2011-11-17
Sometimes I look around and I can’t believe where I am. When I first moved to Zuleta, a small indigenous community in the Andes Mountains, I experienced a shock like nothing I had felt before. I couldn’t imagine how I could live for six more months with a shower that consisted of heating up water...
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2011-11-16
Four weeks ago I was dropped off in Lèona, energetic, optimistic and above all impatient to begin my apprenticeship. The only problem was the vagueness of my assignment of “working with the Millennium Villages Project.” There is no central office here in Lèona, but the effects of the project are clearly visible – a new...
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2011-11-16
It would be naïve to discount the influence of religion on social change. Civil disobedience movements, from Leo Tolstoy’s communes in Russia to Gandhi’s civil disobedience to Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights marches, all shared a strong grounding in religious teachings. And with good reason; the Gospels offer an inspirational example of how to...
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2011-11-15
I will never be able to dance like a Senegalese woman. This rueful and self-defeating axiom runs through my mind over and over, growing steadily more certain the longer my friend – and fellow Fellow – Fatima Ndiaye (Natalie Davidson), her host sister Fatou, and I watch the sabat (drumming-and-dancing ceremony) the inhabitants of our...
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2011-11-15
I don’t think I fully understood the definition of the word “rainforest” until I moved here. I’ve quickly learned that the rainforest is aptly named because it does, in fact, rain every day. As a Southern California native, my idea of rain is a ten minute drizzle storm that stops traffic and makes the top...
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2011-11-14
After a rocky, bumpy thirty minute truck ride into the dry, arid Chapada Diamantina region, we finally arrived at our destination, a town called Ouricuri II. What seems like an average small town is actually a comunidade quilombola. These communities, scattered around the northeastern region of Brazil, are the legacy of fugitive slaves who ran...
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2011-11-11
I awoke to my first morning at the Jumandi Caverns to roosters. Lots of roosters. If I was surprised then, I should have saved it for when I walked out the door. My family was gathering to go to a minga, or a communal meeting for work, and I was going, too. In order to...
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