one-crop export commodity depends for it success on an unlimited supply of cheap labor. Ecuador needs poor men to compete in the world banana market; brazil needs poverty to sell its coffee; chile, its tin; Colombia its cacao and coffee, and so on. The way United States pressure shapes the policies of south American governments can make a Peace Corps Volunteer who is involved and saddened by the poverty in his village tremble to his very roots.”

“I got in the habit of awakening every morning at 3am and lying in the darkness, frustrated and furious, cursing the lethargy of the people, the degradation of their poverty, and my own inability to do anything about it.”

“they were charming fellows, but lazy and dedicated to their poverty.”

“poor people steal. It is a trait in common with the rich, whose thefts vary only in the degree of the necessity and the quality of the theft.”

“ I was pushing the socios shamelessly, sulking when the promised to work and then didn’t show up, getting mad at them when the quit early, pleading the case, giving them long, boring talks on the necessity of suffering Now, sacrificing Now. I was like a one-man symphony orchestra; when the flutes and violins didn’t work, I was blaring trumpets and percussion. I tried to shame them, inspire them or obligate them in some way. As I think back on that time it occurs to me that they must all have thought I was quite mad.”

“ I could feel myself getting stupider.”

“ Poverty isn’t just hunger; it is many interlocking things- ignorance and exhaustion, underproduction, disease, and fear. It is glutted export markets, sharp, unscrupulous middlemen, a lack of knowledge about the fundamental aspects of agriculture. It is the witchcraft of your grandfather spreading it values on your life. It is a dozen irrational Latin qualities like your fear of making more of your life than you neighbor and thereby gaining his contempt for being overly ambitious.”

“They mentioned it on a new broadcast one night, sandwiched in between the stories of wars and riots, announcing that 60% of the world’s children were suffering from protein starvtion and that this deprivation in the first five years of life permanently and irrevocably destroyed up to 25 per cent of a man’s intelligence.

Twenty-five percent.

If 75 is the IQ of the town, what is the medical word that describes the poor, doomed people, this wasted human resource living out its unproductive destiny in the impregnable prison of a destroyed mind, in a twilight, idiot world where nothing really makes much sense?”

            I know a lot of times that people here nod often even when they don’t’ understand, but sometimes it hits me harder than other times. Today, were were studying parts of the body. For this class I had translated pages and pages of definitions. There was one definition that a child read aloud, and I realized I had done a very lousy job translating what he was reading and what he was saying didn’t make any sense. But, he continued reading without pausing to clearify, and the class kept listening away. In any other classroom I have ever been in someone would have started making faces or whispering to other kids in an attempt to discern a meaning. How often do they not understand what I am saying to them but don’t ask. How often do their parents not understand my explainations about heigine or nutrition? Is that why they don’t change, they literally can’t understand the science behind why?

Somehow, reading that someone was doing something similar to what I am, and felt the same way I do is comforting.

29 Noviembre 2011take two

 Today, with our first big storm rolling into Marigal, I sat in bed with a headache.

The kitten on my lap,

the rain on the tin roof,

 the electricity out,

the community’s water system turned off for fear of flooding.

With nothing, I used the little bit of battery life I had left on my computer to watch some ted talks.

Charles Hazlewood hit me hardest.

I can’t help but yearn for music. Without a piano and access to symphony, I die a little. I can easily say that any unhappiness and struggling I have had here could have been cured with an hour at the piano, or an hour in a dance studio, or even an hour with a flute or oboe rehearsing with a symphony.

With my meditation removed from me, I get lost. So lost, that I don’t even realize how lost I am to its fullest until something strikes me in the face.

I don’t get movies often, in fact, I am more of a book reader PCV, but every once in a while when I am in the city I try to hunt down some recently released burned movie discs. This, is the easiest way to wormhole yourself back to western culture, without a doubt.  You get images of everything you do and don’t miss.

In one movie there was an insignificant screen shot of a man putting an LP record on to set a mood. I lost it. I cried harder than I cry when I watch suffering here. I cried harder than I do at babies’ funerals. I cried harder than I cry when I have to tell someone deathly ill that there is nothing we can do for them. Why? Because in seeing that momement, in seeing my untouchable meditation, I am thrown into all of those tears at once.  All of that pain that I don’t know how to deal with in the moment, and can’t meditate about comes flooding back.

Charles Hazlewood brought a small orchestra onto his stage during his speech, and just hearing music that I haven’t been listening to for the past year and a half took me down again. Admittedly I have an itunes with 20 days worth of non-stop music on it, but I have to say that in a year and a half I have listened to it all to the point where my very favorite music is starting to become annoying. Mr. Hazlewood’s group of strings knocked me in the face of everything I haven’t been able to meditate about and sent me into a pool of tears in this rainstorm.

