IDEALS

by Gary Warren
March 21, 2010

I wrote earlier about connecting the dots or trying to make sense of the last 5 weeks here. That includes exit interviews for the students on a DSW placement. One will be returning to Cuernavaca tonight to finish her placement, so for her it a mid course discussion. The ‘dots’ for all include:

· Organizing a learning community complete with committees for health, planning and reflection

· Finding your way around a strange town, communicating without knowing the language, and buying food essentials

· Hearing from a internationally known sociologist about the history of Mexico

· Understanding why the United Nations considers poverty to be the single biggest cause of handicap in the world

· Meeting with families who are squatting on government land in urban poverty

· Seeing illegal logging, deforestation and the rape of lands that provide water for millions of people.

· Getting to know 11 Benedictine nuns who are wonderful examples of loving inclusiveness

· Working alongside Mexican people in a community project to protect their water, and then sharing a community lunch with them. That word ‘community’ keeps popping up.

· Using Buddhist meditation techniques to relax and focus thoughts

· Meeting with a Doctor who performs abortions in a country where such an act is illegal

· Talking with people who have had their family members killed in civil wars in their country

· Climbing a mountain to test our bodies

· Exploring the 1500 year old ruins of a major city and hearing about how they destroyed themselves due to their environmental negligence

· Meeting with women to discuss male domination and oppression

· Making tomales with a family

· Listening to Latin music in a free concert

· Hearing about how indigenous people view the world, and participating in a ceremony that the Dali Llama also participated in last year.

· Spending time in a school for street children.

· Comparing institutions for people who are poor. Some northerners call them ‘orphanages’. These pity and charity feelings generate money for the business. The children all have parents. One had 40 children, and the other had 500 children – but poverty institutions all.

· Comparing how social and economic class defines activities – visiting the ‘mall’, the market, and the street vendors.

· Discovering how to create employment opportunities for physically handicapped adults using a cooperative model.

And that was the first 2 weeks. After that, the ‘dots’ included:

· Having a conversation with a woman in her dirt yard, in front of her house made of bamboo sticks tied with string.

· Trying to understand why entire populations of people are expelled from their community, because of their religious beliefs.

· Visiting other centres of displaced people, and seeing what a new school can do for their children.

· Seeing attempts at providing drinking water falter as people use the water storage tanks as a jail (to house the people who raid their settlement because they had drinking water).

· Sitting at the front of the church beside the Dominican Priest, as he conducted a service in Tstosil for several hundred people who had come to meet the special guests from far away (us).

· Eating lunch with community leaders who asked us what we did with indigenous people who were poor in Canada.

· Hearing about Canadian mining companies who are exploiting the land and killing village members who speak out (we put our flags away after that).

· Living in cabins in the jungle, swimming in crystal clear water, and seeing the huge expanse of clear cut logging.

· Having monkeys swing over our heads while exploring 2000 year old ruins.

How to put all that and more into a college course? Is it general education? Generic education? Or is it about what the students will carry with them forever? What grade do you give?

And back to Canada tomorrow.