A Dispatch from Down South

It has been quite a busy week! I've been all over my little corner of Mexico with a few more trips planned in the coming days. We have just finished up with a group from Rice University working in a community called Vicente Gurrero. The evolution of the puebla is an interesting one: it was a squatter village that started around Oaxaca's major landfill; so if you can imagine the health codes are not quite to Del Mar standards. It was an illegal settlement until a few years ago when the state government sanctioned it; now there are close to 3,000 people living there. We were working with the clinic to spread the word about good nutrition. What happened was all of the Aztecs were eating corn and amaranth all the time but the Conquistadors changed all that. It was part of the Aztec tradition to make little figures out of amaranth that represented their gods and eat them in certain ceremonies. When the Spaniards got here they considered the ritual to be Pagan so they ordered the Amaranth fields burned and only allowed corn to be grown. This essentially halved the nutrients that the locals were getting in their diets and has caused malnutrition ever since. Totally reliant on corn, the locals were unable to get complete proteins in their diets without eating meat; which is very expensive. So, we are teaching everybody to reintroduce the native grain into their diets so that their children can get the proper nutrition they need for meaningful development.

The conversations we have had with the locals have been very productive and nearly everybody has purchased at least a kilo of amaranth. All in all, we were able to talk to 350 mothers and it is we think that due to our talks nearly 1,000 people's diets will be greatly improved. However malnutrition is not the only problem in this community. Most of the problems they face are due to living in such close proximity to a huge landfill. That is, many people came to the clinic after having been bitten by rabid dogs or with diarrhea after drinking bad water. The main issue is the fact that the dump is up hill from the community so all of the water they are getting from their wells is essentially poisonous. This, at least in my mind, solidifies the need for a non-polluting water purification system that will allow them to drink from their wells daily without fear of toxins or biological contaminants; but that's another problem that'll need to be addressed by another project. The photo below is evidence of what happened to a public school that was established before the area was officially sanctioned by the state government.

Aside from going to Vicente Gurrero every day this week I have managed to make it out to another "rural" community with another group of interns. This group is working with a Mexcian organization called Museo Communitarios. They are a group of cultural anthropologists that believe that if a community can band together to set up a museum then they are more apt to do other things as a community such as an artisan cooperative or water purification initiative. On Thursday I made my way to a puebla about three hours south of Oaxaca called San Martin Huamelulpan (waam-a-lou-pan). The day we arrived they were having a ribbon-cutting ceremony for their own museum. It was explained to me that I would know many of the people there from my previous trip in 2006. When we arrived, after some getting lost, I remembered many of the people from before but only a few remembered me. The Municipal President of on of the communities we work with put it best: "I remembered a tall gringo but you know, all you gringos look the same."

Once we were in and settled the president of Museos Communitarios said to me that I would be representing ProMexico (the organization that I work for) in the pre-ribbon-cutting ceremony. That was fine with me I thought that I would just have to stand next to him while he snipped the red ribbon. Well that was not exactly how things went down. We all assembled on the semi-indoor basketball court where there was a long table, with a dark red table cloth, that extended the width of the court. Upon the beginning of the ceremony a young girl, like something our of a Diego Rivera painting, walked in with flowers on her back. An out-of-tune brass band played and we were seated at our respective places at the table. I thought it interesting that a gringo such as myself would be seated at a table with the whose-who of rural Oaxaca; the rest of the table consisted of Municipal Presidents of various commuinities, the elected mayors of various others, and community leaders from Huamelulpan. But I figured: "hey, why the hell not, if anything this is just a nice way of asking me to play in their basketball tournament." So I sat and the ceremony proceeded. They spoke about the importance of the museum to their community and how they belived it would eventually lead to more important events within their community. The emcee started to thank all of the people that were helpful in formation of the community organization and instrumental in the construction of the Museum and they stood accordingly. Then it came: "(translated) and a special thanks to our very good friends at ProMexico and their representative Jeem Beealk for being here today." My first thought was: hey, that's better than most of my high school teachers did, but it quickly to turned to "oh crap I'm supposed to stand up."

After the ceremony we moved to the museum for the grand opening. It went as planned, the ribbon was cut, and then it was time for one of my favorite Mexican traditions: the feast. It was actually pretty cool: we ate in the ruins that surrounded the town. The lion's share of the museum was dedicated to an archaeological excavation that had been undertaken by numerous gringos in the early 1990s. So we ate where they ate some 600 years ago, but sadly there was no amaranth. It was a serious feast, I mean to say four courses not including the free mescal they were handing out. It was funny though, because of all I had learned earlier in the week about rural Mexican nutrition I was particularly aware of what we were eating. They tried to serve regional dishes, which included chicken in many heavy sauces. One of the guys I was eating with said to me after two mescals: "I wonder if this is one of my chickens." But rest assured (and this part's for the parents) whenever food gets weird, whenever you can't garauntee you dinner wasn't squaking, chirping, or burrowing earlier in the day, you can always count on good ol' American Coca Cola. Mexico is the world's largest consumer of Coke and it is served at every meal, no matter how far away from running water you are.

We returned safe that same evening and are getting ready for two more excursion next week even deeper into the Mexican unknown. I will spend Monday in San Miguel de Progresso and Tuesday in Santa Maria Cuchilla working to set up new community initiatives that will hopefully lead to new markets in these communities. I am very excited about the work I am doing and am seeing tangible results in almost everything we do.

And when you wonder why it is that I want to live in a place with no running water, non-flushing toilets, and mosquitoes the size of humming birds: I can't leave, I'm huge in Oaxaca.