...

well, we leave tomorrow morning at 6 am, wow. and yet i want to go out for a bit tonight...i'm nuts!
tomorrow we will be at palenque, our 2nd maya site, so much learning to be had!
i probably wont wirte anything till we get back, not that ive written much lately
we ended up going to the beach two weeks ago, which was really great, except when i lost my new glasses in the dirty, sandy pacific ocean. that kinda ruined my day, but i forced myself to get over it in a few hours...lucky i had my contacts with me and another pair of glasses at home in San Cris. The beach was good otherwise, we went out saturday night to the "disco" which had a horrible sound system, but was a good random time. Then we ended up riding up and down the main street in the back of a pickup truck listening to 50 cent and blink 182, and we had a beach party, complete with fire and chelas (beers), but turns out that palm leaves arent very good firewood.
ok time to go finish packing!
ciao
heather

too much time has passed

well, we leave for our big 2 week trip on wednesday
then when we gwet back sarah is coming to visit and we're going to Guatemala to see the semana santa festivities in Santiago Atitlan, which is gonna be really amazing and I cannot wait.
life here is pretty sweet, I love every minute of it.
I'd really like to succcessfully make a useful post on here before I leave on Wednesday.

It's really weird to think of home in Canada right now.
It's been 2.5 months since I left Vancouver, and the year and a half that I spent living there is a blur in my memory because it all moved so quickly.
Toronto stands out in my mind more poignantly since that's where I was before here, and that's where my mom has been.
However, as of yesterday my mom has moved back to Vancouver Island, which is kinda surreal, not sure why.
Maria Luisa arrived here on Tuesday from Vancouver, and last Friday night she and my sister met up so that Maria could bring my camera cable. It was really weird for me to think of them seeing each other, so far away from here.
I find that I often get caught up in the everyday, and while I have been homesick once or twice, it really hasn't affected me all that much.
I love San Cristobal so much, that one night I spent in Comitan I was homesick for San Cristobal.
We might go to the beach today, or I might stay here and move into my new house, at this point I'm unsure. Obviously I still am no good at making decisions.

si uno come, que coman todos

Ahorita estoy escribiendo mi esayo para la clase de politicas, pero encontre a esa historia en uno de mis libros. El libro se llama "Si uno come, que coman todos" y es sobre una ONG que se llama DESMI y que trabaja para la economia solidaria.

This story/poem is about a little boy who is discovering life around him. One day I might translate it but it's so much work.

"Hubo una vez un nino de ojos muy tiernos y profundos, con un cuerpo y manos agiles, pies veloces, oido atento, buen olfato, que se encontro ante las cosas:

Vio que las plantas crecian,
Que los arboles eran mecidos por el viento,
Que la auraora era el principio de los dias,
Que el agua corria,
Que la lluvia fertilizab a los campos,
Que era verde el color de las hojas y que habia frutos,
Vio que la dureza de las piedras tenia utilidad,
Que los animales cazaban para comer,
Que otros ninos reian y jugaban con las cosas,
Que las cosas tenian un nombre.
Vio que la vida crecia, que los hombres vivian,
Juntandose y construyendo, generando las nuevas cosas y los nuevos hombres.

Hubo una vez un nino, de ojos tiernos y profundos, que comenzo a pensar y buscar una razon a todo lo que veia y percibia a traves de todos sus sentidos e invento las razones, imagino las causas, creo las explicanciones, sugirio el sentido de las cosas, construyo un modelo, una categoria que explicara parte de los sucesos, parte de los hallazgos que hacia con sus manos.

learning, sunburns, scrabble and boys

so this past while has been a whirlwind of learning.
my paper is due in a few days and I've learned a lot since I began thinking about everything.
theres too much to write about. i have a lot of work to do on my paper.
i've been learning a lot about the political aspects of agriculture and resources.
its funny, i thought of it today, that my sister would always tell people that i was going to mexico to study organic agriculture...and i would correct her, saying that i'm studying "latin american studies", but so far everything that I've learned about is so relevant to what i want to do with my life. Today we had a presentation from Maria Elena about global resistance movements and food sovereignty...it was wonderful, she is such an amazing woman, and she is very nice and easy to talk to, I know that I'm going to learn a lot from her.
yesterday we went to carnaval in Chamula and I got sunburnt, but in the worst pattern ever.
my paper is technically due on friday, but we may have an extension till sunday. I'd like to get it done soonish because we may try to make it to the beach soon.
I was sorta dating this guy for like 9 days. His name's Adrian, but he left for good for Playa del Carmen on Sunday. He's a salsa instructor so I'm now a pro dancer, but dancing till 3 on a school night was a bad idea, so its kinda good that he left. He also worked at Mayambe, the thai/indian/arabic restaurant in town, which meant free samosas and salad rolls. I hope that I can still make that work now that he's gone. It was also kinda strange cause I had a date on valentine's day, which never happens... we went to a bar and played Scrabble, in Spanish. I didnt lose by that much, but I had a bit of help. Valentines day isnt as big here, but here its sponsered by coca cola, not Hallmark, but coke kinda sponsers everything. Then last weekend we went to el chiflon, which is a waterfall about 2 hours from here. That was pretty nice, went swimming and stuff. Then we played Scrabble, him in english, and me in spanish. I won that time.
My first weekend with Adrian we went to this big underground house party on Sunday night, all the cool stuff happens on school nights. There was a dj and a band in the patio of the house, it was all outdoor and there was a bonfire, cheap beer and veggie tacos with soy. the dj played some sweet dancing tunes and the band had a cello in it. the singer of the band sounds like he has a digeridoo in his throat and can make the craziest sounds ever. Everyone whos anyone was at the party, the town must have shut down. And, there was lots of weed (shhhh), but we've all vowed to stay away while we're here so we just breathed in deep.

