The week was incredibly rich, challenging and highly worthwhile. Much of what I experienced was a feast for the senses, so I thought I would provide ten images, sounds, smells and experiences from my latest adventure.
1) Waking up every morning at 5:15 am, crawling out of my sleeping bag that rested on a wooden bed sans mattress and walking outside to be greeted by brightly colored hammocks strung and inhabited by families from the Yucatan peninsula.
2) Eating hand-made tortillas for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The outdoor cooking area was also located right outside of my room and was always filled with around 40 women from local communities. They used over a ton (yes, this is a literal statistic) of corn to feed the almost 800 of us over the week and arose at 2:30 every morning to begin food preparation for the day. They cooked beans, corn, coffee and beef over wood fires in tubs big enough to bathe in. Incredible.
3) Participating in the morning and evening prayers intoned by elders in any number of indigenous languages. Smelling the incense. Dancing to the sacred music. Click here to listen to the song I probably heard the most during our time of prayer. It's not the best quality but it is a group from the same community (Rincón Chamula) that seranaded us every morning and evening.
4) Waking up to a flooded room the first morning. It might have been my fault.The toilet didn't have a flusher handle (there has to be a technical term for that, right?) and as I started fiddling with the tank on the first afternoon water started gushing out of the hole where the aptly-named flusher handle should have been. Multiple men spent several hours trying to fix the problem, but to no avail. The next morning a plumber came and remedied the situation.
5) Giving a brief testimony based on Luke 2:41-51 and Jeremiah 1:4-8 in our final worship service. Our theme for the week focused on young adults and as the token non-Catholic young adult, I was asked to give a short reflection. Here are my words from that evening:
Muy buenas noches hermanas y hermanos. Les pido permiso hablar. Me llamo Kelly. Tengo 22 años y soy de la iglesia Menonita, una religión protestante.
Mi pidieron que diera una breve reflexión sobre las dos lecturas de la Biblia que acabamos de escuchar. Como Jesús cuando fue a Jerusalén para dialogar con los principales, estoy en un camino, un viaje. Estoy buscando y este viaje es literal. Vengo de los EE.UU. y ahorita estoy muy lejos de mi familia y mi comunidad. Pero mi camino también se relaciona con mi vida de fé. Tengo muchas preguntas, dudas e inquietudes de lo que es la religión, la fé y Mamá/Papá Dios.
Mi camino me ha llevaldo a lugares nuevos como Bachajón para este encuentro. Y estoy bien contenta estar con Uds. porque este espacio ecuménico me está permitiendo seguir en mi camino de fé. Por ejemplo, les comparto una de mis preguntas: ¿dónde puedo encontrar a Mamá/Papá Dios? Uds. me acordaron que Dios está en todo: en la lluvia que cayó anoche, en el maiz, en mi misma y en cada uno de Uds.
También estoy tomando en cuenta la sabiduría de mi religión menonita. Hay una familia menonita en San Cristóbal, donde estoy viviendo. Me reúno con la señora de esta familia cada mes para platicar sobre nuestra fé. Comparto mis pensamientos, dudas y preguntas. También ella comparte sus experiencias y me pide mis opiniones. Nos acompañamos en el camino.
A veces, porque soy jóven, siento como Jeramías, muy pequeña. Pero sé que Dios me acompaña en esta vida y como jesús en el templo, necesito seguir en el camino, en búsquda porque el proceso de buscar da sabiduría, fortaleza y me permite tomar mi lugar en nuestro mundo diverso y en el pueblo de creyentes, aunque soy jóven.6) Kneeling in the dirt under a starlit sky for over a half hour listening to prayers by the principales (spiritual religious elders) in nine different indigenous languages. I didn't understand a thing but it was a good chance to build my empathy for the many people around the world who don't speak dominant languages.
7) Dancing to live marimba music at our celebration on Friday night with everyond ranging from a baby sleeping in her mother´s arms to a nun from the Dominican Republic to a wrinkled principal who was at least 80 years old.
8) Wading through incredible amounts of mud after a supremely rainy Thursday. Upon returning home I scrubbed my feet in the shower (which I never do), trimmed my toenails, scrubbed my feet again and then attempted to chip off the still caked-on dirt with my pocket knife. My toes still show remnants of my muddy experience.
9) Drinking pozol (thick, fermented corn dough dissolved in water) at noon every day. It's quite an energizing drink and apparently is great for the digestive system. Pozol is the traditional drink of southern Mexico and is often carried by Mexican farmers to the field and consumed as a mid-day snack.
10) Staring off into the jungly mountains when my mind wandered from presentations at hand. The countryside was beautiful and it was a welcome relief to escape from urban life for a week. It also brought back fond memories of the six weeks I spent in the Peruvian jungle almost two years ago.
So there you have my week in a ten-point nutshell! In all seriousness, I am extremely thankful to have lived this experience. I left feeling much more connected to a different demographic of the Mexican population and am also so honored that as a foreigner from a different religious tradition I was allowed to participate in religious ceremonies and the daily life of these beautiful people.
I'll leave you with a quote from the Popol Vul that struck me this week:
Dios, que seamos uno God, that we would be one
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