Luis Estavillo and San Felipe Lachillo, Part I.

Most of the time, I think change happens gradually. Our perspectives carry an inertia all their own. It's tough to alter the way we live or think when we've come to find comfort. Yeah sure, over time we might grow more relaxed about taking the trash out, or more adamant about recycling. But these are little changes that come from experience and learning. Rarely, does a single event transform our life's course or revolutionize the way we think. Here's a story of one that did:



Two yeas ago at the suggestion of a friend, Luis Estavillo, a restaurant owner in La Crucecita, Oaxaca accompanied a Red Cross mission into the mountains around Huatulco. The trip was to survey conditions and resupply clinics with basic medical equipment. Luis had never worked with the Red Cross or participated very much in any kind of volunteer aid projects. Although he had lived in Huatulco for 20 years, he hadn't so much as left the pavement, let alone set foot into the mountains that lay just outside of town. For all purposes he saw the trip as a chance to explore, a fun day in the hills.



What he encountered though, was a kind of poverty that he had only read about. Coming to the village of San Felipe Lachillo, Luis found children suffering from malnutrition and disease. Many of them were plagued by lice and fungus, diarhea and deficiency. But what struck deepest was the feeling of defeat staring back at him, of children barely school-age looking through desperate, old eyes. He decided to do something.

San Felipe lies at the end of a dirt road three hours from Huatulco. As the crow flies it is barely 20 miles. But the 4X4 road, the various stream crossings, and the absence of through traffic (it is after all, a dead end) isolate it and keep it cut off from the rest of the world.

While the isolation of San Felipe has helped to preserve things like custom and tradition, it has also secluded the village from services like health care, medicine, education, and outside income. There is no doctor in San Felipe, no dentist, no nurse. There is no high school, only a ‘telesecundaria’, which is basically a room with a T.V. where kids can watch videos of teachers teaching high school. There are no jobs. For work villagers must travel to Huatulco, which means they also must stay in Huatulco, returning home only on Sunday to visit their families.

One of the things that struck a chord in Luis was malnutrition, especially among children. Hungry kids don’t do well in school, he says. They don’t do well in anything. They don’t have the energy. As in most of the schools in rural Oaxaca, there is no free or reduced lunch program. Kids must either bring their own or go without. For the children of San Felipe, it wasn’t a case of not wanting to pack a lunch. They didn’t have any lunch to pack.

Luis knew that if there was going to be real change in San Felipe, it would have to start with the children. A few weeks later he met with local leaders to determine what the community needed most. The School Breakfast Program was born.

Its aim was simple: provide the kids with one nutritious meal to start the day. Food would not only keep children coming to school, but give them the energy they needed to enjoy it. Before breakfast could be served though, they needed a place to prepare it. So, community leaders drew up the plans for a simple shelter, chose the materials, and estimated the cost. The only problem left was finding a way to pay for it all. Enter Luis.

“I had wanted to take on a new challenge,” he says of his decision to raise money for the breakfast project, “I liked swimming, but I was never going do it seriously just for myself. I needed to find a greater cause,” he says.

By the end of the meeting in San Felipe, he knew he’d found it.
With help from friends and family, Luis took up the Nine Bay Challenge – the then unconquered crossing of the nine bays of Huatulco – to raise money for the program. Donors pledged money by the hour, the kilometer, or the number of bays crossed. All the proceeds went directly to the construction of the shelter in San Felipe.

Crossing the nine bays of Huatulco is an epic feat. Not only is the distance long – at minimum 20km (12.5mi) – the route is plagued by jellyfish, rough seas, and unpredictable currents. (In our recent attempt Luis came out with over a half a dozen stings on his chest and back). Without warning large eddies can arise and carry a swimmer out to sea. Unlike long lake crossings or pool distances, success in the open ocean depends heavily on luck – on the chance that the conditions will remain calm, the weather will hold, and the currents will maintain their favor.

In his first attempt, Luis swam for an incredible nine hours. Although the swim ended far short of its goal, it succeeded in raising over $1100 and getting the school breakfast program to its feet. Money raised through the swim purchased not only the materials to build the shelter, but enough food and cooking supplies to feed the school’s 50 children a daily breakfast for the entire school year.

Undaunted by the failed attempt and seeing the results of just one meal a day, Luis decided to try the swim again. The kids sent him back to the ocean, he says. He wanted to give them more opportunity to succeed, to provide lunch for them as well. Much like the first attempt, Luis’ second attempt likewise fell short to rough seas in the bay of Chachagual, where he swam for five hours in the same location unable to overcome the currents. Exhausted after seven hours, he drug himself into the lifeboat and collapsed.