Alright, this cafe is about to close, I should probably wrap this up. I promise to write more next week, when my research paper is all done. Hope all is well wherever you all are!

vamos a bailar

Salsa dancing till 4:30 am is really quite exhausting, which is why I attempted to sleep before I go out to do it again. We've only been here about 2 weeks, but we've already become regulars, since there's only a few clubs in town and the same people go all the time.
We went shopping today, I tried to buy pants, but apparently I'm too tall for this country. I did manage to find one pair that fit me, but I wasn't sure if purple flared cords fit into my wardrobe.
I'm really excited to get started on my research for my poli sci paper...real life research is way better than reading books or e-journals.
Well its almost 11:30, gotta get ready to go out. Our first week here we made the mistake of going to the club before 10:30...and we were the only ones dancing, I don't think last call exists in Mexico.

POLI 332 Research Paper Proposal

Research Question: How have free trade agreements, such as NAFTA, affected the food sovereignty of Chiapas?
My research question has evolved and changed a lot over the past five days. I knew from the start that I wanted to focus my research on food and agriculture, however over the course of a few days I had many experiences and met many new people that helped me to narrow down my topic.Wednesdays class and discussions about neoliberalism and free trade made me realize the politics of food, especially in a less developed country such as Mexico. After class, at La Casa del Pan, Marella and I ran into Robyn, a friend of a friend who is writing her undergraduate thesis on food sovereignty as a form of resistance for Dalhousie’s International Development program. I had never heard of food sovereignty before but Robyn got me interested in it and gave me some good sources of information contacts. Friday during class, we went back to TierrAdentro and met Peter Rosset and Maria Elena Martinez from the organization La Via Campesina. Peter has written a lot about food sovereignty and Maria Elena has just published a book on organic coffee production in Chiapas. I also found out that one of our neighbours is writing a thesis on coffee production for a university in Norway. Since this assignment is to be very much based on what we have learned from the people around us that we have met, I decided to research the effect that free trade has had on Chiapas’ food sovereignty, with a focus on coffee production.
When I began to look into agriculture in Chiapas, I found out that Chiapas is the biggest producer of organic coffee in Mexico and that Mexico produces the most organic coffee in the world, which made me think about coffee and free trade. People of all countries and cultures drink coffee, however, only a few parts of the world have the necessary climate for growing it. What affect has the North American Free Trade Agreement had on the food sovereignty of Chiapas? The concept of food sovereignty which was developed by the group La Via Campesina in 1996 argues that food and agriculture are about more than the trade of economic commodities. La Via Campesina explains food soverienty as the right of rural peoples to define their own food and agriculture, to regulate trade in order to achieve sustainable development and to determine their own level of self-reliance. Food sovereignty promotes trade policies that will help people to achieve safe, healthy and sustainable food production. Do the policies of NAFTA promote sustainable food production? Do they impede people from defining their food and agriculture?
I decided that coffee would be a good case study for this research since Chiapas produces such a large amount of coffee. I realized that a farmer in Chiapas, when deciding to grow coffee beans, is entering the global market by default, since the amount of coffee that Mexico produces is far more than the country itself could consume. Therefore, what would make a farmer in Chiapas decide to grow coffee instead of another crop? Does free trade have an effect on his/her decision? How does this affect food soveriegnty, as the right for people to define their agriculture? Has the amount of coffee production increased in Chiapas since 1994? Has organic coffee production increased as a result of NAFTA? How have free trade agreements affected the world price of coffee and thus the income of Chiapan coffee growers?
Perhaps free trade has decreased Chiapas’ food soveriegnty insofar as that it made export production easier and more profitable and thus forced people to revert to production for the world market (ie coffee) instead of producing for the local market. Another hypothesis is that since NAFTA, the farmers of Chiapas have become more aware about their food soverienty and their right to define their own agriculture, thus supporting resistance movements that emphasize these rights. Or perhaps free trade agreements have not influenced farmers’ actions or decisions at all and they have always been aware of their need to be self-reliant.
It is obvious that many questions exist surrounding this issue, and I also have many possible answers to these questions. To find answers to thsee questions I will look to other people’s research as conduct my own research first hand here in Chiapas. Through my connections with Maria Elena from La Via Campesina as well as my new neighbour, I hope that I will be able to talk to some coffee growers of Chiapas to get their perspectives on the issues of free trade and food soveriegnty.