Mexico country of contrasts

Hola companeros!
¿Que onda?!

Ill write to you in English today, which all can read, so that i dont have to write two versions of spanish and dutch. And am seriously considering to start the website Anouk, since I write endless stories as a diary for myself anyway. Where can you start such a website?Oh and please dont feel obliged to read it all!

Mexico is a country of contrasts as Carolina explains to me and which i{m already noticing. First it is a country with many different climates. Even in Mexico DF we find difference between the dry north (where the house of the family Camacho Villa is situated) and the greener, humid South. The same goes for the country: being on the latitude of Marocco it should be all desert like, but the ocean influence on both sides, creates areas as humid as where I will go in the Selva Lacandona, Chiapas, where rain fall amounts to 3000 mm a year sustaining a green, abundant vegetation all year round and two instead of one maize cycle a year. Right now im enjoying autumn sun in Mex DF and max of 22 Celsius and today we will go to visit a nearby pyriamid in very dry, desert like region with almost the whole family.

Family is very important here, just as being social, something i already experienced in Spain especially in Andalusia, where I sometimes got really fed up with hardly being on my own. I know it is something of myself i have to respect and make respected, cause i{m getting in a bad mood if i dont have my time of reflection; a good challenge for me in sticking up for myself. Luckily i have been staying in host families before, and learn how to deal with that situation better and better: recomm. 1 is not to be overpolite, but to just say what you want, you are a foreigner, which is the perfect excuse to be different and by being assertive you are also less of a burden for the family.

The eldest son (end 30s) is still living at home, which is not unusual here, the others have also only left home when marrying. Carolina, the youngest of the family with 32, is the exception. Her father who passed away, was a lawyer and so are her 3 siblings. Grown up in the city, she decided to go to the province of Chapingo to study agronomy, because "i loved plants and was thinking of doing botany, but decided that agronomy would be the wise choice since unlike an unemployed biologist, an unemployed agronomist will never starve of hunger, since he{ll always be able to start his own farm".
In a restaurant in the city centre (we thought it better if i didnt immediately catch diarea by eating from the many street sellers of tacos y tamales) we spoke of our dreams yesterday. Carolina also has a dream of having her own rancho, but she now sees it more as something to start after retiring, because: "The sad reality," she says with a big smile, "is that i dont have the physical constitution for the hard farming work, but i do have the brains and like talking to the farmers."
After her agronomy study, specializing in phytotechnia, she worked in Yucatan with farmers and for the Environmental Department of the government. Then she did a Masters in plant genetics in Birmingham ("I never felt at home in England, where it was so cold and organized") and came back to Mexico to start a doctorate. She got very dissapointed by the fact that no'one seemed interested in her research here, even though the government would give her a grant to do a Phd in England, that would never benefit her own country! She then had the idea to set up an organic and farmers shop, as that would be the way to help sustainable development. But she stopped the project, realising that in her heart, she wasn{t happy sellling products, as her dream was to farm or to work with farmers in the field.That is how she came to do her doctorate in social sciences in Wageningen, where they would let her do a lot of practical work in the communities in Chiapas, which could benefit the farmers.

I feel relaxed with her and it is very interesting talking to her, I love her concernedness for her country, its people and nature. I recognize myself in her struggle to use your talents to contribute to making a better world, while also trying to make yourself happy. It will be good to travel with her, although it will inevitably be hard at times to be together so much time. I hope we will find ways to let the other person have its freedom aswell.We discovered yet another comparison: also Carolina suffered a break'up with a long distance love lately, but as she says: You{ll see, Mexico nos va a consolar, es lindo (Mex will console us, its beautiful).

When thinking about my research plans, I dont have much clarity yet, but i feel that i need time first to get more overview. Monday we will have a first meeting with the NGO (ONG) CETAMEX Carolina is working with, in the working area, mainly consistent of Angel a old man who has worked with the farmers for many years, temporally involved specialists (like Carolina in plant genetics and another guy in cattle) and the promotor-farmers. The promoters are chosen by their village (which have 70 till 3000 inhabitants) to participate in talleres-workshops: the idea is that they will experiment with the options they discover during the workshops on their own farms and diffund this knowledge to the others.

Ah, I was talking about the contrasts. Another one is in the people, who are all more or less a mixture of the indigenous population with the spanish (and some german, italian and french influences). Some more indigenous (esp in the south) and dark'skinned, in the north you even find tall, blond people with blue eyes they told me. Here all the people are shorter than me. But unlike when I was sixteen, visiting Cyprus, I do not feel embarassed at my tallness anymore, and it it practical when wanting to see a show or something in the street. Third contrast is the one in wealth and even though I haven{t seen the poorest yet, the difference does strike me. Staying in a middle class family, their life isnt much different of ours, their television bigger, their cars luxurious. But the houses in other parts of the city are much smaller and their inhabitants{ lives more precarious. In the city boys offer to wash your car, while waiting in the many traffic jams and there is loads of street vendors and beggars as well. When one wants to park its car in the centre, it is normal to hand over car and keys to someone to take care of it in exchange for a little money and Carolina tells me how she never did her laundry before coming to England, as it is cheaply done by this (informal sector).
My reaction of embarrasment when confronted with these situations is just as in the stories that fellow students told me when going to these countries, knowing that Mexico is not extreme in its poverty at all, but the sharp differences do make it sour. It makes me think of the relative egalitarian society i come from. Also I realize that it bewilders me to see that the poverty I have seen untill now (in the big cities of Spain, Italy and to a lesser extent in my own country) was mainly the lot of immigrants and gypsies, here it is the {normal{ population. Well here in DF, in general the indigenous peoples are of course poorest and can be seen as a different group...

