When I got off the bus in San Cristobal, it was so cold I seriously considered just getting on the bus to Oaxaca to hook up with Drew and have some sunny times but a quick call put that idea out of my head as he said the weather had gone off there too. I also had a recommendation to go down to Mazunte from Viviana's friend. Both trips would have involved 2 night buses in three days. Nap. So I had to trot to the same hostel as before. There were more lovely people to sit round the fire with tho, so felt better after that.
Next day, got the work gloves I was looking for and hung out with a stupidly attractive Dutch girl and a fellow Bristolian. Went to Pura Vida in its new location with a really great guy called Sven. He turned out to be an ecological urban planning dude doing stuff for the upcoming climate conference in Mexico. He could also hold his ale ;) The next night was more of the same and on the Sunday, I thought I was late for the start of the work programme and that I might have missed a bus or something. Far from it, there was a note saying we would be leaving on Monday, due as it turned out later, to there not being enough transport available for all of us. A nice afternoon with two Belgians ensued, Aymarie and Thomas. Tunes and chill. Very nice.
The next day we finally got going around 11.30. Chatted with Sebastien, the local organiser for Habitat, which is the organisation which had the local contacts in the indigenous community. Also in the truck was Romaric, who'd just arrived from Tuxtla, up the road.
The house was fairly spacious by local standards, and pretty solidly built. Also it was up away from the road, unlike most of the other houses. We were the focus of a few looks all week.
This was our walk down into the village from the house. Picks and shovels in hand we set off each day...
We had fold-down beds with four in one room, two in the room to the left and me and the group leader Xuan (pronounced Shun in Tseltal). So it was basic but reasonably comfortable. Oh, I forgot to say. The previous inhabitants had left the twin-vault, urine-separating toilet with two full vaults and a blogged urine pipe. Cheers then. So the first job, which myself, Theresa, Clémence and Juan dutifully volunteered for. Shovelling caca.
The worst bit was digging out the fresh stuff by mistake, but Clémence got the short straw there before we got to the properly dried and limed stuff you can see above.
And here's the crew. Romaric, Clémence (both French), Theresa (Ger), Demmy (US/Mex), Daniela (Mex) and moi. So I was speaking more French than I'd ever imagined again as I was paired with Romaric for the first three days.
Oh, and this was an uninvited guest - a 6-legged spider.
So this was what it was all about. Digging holes, carrying breeze blocks. Filtering sand. Shovelling gravel. Carrying very heavy buckets of gravel. Levelling holes down to the right depth and smoothing off the sides of trenches. Didn't actually pour any cement or mix any, but could have done if my arms had been strong enough and I'd had wellies to stand in the cement. They didn't have cement mixers so they did it by hand.
With a little help from these two :) Thus ensued 5 days work during which we all worked out that it wasn't a Zapatista community at all, that the builders didn't really want us there, were bemused by the fact that we were working for nothing, but were still happy to invite us to their houses and be friendly. So at the weekend we decided to visit a Zapatista Caracol, an administrative support centre for the different municipalities. There was a municipality just up the road from where we were working, but we weren't allowed in. Demmy (guy below) did manage to work out that the engineer on the project I started on and the one he went to second, was indeed a Zapatista and they had a very interesting political discussion for about 15 mins.
Here's me below in front of Emiliano Zapata. As I said last time, his movement was in Morelos around 1910 and its ideals were adopted by the indigenous movement in Chiapas. Just as before, land rights were key and this time, NAFTA was the spur. It opened the door to another round of undermining of indigenous rights. They were also protesting the lack of investment in basic infrastructure - schools, roads, medical facilities. I learned a lot of this from a film called Zapatistas: Cronica de un rebelion (see a bit on Youtube). In 1994 several towns were occupied and later these Caracols were set up in 2003 and the Zapatista army (EZLN) withdrew from the day-to-day governing of the movement. Didn''t stop the government forces from harrassing people, funding paramilitary groups which were given carte blanche to rob and kill (with Mexican soldiers either helping or standing by). Forty four people were killed in Acteal.
The James Hetfield I'm currently sporting for Movember leaves Emiliano for dust. Sadly, the movement, which is trying to avoid the mistakes of Soviet or Chinese communism by remaining democratic, is losing members to the bribery of the government. Part of the reason why we were not allowed into the municipality because Habitat and Natate are NGOs but have government grants. Therefore, for the locals, they are the government. At least that's what I understood. With the amount of smoke and mirrors going on, I may have misunderstood.What the film and the misrust I saw in people's eyes left in no doubt, is that these people, the poorest in the country, were brutally mistreated, harrassed and politically ignored by the army and the government.If only Zapata could reappear on a flaming steed as below... he'd probably ended up murdered again. A bit depressing.
So the next day we set out along more windy roads (they all are) in the Chiapas highlands where some of the communities were dispaced by the war into roadside shacks and others already existed in established communities. This next place was decidedly more westernised and Mestizo (mixed race) than the solidly indigenous community we were in.
We arrived to the disappointing news that the first event of the day wouldn't be till 6 so we were well early. Being an intrepid group, we didn't give up and walked around until we bumped into one of the owners of the 3 properties we were working on.
So we washed a few of the tables you can see after they'd bought us a beer for free. Then we were offered some Pox (pronounced Posh). In fact tradition is that you have to down it in one. And then the band arrived and started playing, and then, it all went weeeeird.
The dance floor filled with a variety of monster-costume wearing folks and we were literally plied with booze every other minute. Pox, beer, pox, beer. It was incessant. Then we got a free meal, had a slight panic when Theresa went to lie down near/in the loo for a bit and was there for a good half an hour, and finally left throroughly the worst for wear.
The following week it was back to socialising. But ater having realised that they had invited us for dinner 2 times each at the houses we were working for and then proceded to look stunned when we turned up. Much more so when we said we wanted to eat. So, we figured out that polite refusal must be a big part of how they do things, so politely we refused and even brought lots of crêpes with apple and caramel sauce etc provided by the Frenchies (although I did pitch in as well).
This night above was probably one of the highlight for me. There was a real feeling of opening up and asking the questions they were really keen on knowing the answers to. The presentation I hurriedly cobbled together in an internet caf in Moscow before heading to summer camp was very useful as it has pictures of Langham, Oxford, Bristol and Manchester. There was a real feeling that these folks had been cheated out of an education as their knowledge of geography was sketchy to say the least. Then, they know how to survive civil war, ... not sure whether knowing the capital cities and location of countries is quite as impressive really.
So after a debrief and a nice few sherberts to celebrate, it was time to head for Guatemala, late and a bit hungover, again. But off the back of a week of doing a bit of yoga and meditating every day on the roof of our house in San Pedro. And one night of drinking per week - broken the back of the cycle of inebriation.... well temporarily at least, and off to Guatemala.
Ta ta,
love s
xx
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