Article written by Michelle Storey

In mid-November just two weeks after
arriving at the Chiapas Peace House as a Brethren Volunteer
Service/Global Missions Partnership volunteer, I departed from San
Cristobal de las Casas, a picturesque and touristy hippie haven
swarming with activists and NGOs. I headed to Union Progresso, a
small highlands community of 35 Tzotzil families, where I spent 13
days living and participating as a civil observer. I set out for one
of the numerous civil peace camps that are distributed throughout the
state in order to better my understanding of the complexities of
Chiapan indigenous communities, the Chiapas conflict, and rural life
in a Mexican context.

Our days began very early with the
combination of roosters competing for who could crow the loudest and
the neighbors one after another waking and turning their favorite
marimba tune on full blast. We cooked beans each day over a fire for
our meals and received wonderfully fresh non-GMO tortillas from a
different family each day. For us campamentistas, just starting the
fire was quite a process, so there was always plenty of time to read,
chat with neighbors, or play with children while cooking. During the
day the warmth of the sun provided a perfect opportunity to connect
the tubing running from the continuous water flow, granted that the
tubing wasn't broken somewhere alone the line, and connect it to the
top of the punctured bucket hanging in the outhouse. It provided a
perfect little shower! When not focusing on a meal we liked to walk
through the community or surrounding coffee and banana trees where we
could visit with neighbors, help pick coffee, or gather firewood. In
the evenings we usually played several rounds of ¨Uno¨ with
the children, or went to the most central of the three small stores
selling the most basic of items to listen and chat with youngsters
singing Zapatista-inspired songs. We usually turned into bed by 8 or
9 o'clock at night.

We were very fortunate to have a
campamento in such great condition. Not only did we have a shower;
we also had 2 wooden beds, a lightbulb and a pantry with a few
plates, forks and cups. Previous campamentistas had left several
books and spices. My only complaint was the zillions of cockroaches
that ran across our heads at night and flirted with the idea of
entering into our sleeping bags!

Union Progresso is a Zapatista
community that depends heavily on the cultivation of coffee. It is
basically the only source of income, and since November was the heart
of coffee season, the community was swamped with work! Finca land
that was formerly communal has been divided into individual family
parcels, but much of the processing work was done collectively. A
car was leaving the community every Sunday so folks could go sell
their coffee in the Bochil market, but like the majority of small
producers worldwide who have struggled tremendously since the fall of
the international price of coffee in 2001, earnings for folks in
Union Progresso were less than mediocre.

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I returned to San Cristobal so excited
to be surrounded by such immense natural beauty that amazingly is
still in the hands of indigenous peoples fighting for their right to
influence their own course and to be heard. I spent one night in the
Peace House thinking about how fortunate I was to be in such an
amazing place where I am constantly immersed in and inspired by
networks of resistance, activism and creative energy. I was very
eager to begin working immediately with an organization in San
Cristobal, yet also knew I would have to wait for a little while
since the very next day I was leaving for Playa del Carmen. This was
also very exciting since it meant I would be seeing my mother for the
first time since leaving the United States almost one year ago.

The 16+ hour overnight bus trip, which
despite being second class and including several stops by military
police seeking to intimidate any un-properly documented folks and
expel Central Americans on their way to the land of the free, was
still much more comfortable than any Central American chicken bus I
had ever been on. Our filtered-out bus finally arrived in Playa del
Carmen and I made my way over to my mother's hotel. After almost two
hours of wandering I finally discovered the gated community of
PlayaCar and the lush 400-room, beachfront, all-inclusive resort, the
Viva Wyndham Maya. Wow, did I feel out of place! Luckily, and props
to my mother, the entire front desk and hotel security knew I was
coming, so I passed through the gate with little hassle. It was so
great to see my mother after such a long time, and I must admit the
variety of food available to me was a nice change of pace from my
previous two weeks when I rarely even saw a vegetable, let alone ate
one. But my new surroundings were quite a shock to me, and I never
did come to understand why one would come to another country to feel
as if they had never left their own. It would have been very
possible to spend a week or more within the resort itself, supposedly
exploring the culture and the wonders of Mexico, without ever leaving
the hotel gates, speaking a word of Spanish or interacting with
anybody who is brown.

The hotel, located on 13 acres of some
of the Caribbean's finest white sand beaches that have been inundated
by vacation resorts, offered a wide selection of recreation and
cuisine with buffet, full menu, or a la carte dining, snacks and
unlimited drinks from three restaurants and three bars. The
beachfront pool and jacuzzi area always seemed to have one activity
or another going on (my favorites were water aerobics and learning
colors in Spanish, repeated at the same time every single day), and
each night there was live entertainment provided by the resort's
exquisite international staff. The hotel also had tennis courts, a
fitness center and spa, a rock climbing wall, trampoline, bikes, a
scuba diving center, and last but not least the satellite color TV in
all rooms. All of the stimulation, consumption, spending, and waste
seemed excessive to me, even by U.S. standards. I left Playa del
Carmen very happy to have spent time with my mother, but also feeling
ruptured from the inside out by the completely different realities we
live as a human race.

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