Stung by failure yet again, Luis nevertheless returned to San Felipe with the money for school lunches. The results were amazing. In just a few short months kids were not only returning to school, they were learning and advancing like never before. Not wanting to turn their school into a soup kitchen, teachers in San Felipe knew to treat school meals as a privilege.

The kids have to work for their breakfast and lunch, said Eloisa, one of the teachers I met with in La Crucecita. The lunches are free, but they’re not free. They don’t do their work, they don’t get fed – simple as that.

Likewise, they had similar plans for doling out the school supplies and backpacks from the Rivers of Tomorrow project. All the basics would stay in the school, she said. Kids could obviously take home what they needed for homework, but the majority of it would remain in the classroom. The backpacks however, would go to the kids who both needed and deserved them. They wouldn’t be just presents, said Eloisa, rather rewards for the kids who worked hard.

Along with putting the initial project in motion, Luis’ swim opened the eyes of locals and tourists alike to the poverty that lies just outside the opulent hotels and wide streets of Huatulco. For many, seeing the kids firsthand and Luis’ bold effort was enough for them to pledge money for future projects. Since the beginning of the school breakfast program, several new investments have been made including a sustainable egg and poultry operation, plantain farming, and equipment for a commercial bakery.

Others have donated their time and energy, teaching the children to swim and paint. It is this emotional effort, says Luis that makes perhaps the greatest difference. Kids being free to be kids, feeling like somebody cares about them. Flipping through his photo album, he points again and again to the children’s faces. The collection of pictures is like a graphic timeline of his work in San Felipe. Look at their eyes, he tells me, do you see the changes? I do. They are still the same forlorn gazes from before, but something is different about the recent photos. In four words Luis reveals his greatest reward and says, “they are smiling now,”

Rewards

One thing I’ve learned in doing this project is that the true heroes are the ones striving to make a difference in their own communities. They are the ones with the knowledge and connections to make things happen. They know what’s best for their community, even if they don’t know how to obtain it. More importantly though, local leaders are the ones that local people trust. They have a genuine, long-term interest in their communities. After all, they have to live there.

Relief agencies may come and go. They can provide aid and make life more enjoyable for awhile. But in the end, sustainable progress grows from the community itself. It starts with a change in mentality, a shift toward positive thinking. Ideas grow into actions. Actions grow into changes. Changes in turn, feed more positive thinking.

People have asked me, ‘how did it go?’ ‘How did it feel to drop off the supplies?’ Honestly, I think, it was a little anti-climatic. There were no ceremonies, no speeches. Kids and teachers weren’t falling to their knees saying, ‘thank you, thank you!’ The donations themselves were quiet ordeals. I can’t say I felt much of anything per se, save for the satisfaction of seeing these projects come to completion.

Much more than the supply drop-offs, the real reward of this project was seeing people in action. It was seeing secondary and elementary kids in the States donating piles of their unused stuff. It was schools offering up boxes and boxes of notebooks and printer paper. It was people buying T-shirts and making donations. It was finding out that people actually cared and were willing to act.

I got the same reward seeing all of these things in Oaxaca. Perhaps the greatest thing is seeing how much people can do with so little. How something as simple as free breakfast at school can completely change a child’s outlook. Or how people can take such pride in their land that they refuse to sell it no matter the offer, or how badly they could use the money. For sure, the greatest reward is knowing that there are still heroes out there – everyday people that truly change lives.

Barra de la Cruz

Before arriving in Oaxaca, I never expected to return to Barra de la Cruz. This project was aimed at helping the communities along the rivers of Southern Oaxaca. Barra doesn't rest along any of the rivers that we paddle. It's a seaside village, tucked into a bay about 15km east of Hualtulco. Other than the fact that it had some amazing surf, I knew little about the town or the people that lived there.

My friend Mark and I had visited the town 4 years ago on a whim. Someone in La Crucecita had recommended it for surfing. When we got there we found the beach deserted and the waves simply awesome. Where are all the gringos?, I thought. This place should be packed with surfers. I was sure that Barra had been discovered, and that maybe it was just the off-season. But where was all the evidence? Where was the second-hand board shop? The crappy burrito stand and taco bar run by the tourists that never went home?

