A visit with the indigenous people of Monte Sion

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Today I was part of a world I had never seen and because of it mine will never be the same.

Exiled from their village for conversion of religion and forced to start a village from scratch the people of Monte Sion have gone a long way.

Where do I begin - beside an army base and a brothel, a community of no more than 300 indigenous Mexican’s live their lives the only way they know how. They’ve built homes from wood with tin roofs that leak, cook over open fires in their kitchen, eat two meals a day of beans and tortilla, can’t read or write, share a one room house with their families of over seven with chickens roaming free, have no running water, but still seem to smile and their children still sing.

We entered the property of one family and spoke with the mother, her name was Trini. We introduced ourselves and she welcomed us. The three of us Quest students came with three others, Paul from Arthur Frederick Community Builders, who has helped the community with water projects, a French women named Stephanie who lives in a village nearby with her husband and family and an older women named Diane who is god mother to one of the young boys in the village. We all sat together and listened to this indigenous families story.

Trini is married and has five children, her husband works in logging. The family lives on a small piece of land with three small buildings on it; one a kitchen, one a sleeping quarters and one an empty building of another family. When Trini and her family were exiled from their village and forced to flee, like the rest of the people in the community, her family could not afford the 1,500 pesos for the entire property and were forced to split with another family who had more money. Many families don’t have toilet and they bath twice a week in a homemade temescal or steam room and use cold collected water to rise and use the green contaminated water, which they use to drink from, to wash their clothes.

Trini was taught how to grow mushrooms and Diane said she is going to try and help her sell them to a new organic restaurant in the town. Her daughter lives in Cancun working as a house cleaner and receives only 2,000 pesos a month minus living conditions. That is equivalent to less than $200 Canadian a month to send back to her family, the daughter is only fourteen years old. This is considered a normal occurrence.

We sat and talked to this women for over an hour. Her story was real and her presence was genuine. She showed us the little she had and let us hold her new baby born in December.

Arthur Frederick Community Builder, also known as AFCB, started a project in this small village giving the town a water filtration system, school houses and a basketball court for the children. The green contaminated water used to be the only source of water for the village before the project was able to build something sustainable. Since then conflict within the community has transformed one of the water holding cells into a prisoner holding sell and often the children can’t attend school because they are needed to work.

We asked what Trini’s hopes and goals were for the next year, she said she would love to have a block house and to allow her children to continue their education and go to a nearby town and get a job.

“Here in the mountains it is difficult,” she said.

When we entered the property that was home to these people there were so many things going through my mind – we had just passed trucks filled with army men holding guns, massive walls lined with barbed wire and no more than 100 meters away was a community filled with children and there was a school built by members of AFCB with a brick wall around it to block the view of the brothel stationed for the army. The children were dirty and surprised to see white skinned people walking through their village. One young girl, Sillia, ran her fingers over my arm so gingerly, expecting it to feel like a foreign silk and perhaps to her it did.

I remembered when we first arrived and told Trini we were from Canada and Stephanie was from France.

“Canada and France, are they close?” she asked.

I forgot that these people were illiterate, had probably never seen a map of the world, or a washing machine or a shower. I couldn’t imagine what the world looked like from inside their eyes.

Today we learned a lot and it was a lot to process. We saw examples of community development, of religious conflict and exile, of international support and non-profit contributions. We learned about human rights and saw examples of community policing. It was a world we’d never seen before and one as much as we’d like to and as much as we try to, we may never completely understand. Sometimes it seems we must understand things in order to help, the more I learn and the more I grow the power may not always be in understanding it but in respecting it.

Today I was part of a world I had never seen and because of it mine will never be the same.