Al Yucatan me voy

Hola--Sarah here, seeing if this works. Karie said to record some hopes and aspirations, so here goes.

I've been reading two books, Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution by MY AUNT--yes that's right, mi propia tia, Caroline Fraser--and Stones into Schools by Greg Mortensen. The first one is about efforts all over the world to recreate large corridors of habitat for native flora and fauna in hopes of preserving biodiversity and stalling global warming. Some efforts do better than others. Most striking and intuitive to anyone who's studied PAR is that the efforts that involve local people--economically and educationally--succeed. They are locally owned, provide jobs in ecotourism or provide markets for local goods, and educate the children of the place about the importance of the life around them. This is one thing I am going to remember if people ask me questions about what I am doing for the environment, or what they can do for it.

The second book is a follow-up to Three Cups of Tea and tells the stories of the schools that Greg Mortensen, in partnership with a Central Asian staff crew and every community he works in, has helped build in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Here is a quote that I am going to take with me and remember in my work:

"When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it's amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children."

Listening is the most important thing, which is good for me. I don't always have something to say, I don't have solutions to all the problems I will see, and I know that at times I may feel powerless, I may feel as though my country is the root of all evil and I can't pull that out of myself, and I still have quite a lot of self-doubt to overcome. But I can listen.

I have a great opportunity to listen to children. Oh, I will teach too--I have the Rodale composting book and diagrams of food webs and the nitrogen cycle, and songs and poems a-coming--but I will make plenty of time for listening. I will ask kids what they want to do when they grow up, and use silly check in questions, and ask them to teach me songs to share with the kids at my mom's school, and teach them some of the songs I know. So that if those kids ever meet, they will have songs to share, some from each.

Jesse, Karie and I watched a documentary about Yucatecan immigrants in San Francisco. It was mostly discouraging. Afterwards Jesse and I talked about it and sort of agreed that we don't want to say to people we meet "No, don't come to the US" because that would be sort of dishonest--yet we kind of felt that we are supposed to somehow imply that. But we're coming back here because we love our home and it's wrong not to want to share that, right? I've been thinking about this a lot. I have concluded that it's not my job to persuade or dissuade anyone from making the choices they make.

My job is to be kind, to be in solidarity, to give what I can, to respond to what people tell me they need, and to learn. My job is to make sure I give back to the community as much as it gives to me, to have fun, be fun, create happiness, to love. As silly as it may sound, only with love will work reach its full potential. My job is to separate the good and the nasty parts of privelege, to separate human rights from unjust excess, and try to represent myself and my communities as honestly as I can. My job is to keep on keepin' on. My job is to listen.

So, hopes and aspirations--I hope I can do all that and leave knowing that years from now, I will still be friends with the people with whom I worked.

Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto...
Con ganas de trabajar,
Sarah