Much like the casual visit of four years ago, I came again to this quiet little village by the sea not expecting much of anything. It was more so that my father could swim in the Pacific for the first time in his life and see a beach with no hotels, no houses, no nothing. And just as it did four years ago, Barra completely surprised us.

I was a little worried, frankly. The gringos (and this is not a negative term - I'm a gringo) certainly had found this place by now. The question was: how much damage had been done?

Driving into town though, I had to blink again at the pastures and palms lining the dirt road. The town looked exactly the same. There were no new houses on the hill, no condos for rent, no crappy burrito stands and tourist bars. There were surfers though, a bunch of them.

We ran into Pepe, the mayor of Barra, more or less by accident. In looking for Barra's school, one of the boys at the toll gate had pointed us over to his house. He was busy rewiring an electric fan and looking generally perplexed, when we arrived. Have a seat, he insisted, I need a break from this thing anyway.

For the next hour, our conversation moved from education to land rights to the political organization of Barra itself. In responding to question after question, Pepe tirelessly delivered to us Barra's concepts of its past, present and future. I am convinced a book could easily be written on the vision of this place. The unity and cooperation of the people are truly amazing.

Nowhere is the value system more apparent than in Barra's schools. 30 years ago, the government built the structures for the primary and secondary students. Since then, not a penny of state or federal aid has come from above to maintain them. Yet the buildings are spotless, freshly painted, and equipped with chalkboards, desks, and tables.

Everything we have in the schools, everything we do to maintain them is payed for by our own money, says Pepe. Everyone in the community contributes, he says, it is the only way that we can provide what our children need. Along with health, education is priority number one for Barra's kids. For that reason the community has one of the highest graduation rates not just in Oaxaca, but in all of Mexico.

The success of education in Barra has everything to do with the parents, says Pepe. There's no skipping school to go surfing. This is a small town, he says with a smile, a place where parents always find out.

Still, with all the support from parents and the community, maintaining the quality of education in Barra is no easy task. Teachers must scrape together money for their own supplies. Extras like crayons, notebooks, art materials must all be bought with community funds. The community also has to provide lunch, as there is no (functioning) school lunch program in the area. The secondary school, which houses around 60 kids, is literally falling down. Pepe has three times now petitioned the state for partial funds to help build a new one, all to no avail. So, he says, we'll just have to do it Barra style - save our money , and do it ourselves.

After talking with Pepe and seeing the schools in action, it was truly a no-brainer to decide to donate much of the Rivers of Tomorrow supplies to this community. With the help of the school principal and a few other leaders, we unloaded over 400 pounds of pencils, pens, paper, notebooks, crayons, calculators, and other items into the municipal storeroom. The teachers and principals would sit down that night, Pepe assured us, and decide upon how to distribute the goods.

I assured them that all the supplies were donated, that there were no strings attached and that they could do what they want. I explained how much of it had been sitting around in teacher's closests for years, that it was never going to be used in the States. They couldn't quite believe it. How could you not have a use for all this stuff?

In the end Pepe and the principal took us on a closer tour of the school. We visited a sixth grade class where kids were working on long division. 'They're so well behaved,' my father said after the visit, 'in 33 years of teaching I've never seen kids so respectful.'

'We are different,' said Pepe.

Indeed they are.

15 October: Tuxpan to Huatulco

Huge day of travelling. With an early start we made it to Acayucan by early afternoon. From Acayucan, we turned off on the road across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (the narrow ´waist´of Mexico). Heavy rains had turned the already marginal highway into an all-out 4X4 challenge. For four grueling hours we slammed our way through the craters and potholes, until finally reaching the road to Huatulco shortly after dark. From there we passed another two hours along the winding highway, arriving in La Crucecita in time to catch some late night tacos pastor.

Hola...Saludos de Oaxaca,

Good morning everyone. I hope all is well. 4 days, 2500 miles, 2 dozen tacos, 6 searches by the military, and 10,000 speedbumps later - we´ve arrived in La Crucecita - the base point for our project in Oaxaca. Today we will rest, plan out logistics, and talk with some of the people involved in other aid projects in the region.

I know some of you may be curious about the journey, so here´s a brief recap of the last 4 days.

12 October I left Black Mountain, NC (thanks again Walter - next time though, we´re going trail running) around 9:30 a.m. headed west to meet my friends Larry and Leslie Stewart (picture above) in Knoxville, TN. At a McDonalds just off the interstate we said goodbye, as they made the last donation of school supplies for the season. Thanks again guys.

