Cepeda week 4...where are you, all you other interns?

Here is what there is a lot of in Cepeda:

Friendly people

Babies

Fiestas

Doctors appointments

Trash

Borrachos

Beautiful people

Teachers not showing up for class

Chickens

Hope

A couple of things:

1. A Sherman Alexie moment. So I go play basketball with the girls when it is the girls´turn to play basket, as they call it. We play half-court four on four and for the next two hours, I feel not even a little bit weird or different or unusual. Like everyone else in the game, all I want is that ball. I accidentally smash the ball into someone´s face and everyone laughs, I say sorry a million times; a couple minutes later, someone smashes the ball in my face and everyone laughs too. We yell in Spanish and Maya. I am in the middle of the Yucatan in the middle of a crazy part of the history of this little town and this people, and I could be playing with my friends in Bellingham or Santa Cruz. The power of el deporte is not to be underestimated.

2. The school…I feel strange just putting my opinions about something I barely am beginning to understand on the internet. I feel like I am not qualified to judge, but I am also being asked for my recommendations and help. Middle school is a hard age. All of the kids are great one on one, but in the classroom some of them are a real challenge! Throwing things—hitting each other—hitting the people trying to pay attention—writing love notes—how do real teachers deal with this stuff? I´m not a teacher, I don´t know. At the same time I can´t blame the kids when their teachers don´t show up for class at least once a day, and in Cepeda there are not a lot of people who have beyond a middle school education or are doing work that requires that, so there aren´t a lot of role models. So I take the naughty kids after class and talk to them and try to make an agreement that the classroom is a place for learning and at the very least they need to let those who want to learn learn. When I ask them why they are in school, the answers I get range from I want to get a good job and make money to I want to learn to There´s nothing better to do. But one on one, they are interested in the project, they ask me all sorts of questions, they teach me Maya, they ask me about the medicinal plants in the garden, they ask me about David and California and where I´m from, they tell me about their grandma who taught them about plants. It´s a powerful age too, if there were only enough good mentors—what kids that age need is someone to work with, someone they respect, like an apprenticeship in a way. They are proud of their Maya and interested in the plants; mostly I think it is the ¨why¨ and ¨how¨ of conservation and agroecology that it is important to teach, el largo plazo, the long run. I have also been teaching poems and songs and games in English in classes where the teachers don´t show, and we learned Head Shoulders Knees and Toes in English and Maya, and the kids for the most part really enjoy it. I´m looking forward to getting some more outdoor lessons developed.

3. The project. Jesse and I are pretty much working together on the entire garden space and curriculum because compost requires a lot of resting, and there are at any given time at least five kids who want to help us, between teachers not coming and kids not going to class. We are making progress; some big challenges are the trash and the leaking septic tank. The difference between organic and inorganic trash has been a big thing to teach, the distinction is not made here, all basura is burnt. Jesse has some great creative ideas and he and the kids have already brightened the space so much. The kids like to paint signs and some of them will pick up trash and collect rocks. The pecuarias class is often killing chickens with a nail to the brain as we work. The biodigestor (pig and chicken manure) worked so well that I need a bigger methane capture tank for the second one and I want to hook up a little simple stove to it so we can cook an egg or something to show that it works. If anyone has done that, please can you email me and tell me how you did it? Thanks! I don´t want to blow up the drum, that would be sincerely stinky.

4. The community is lovely and kind and welcoming. There are a lot of problems—trash, half the men in town falling down drunk at night, general poverty, junk food, kids getting taken out of school for weird bureaucratic reasons, lots of 15, 16 year old moms—but also they have a clinic where people go for very frequent check ups, the women are very organized and have meetings about health education, preventing domestic violence, and school; and they still have a lot of their inherited richness of knowledge, biodiversity, language and culture. The women seem to have a lot of organization and momentum; I would like to see the boys have that sort of role models too. The men work very hard here, but there seems to be less organization and interest in education among them. Or maybe I just talk more with the women, I don´t know. They are at such an interesting time in their history—they still have their language and some Mayan ceremonies although the church is very strong here, and lots of old people seem to know the medicinal and food plants, but in the last two generations much of that seems to have fallen by the wayside. But the kids are interested in it, which is so great; I could definitely see them only wanting to move ¨forward¨ into technology etc, and I could see why, and from Tom´s stories of Tzucacab I was half expecting that. But now is a mix. For instance, for a quinceañera we made relleno negro, with entire turkeys and chickens and burnt chiles and tortillas, and we also made pasta salad with ham, mayonnaise and pineapple. The computacion class is the one that seems to have done a lot of work with David and is interested in medicinal plants. A time in the history of Cepeda with much potential, I think, and I am grateful to be part of it, as well as aware of the huge responsibility of being here for it.

I am wishing I had more time. Ten weeks is very little to understand and to take steps to address things that the community wants to address. Now it is time to get back.

Maálob—Maya for bueno and goodbye—Sarah