First Steps in a New Partnership
When a few other members of Brown University and I started the IHF Brown chapter, we weren’t completely sure what we were getting ourselves into. What exactly was SYJAC and how did it affect the daily lives of its community members? What difference could we, a group of American students, do in the lives of the indigenous people of Chiapas, Mexico? Our winter break trip to San Cristobal de las Casas taught us all this, as we experienced firsthand and participated in the process of community building and international activism. Our main project while in San Cristobal was to paint the SYJAC community center, which was only being marginally used for a daycare center and was essentially a giant block of cement. The painting took about 7 days of full labor, and included numerous random tasks such as attempting to communicate in our stumbling Spanish with the paint shop workers, and helping the 3- to 5-year-old daycare members to slap their handprints all over the finished painted walls. It was exhausting work, but very satisfying to see the place brighten little by little. After a lot of sweat, perseverance, and paint smears, we completed the center and inaugurated it with a community party on our last weekend in Mexico. The party was a chance for us to connect our work to the people we were working for, and realize that just this simple act of painting a center would have lasting effects.Now that the center was painted, it would be used for a number of different local projects and fundraising efforts to provide sustainability and institutionalization for the community. Now that we are back in the US, we plan to keep in touch with SYJAC and the community’s progress. We will help in any way we can with local projects, and we are in the planning stages of beginning a letter exchange program with a local Chiapas youth group, in order to foster an interchange of cultural and societal ideals about our different societies and potential for positive change. Through these plans, we hope to keep the SYJAC spirit alive on Brown’s campus and continue to be promoters of social change.
RSS
