It was how they learned my name.  Two weeks after arriving in Chiapas, I was attending a workshop with thirty indigenous human rights activists, playing a game of musical chairs in the courtyard.  At the moment of reckoning, with everyone scrambling for his/her respective seating, I spied a chair and homed in on it with all the desperation of a new volunteer trying to prove her devotion to the cause. 

Unfortunately, my commitment erred on the overzealous side — I had built up too much speed, and my fellow workshop members were treated to the sight of their new young white female lawyer/consultant overshooting the chair by several feet and doing a full-body professional-wrestling-style dive straight onto the concrete.  I soon became aware of just how intense an impression this had made when, in the afternoon discussion, one person remarked how "sometimes in our work we're running too fast to see where we're going — you know, like Kara and that chair."  Several other people also referenced the incident as a sort of paradigm for the discussion, and even the workshop leader noted that, in dealing with human rights violations, we have to make sure that we maintain a controlled response — unlike, you know, Kara and that chair.  Before leaving the U.S. I had secretly harbored my leftist fantasies of "contributing something" to the struggle of Chiapas, but I never imagined this would take the form of providing a framework for critical discussion by falling on my ass.
 
And therein lies the common struggle among many volunteers here in Chiapas and, I suspect, in other parts of the world:  the way I’d like to see myself and my contribution to the struggle is vastly different than the way I am seen by many people here.  I’d like to see myself as a fearless crusader for international justice.  I’m seen by many people as slightly ridiculous.  To understand why I’m seen this way requires an enormous amount of humility, and learning humility can feel overrated in the moment.  Humility means realizing that when I was trying to say in Spanish that I wanted to commit myself, I was actually saying I wanted to compromise myself.  Humility means not getting any sleep because I’m trying not to fall out of the hammock.  Humility means yelping when I burn my fingers flipping the quesadillas on the fire while all the other women who've long since lost those nerve-endings look at me strangely.  It means displaying all the grace of an overweight grizzly when I’m trying to salsa dance.  And it means trying to inconspicuously remove and discard from my soup the giant chicken's foot that the cook so proudly and generously awarded me. 

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But humility also goes beyond the merely trivial embarrassments.  It means having the bank teller laugh at me.  It means sitting in a meeting where people freely use the term "gringos" and don't care that it makes me squirm.  It means absorbing the rage of my co-workers towards the last white volunteer who crashed the computer, misplaced all the files, and left the next day.  It means hanging my head and apologizing to everyone the day after the U.S. elections.  It means acknowledging that the lower standard of living I’m struggling to adjust to is still several notches above that of the average campesino.  And it means always, always, always acknowledging that I’m white, I’m rich, I’m at the top of the food chain, and there are some things I will never understand.

But I knew this coming in, right?  I didn't expect to be met at the airport by people waving American flags who would whisk me away to a lavish feast and sit at my feet, disciple-like, listening to my views on global politics.  I knew my nationality, skin color, and privilege would catch up with me someday.  I knew it was about damn time that the tables turn and I feel the brunt of the world's discrimination, anger, and threats.   And I doubt that the existential crisis of a young ex-pat constitutes the gravest humanitarian threat to Chiapas today.  So maybe it’s time to learn a little international and personal humility.  Maybe it’s to stop wallowing in my discomfort before it becomes vaguely narcissistic.  Maybe it’s time to suck it up and deal. 

The problem is that the psyche can only apologize so many times before it threatens to snap during the most trivial moments of the day.  There are times I want to tell the kid on the plaza that if his writing-my-name-in-the-notebook scam didn't work on me the first twenty times, it won't work now.  There are times I want to tell people to just show up on time, for once.  There are times I want to tell the men in the street who make kissing noises at me where they can go.  There are times I want to throw my hands up, eat a Big Mac, drive an SUV, wear Nikes, wave a Walmart banner, and violate international law all at the same time — since I’m presumed to be doing this anyway.  But beneath it all, what I really want is what all Mexicans want, what everyone in the world wants:  to be given a chance, to be judged as an individual and not by how much money I have or where I come from or the color of my skin.  But I already know that's not the way things work.  That's what brought me here in the first place.  

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At such times, it's good to invoke parental wisdom.  If my mother were here, she'd say, "In all things, moderation."  Meaning that you have to have some humility, but not so much that you despise yourself out of deference to others.  If my father were here, he'd say, "We are called to be faithful, not successful."  Meaning that all you can do is offer yourself up daily with all the passion and commitment and energy that you possess, trusting that — in some way, on some level, with someone — it will be enough for the moment.  And thankfully there are people here who welcome me warmly, who demonstrate a grace and an openness and an acceptance towards me in spite of the name on the front of my passport.  Their generosity is what humbles me most.  So I laugh, pick myself up off the concrete, and keep playing.  At least now they know my name.