This month, 25 youth from Mexico and around the world arrived in Oaxaca to participate in the first School for Warriors without Weapons in Mexico. Participants worked in a neighborhood of primarily rural migrants on the periphery of Oaxaca City towards the construction of a project that had to be ecologically sound, economically viable, socially just and based in the dreams of community members.

For the warrior, change starts at home. The School for Warriors without Weapons believes that if you want to have a broader impact, you must first make sure your own actions are consistent with your own values. Through daily chores, workshops on non-violent communication, and an emphasis on re-establishing a more profound relationship with the natural environment, the School for Warriors without Weapons promotes reflection on participants’ personal search for that congruence. Each week in Oaxaca began with a ritual celebrating one of the natural elements—earth, water, fire, or air—to engage how we relate to that element. We hiked high up the Sierra Mixe and into a cave where we made a sacrifice to the earth that feeds us, followed the river downstream in the rain to a powerful waterfall, chanted together in a sweat lodge, worked in the cornfields in the Northern Sierra and received limpias, traditional cleansing rituals with herbs to balance the good air and the bad air within us. At the end of each week, we held a Fire Council, a bonfire which each person approached, one by one, to reflect on what qualities of the natural element celebrated that week represented what we had learned, achieved, or what continued to challenge us.

The warriors also participated in a series of talks designed to provide them with tools to support their work in the community. Guest speakers gave lectures and workshops on ecological architectural practices, up-cycling (making something beautiful or useful from garbage), water scarcity and alternatives in Oaxaca, indigenous practices of self-governance, gender, the paradoxes of solidarity, organic agriculture and local responses to global warming. The program’s main form of transportation, fondly known as the “Che-bus”, was an old school bus revamped to run on reused vegetable oil.

 Following the Day of the Oasis, participants had three days to create a proposal for action in the community. The rules: the action had to be done without money, it had to be based in the dreams of community members, and it had to be spectacular. “How can we build something spectacular with no money?” some participants asked. “Make use of the resources you now know exist,” responded facilitators. Participants made models to present the action, after which neighbors made critiques and suggested changes. The proposal in El Diamante included a soccer field, a garden, water-conserving trees, a tire swing, a see-saw, a gazebo for community meetings, a mural, and the expansion of ditches for improved drainage. Children wanted more swings and more toys in general, several women wanted an altar where they could go to pray, and other people envisioned having fruit trees as well as water-conserving trees, so all those were added to the proposal

 Now that the proposal had been agreed upon, participants had the big challenge before them: making it real and making it spectacular. The first day of Action Week, participants ran around looking for materials: things neighbors had lying around from old construction projects, piles of old wood or bricks around dumpsters, seedlings that families or greenhouses were willing to donate. They also had to get neighbors involved, rounding up women who knew how to make adobe bricks for the altar, men who had worked with cement and laid rooftops, youth from the coast with experience weaving who could make soccer nets, children to sand down old metal pieces and paint pots for plants. With the help of all of the neighbors, all of the participants and many volunteers who came out from Oaxaca City, in a week the Jardín de los Sueños (Garden of Dreams) was inaugurated with music from Los Raices, a son jarocho group, traditional dance from the coast, and a play produced by an indigenous theatre group from the Northern Sierra. Children played on the see-saw and organized for everyone who had worked on the playhouse to put their hand prints in bright colored paint. 

 

What was built in such a short time with so much creative energy from so many people was, indeed, spectacular. But most of the magic wasn’t the work of nails and boards or ditches dug. It had much more to do with the bridges built on dreams and laughter, on sweating together under the hot summer sun, on tearful goodbyes and on the stories we all carry with us.