into the caverns of tomorrow with just our flashlights and our love we must plunge

Seven days...seven bus rides, nine taxis, six hotel rooms, two nights on busses, endless bean tacos (including several wide-eyed ‘¿sin carne?’ gasps when we ask for no meat). It seems like so much more than just one week since we headed out from Denver. Much, and little has happened. Each day I grow closer to being able to put some of my mind into written words. Perhaps it’s the pressure of needing to write for school; perhaps it’s just that I’m still breaking away the emotional wall I built over the last few months of often painful Convergence planning. All the times I wanted to crawl into a hole and escape the tension in my dinning room (where good friends became coworkers, the candles on the table were replaced by dozens of computer cords, and leisurely, delicious dinners with my partner became late night realizations that we had forgotten to eat in between emails and conference calls), and all the times that I just didn’t care about anything anymore, and I really just couldn’t think of where I – emotionally and physically – wanted to be. Those times are slowly giving way to the days here with no cell phone, no email obligations, no work that keeps me tied to the computer instead of exploring the infinite around me. Though, here I have many past and present walls to break down as well. This being my first time really traveling through Latin America, I often have to remind my self that it is all new and unknown. Meaning, that all the stereotypes and words of caution, while holding whatever value, must not create my experience, only this moment exists. In tourist cities, in small towns in the middle of farmland, I enter with ideas of what they must think of this guera (white girl) wearing sunglasses gazing out on them from inside a rental car… I feel ashamed, guilt, privileged, not belonging. Then I smile, and the older lady with the squirming child in her lap, sitting on her doorstep, smiles back. The genuine smile of humanity. In that tiny moment I am thrown into the present, to our infinite commonality.

So, as I proceed, trying to make each of those fleeting moments of escape from my created world last longer and deeper in me, I am also trying to bring everything I understand of student organizing (how to make Starbucks love me, how to make students believe I have ever lead a campaign on a campus) out from inside me, and to a place of more gentle reflection. As of now, I hold animosity for it all. I want this journey to be a time that brings my world of student organizing into a greater world perspective. To better understand its purpose/meaninglessness. To better understand my privilege as an educated USian, and to find the right place for that understanding – not buried, but not tormenting me. A place where it is in solidarity with all humanity in a way that stems only from compassion. Wow, what a task. A lifetime in fact. What will these 13 weeks contribute?
One Love ~ Haley