Return from Mexico 1/31/07

Hola Amigos,

I just returned from Mexico yesterday. I'm in Dallas enjoying my baby girl, who is sitting next to me in her "exerciser,"( a thing we never had) eating Cheerios from one of the trays (some things never change). Picking things up this way is a new skill, as is sitting alone. There are surprises each time I see her.

I spent eleven days in Chacala, my fishing village, enjoying the warm weather, swimming every day, and hiking all over the village, getting strong for the coming trek in Chiapas. I tried to visit 1-2 families each day and catch up with the growing children and events of the village. Cambiando Vidas, our educational nonprofit there is going strong. We have 29 kids in the scholarship program now, 5 of those in University, and a thriving learning center with after school programs and a computer center. After 2 years, I don't even recognize some of the kids, and there are many more new ones I don't know at all. Visit our web site at CambiandoVidas.org to learn more about all our programs.

On Friday, the 19th, a friend drove me to Puerto Vallarta, and I flew to Mexico City and on to Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas, to meet up with a delegation from Witness for Peace and Equal Exchange, a fair trade coffee company, which gets some of its coffee from the Indigenous Mountain farmers in Chiapas. I buy coffee from their "Interfaith Program." for our church, for serving and for fundraising. The UCC church was also involved in this and we had 23 people from all over, including many UCC ministers or retired ministers.

We were in Chiapas eight days, mostly in San Cristobal, and met every day with various Peace NGOS, and groups that work with los Indios, the indigenous people. My head is still bursting with information I have yet to understand and process. About 20,000 indios in Chiapas are displaced; many live in in slums surrounding San Cristobal and come into the markets and streets every day to sell whatever they can craft. San Cristobal is a a beautiful colonial city, although it is at 7200 feet and I was cold the whole time I was there.

The highlight of our stay was a trip into the mountains to visit a coffee growing village. We travelled in vans for about 3 hours to a mountain town that houses the co-op that receives the coffee from the farmers and ships it to the states. Then we climbed into the back of 2 coffee trucks and rode another 1 1/2 hours, mostly on dirt roads to the village of Chavajeval, in a valley of only 2,000 feet, and much warmer. The coffee fields above the village (about 1-2 miles straight up) are in a cloud, rain forest and very damp.

We stayed in the homes of some of the families there, and slept on either dirt or cement floors for two nights. Most of the people there speak no Spanish (their language is Tzotzil) and many have never seen a Norte Americano before. They are very solemn, and the children run and hide when we approach, but ultimately the women and children laughed at us a lot. Our family had four older children, and a 10 year-old grandson living with them, whose father, their oldest son, was slain in a military raid in 1998. (Many of these pueblos were raided and burned because they were Zapatista sympathizers or some of their young men were probably Zapatistas.) The village had no arms when they were raided. I had some playing cards with me, and the 10-year-old became my special buddy. He would escort me when I needed to go somewhere, but not really walk with me. He would take another route and pop up later, or run ahead and then wait and peek out to make sure I was coming to the correct place.