His point of the speech was, “where there is trust, there is music by extension of life. where there is no trust, the music quite simply whithers away.”

Is that where we can place the lack of music and art here?

No trust for your government.

Little trust for mother Earth to protect you year after year.

Little trust in one another, even your family members.

Right now I am listening to Lost in the Trees Movemenet 1 Sketch from the album All Alone In An Empty House. How appropriate.

29 Noviembre 2011

Yang Lan on young people in China on TED talks 10/3/11:

“umong the 200 million migrant workers [in China] 60% of them are young people. They find themselves sort of sandwiched between the urban and rural areas. Most of them don’t want to go back to the countryside, but they don’t have the sense of belonging; they work for longer hours with less income, less social welfare, and they are more vulnerable to job losses subject to inflation, tightening loans from banks, appreciation, or decline of demands from Europe or America for the products they produce… … For those who do return back to the countryside, they find that they are welcome, because of the knowledge skills and networks they have learned in the cities with the assistance of internet, they are able to create more jobs, upgrade local agriculture, and create new business in the uneducated market.”

I was stunned to hear this Chinese woman discussing this fact in a Scotland lecture hall while here I am an American preaching this fact in Peru.

Here, it is looked upon as an honor to be able to move into the city. No one wants to stay in Madrigal, but often the families are in a sense trapped here due to financial restraints. But, if a couple can afford it, they send their children to the city to study (high school or university), which is fine in my opinion. The education system here is pretty darn terrible, so if I had kids I would send them as far away as possible. Yes, it means they lose some of their historical and cultural knowledge, but they can read, and write, do math, think critically, and know how to live healthfully=worth it. Then they can visit the farm on holidays and still appreciate their root, and move back here as adults to raise their families. But there is one key factor missing: These kids never come back to their small communities. Instead, they live in poverty due to low job opportunities in the polluted outskirts of Lima, Piura, or Arequipa.

There is a good friend of mine that raises horses in a village nearby. He is one of the locals I have found to be the most educated and enjoyable to talk to. He knows everything there is to know about local farming, raising horses, and the land here in general. Someone I respect greatly. The key is, he came back. Now, he runs the most successful horseback riding tourism company in the entire canyon.

While riding horses one day he was bragging about his kids to us because we had inquired. We only knew his youngest, who is small, smart, and respectful (qualities you don’t often find here… ok, well small yes, but smart, not so much, and you have to earn these kids’ respect). He was telling us about how his older kids studied and now lived in the city, to which I reamed him. I went on a rant about how they have to come back and pointed out how he was so successful due to his education and how the communities here are naturally selecting for the elderly, disabled, and least educated. No wonder they are having decades of trouble advancing as a communal society. He looked at me wide eyed and I think a little shocked. He had always been proud that his adult children were now living and working in the city with good jobs and nice apartments. “Imagine what they could do for Yanque.” I said. His children are on the higher end of the social standard in the cities. It would almost be like sending another me or Peace Corps volunteer to one of these villages. They are professionals. That is how the conversation ended. But, neither of our thoughts ended there.

I was trying to set up a mentoring program, last year, that would bring young professionals to Madrigal and/or other villages in the canyon to no success. Because these young adults are professionals they are busy and can’t afford to commit to taking the time to travel all the way out here regularly. Another factor to the lack of success of the idea was that a Limenian tourist had gone missing in the canyon around that time, and the young professionals were honestly scared of the danger involved in living in the canyon and the scary roads and bus rides, which is completely understandable. It takes someone special to be willing to endanger themselves in this way for the good of someone else (toot toot).  Of course there is also the fact that ‘volunteerism’ the word, doesn’t exists in Spanish and is not a part of the culture.

Today, watching Ms. Lan’s lecture about the same phenomenon in China struck me. This means, it is happening every were due to these worldwide urban development trends. What if someone developed an international NGO that simply focused on bringing rural community members’ educated children home? Could that be a successful program?

I want to say that I am an exception, but I think I am a perfect example of that not being successful. I love my family, and miss them all dearly, but I don’t want to live in Ohio. I think they would be the first to tell you my mother, father, brother and I are the black sheep of the family. I like living in communities where people think more like I do, and that wasn’t Ohio. Communities like Ann Arbor, Austin, Portland, Granada, Brighton have citizens with similar goals and understandings to that of my own, and it is comforting and inspiring to be surrounding by them. If my hometown was third world, would I want to risk sacrificing my happiness to be a part of a statistic that could possibly bring future generations higher education and healthier lifestyles?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

28 Diciembre 2011

Do you have to lose the idea of the self in order to truly connect with other humans and our planet?

Thandie Newton speaks on TED talks July 20, 2011. She just skims the surface of where this question can take you in her 20 minute lecture.