All the family including children and a pregnant sister in law joined in the visit of the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon in Teonichan (or something like that, the names here are really complicated). Impressive structures from the 1'3 century after Cr., when you realise that although having an extensive irrigation network and good astronomic knowledge, these people had not yet discovered the wheel and didn{t have any drought animals (horses, cows, sheep where all brought to this contentinent by the spanish!). But they did possess slaves from conquested peoples. Little is known about them and their demise- why they abandoned the place long before the Mexicas and the Azteks came to this area. They did find human sacrifices mainly of foreign people in the temples, where the god of water and some others where worshiped. A very important god was Quetzalcoatl, the feathered snake. In Mexico the equinoxe is celebrated the 21 of March, when the day is just as long as the night and Quetzalcoatl come down to the field to water them so that they become fertile and the sowing can start.

6'11 Today used public transport for the first time, which gave me a sense of finally being part of this city. The autobuses are so crowded, that we normally have to let pass several untill we find one in which we manage to squeeze in: now i do feel this is a city of millions. Because although the city is massive, i do not really notice this when in the centre for example, which is not more crowded than Barcelona and thankfully has much less tourists. Yesterday i was also pleasantly surprised to see that most of the visitors to the pyriamids where Mexicans, seeing it as a nice way to spend their sunday with the family. Only very few Germans and some gringo{s. The term gringo, used for americans, but i will probably be called one too when going to the communities, comes from green'go! This was shouted at the american soldiers in their green uniforms which occupied the country for a while (dont ask me when).

In the meeting, I have to present plan and receive feedback. My first question is on "how can one work with small'scale farmers on the common aim of biodiverisity conservation- sustainable land use and development?", which I want to answer by observing the work of Carolina and other practioners. The second one will be "how can the experimental and learning behaviour of these farmers be characterized?". This means looking at whether they are trying out new things (varieties of maize, mulching, not burning, green fertilizers), why or why not, whether they adopt external advices or adopt them, where they obtain their knowledge from, how they conduct experiments etc.
Angel is interested in the results of my work and gives me many advices, on how to speak to the farmers (first of all apologising for not speaking tzeltal and a strange form of Spanish: with all my efforts to pronounce the c¿th in castellano, now i have to drop it again!!! and vosotros is a form not used, and not understood by these people whose spanish is often poor).
He explains me a lot about the slash'and'burn (roza'tumba'quema) system they used traditionally and which many are still using, burning part of the forest to convert it in agrarian field for a few years and then let it recuperate. A system that functions well when population is not dense and there is time enough for the forest to recuperate, it is efficient because after a few years the weed load is so big that it is better to leave the ground. Weeds together with the low fertility )or better said easy degradation= of the shallow soil are actually the most limiting factor for cultivation here in the humid tropics.Unluckily the fires sometimes get out of hand, loosing more forest than needed. The other threat is the cattle farming, which impoverishes the soil because the forest or the secundary vegetation (akahual: small trees and bushes) cannot recover and thus the ground lacks carbon.
The farmers however are really interested in keeping cattles on meadows (zakate=pasto) since selling one or two animals a year is the main source of cash. Therefore CETAMEX organized a workshop on forage banks, a form of cultivating fodder plants for the animals in a more intensive way than just meadows. The plants can then be cut, providing the cattle with protein and energy and less forest needs to be cut down, as less space is needed.

One of my themes could be: why do some farmers keep on burning while others arent? Angel explains how this is a socio'technical issue. All of the people in the community where we go are migrants from other parts of the province, moving to the Selva Lacandona in the 1940s and 1950s. Tzotzils come from the higher, colder areas of Chiapas, where burning was never practised. The tzetals that we are visiting come from the lower areas, where burning is the tradition. The way they keep cattle is like they have seen it being done on the big ranches where they were working as land labourers (peones).After they move into the Selva, the area has been declared National Parc by the government who is looking for reasons to throw them out or at least denies big part of them the rights of their land. Not burning can thus be a political issue as well: every burning gives an excuse to the government to throw them out.

I am very enthusiastic about the work in the communities and cannot wait to go there, even though life will not be easy there it will be a great experience... We are thinking of following an intensive course in tzeltal so that we can communicate better with the people, especially the women and also as a way to gain their confidence.

Later on in the afternoon we met Carla, from the Infocentrum in Wageningen. She has been to several communities in Chiapas as well (amongst which La Realidad which Dani and Marieke where visiting some years ago), but not the inaccesable communities we will go to. As it seems now, this first time we will go in by a little airplane to the first one, as the NGO has some spare money, Carolina is still recovering from a leg fracture and we will take many goods with us (food, solar energy battery loaders). That saves us an eight hours walk this time, between the communities walks will be a few hours in the mud ' i{ll by myself some rubber boots, which i{ll leave for the farmers after my stay. We will stay three weeks up till a months in the comm, but not staying more than a maximum of five days in each, as we are in a way a burden for the families who prepare our food (even though we try to make an exchange, it is not possible to take all food with us...).
Carla was also in Oaxaca, where the situation is really tense since unions of teachers started protests five months ago and mainy joined them, fed up with the policies that only benefit the rich. An american journalist, with whom Carla worked got shot by paramilitarists. Really horrible, but it is important that they are there to show the world what is happening (people disapearing and being killed), as here in Mexico the news about it is really scarce and biased, saying that all of them are terorists, while these are normal people fighting for their rights to live a decent live. If you want to know more, please have a look at Indymedia (Netherlands, Spain, Chiapas).

Tomorrow we{ll go to Chapingo University and possibly to CIMMYT, institute for the Mejoramiento the Maiz y Trigo (improvement of maiz and wheat). Wednesday we{ll go to San Cristobal, where i might have time to check the internet. If not, you{ll hear of me in a month time!

Thanks alls for your emails!!!
kus,Jenneke