From Knoxville it was smooth sailing all the way to western Louisiana, where at 1:30 a.m. I stopped for a nap at one of those all-inclusive truck stops (you know, the kind where you can buy fuel, groceries, a shower, maybe even some christmas presents?).



13 October 2008
Houston, TX

Rolled into town this morning ahead of a golden sunrise. Living in the mountains, I often forget about that dynamic hour between dawn and day. By the time the sun peeks over the Appalachians, the day has very much begun. Our only glimpse of sunrise comes in the mountains themselves. We watch the sun awaken in the peaks. We see their tops glow with first light, and their flanks transform in descending waves of color.

On the vast, steamy plains of the Gulf Coast there is nothing to block out the sun. There are no mountains to stand in its way, no hills, no ridges. Before it even breaks the horizon, the sun unleashes an anxious display of color, a display that falls over every field and lake. In the mountains only a few fortunate peaks ever witness this daily event. In the plains however, they watch it from every corner.

I picked up my father at the airport and from there turned south, toward Brownsville and the border. The miles ticked by, as like it rose in the morning, the sun sank slowly in the sky.

Picture: waiting for the train outside of Corpus Christi, TX

14 October 2008 Tuxpan, Mexico.

Big Day. We made it through the border with little trouble from the authorities. At the control station 25 km south of Matamoros, the customs official waved us over for the first of several inspections. He asked the usual questions (where are you going, what are you doing, do you have any guns, any bullets?), but released us without a hassle.

We sped through the endless plains of Tamaulipas Province. Driving across Northern Mexico, it´s easy to be misled by the smooth pavement and easy driving. ´This could be anywhere in the U.S.´, I think, until we pass a pair of stick-and-mud shacks leaning against the wind, an old man sitting in the dirt patching holes in a tire.

The fantasy fully vaporized at the border of Veracruz state, when we entered Mexico`s flagship highway repair project. Cars, trucks, and double-length trailers all crowded the crumbling highway headed south to Veracruz.

The topes began.

´Tope´is spanish for speedbump, and they are everywhere in Mexico. Topes guard every town, every village, every bus stop and show no quarter to those who try to deny them. Speedbumps in the States, like the kind you find in a Target parking lot or an elementary school, might jolt your car a bit if you take them too fast. They might even bunny-hop it. Mexican speedbumps will send it airborne without a muffler. They`ll destroy the shocks, gut the undercarriage, and even crack the transfer case if you´re not careful. Topes will drive you mad with their excess, their inconsistency. They´ll make you crave the potholes and craters of the open highway. They´ll force you to utter curses that might never be repented. But there is no escaping the tope. The tope conquers all.

So yeah...we went a little crazy from the speedbumps, but no less reached the day`s goal of Tuxpan, Veracruz. Here is a view of the sunrise in Tuxpan:

Supplies are pouring in!

Supplies are in from the schools that participated in the Oaxaca project! A big thanks goes out to all the kids, teachers, and parents who donated their time, money, and energy into providing the materials for children to go to school. You’ve shown that everyday people can make a difference. Here are some photos of the classes that participated:

James Buchanan High School spanish students collected an assortment of notebooks, binders, and folders from their own closets to donate to schools in Mexico.


Teacher Natalie Campbell said about the project, "it was wonderful for the kids to see something real. Many of the speakers we have in foreign language courses just give the usual tourist's view of a country." The slideshow not only illustrated what life is like in other places she said, but also made them realize just how lucky they are to live where they do.


Students from the Mercersburg Academy's Community Services and Outdoor Programs came up with loads of their own school items, much of them badly needed art supplies like crayons, markers, and scissors. One faculty member even donated his old computer!





Pictured here are students Erin McKenna, Mark Herring, and Community Services Director David Bell.





And finally, second graders from Hamilton Heights Elementary in Chambersburg, PA gathered a giant box of notebooks, folders, and construction paper. (My back still hurts from hauling that thing out!).




Keep smiling!

With most of the supplies in, it's time to organize the long journey south. A huge thanks again to everyone who gave their energy to this project. It's been incredibly inspiring. You've shown what a difference the little things can make.

T-shirts are here!

Rivers Of Tomorrow T-shirts are here, and they're going fast! Here's a glimpse at one initial reaction to the design:

This guy is smiling because for $20 he not only got a T-shirt, but also purchased enough pencils, paper, and crayons to last 3 children for one school year.

If you're interested in purchasing one for yourself and sharing a smile, you can do so by contacting me at brian.e.snyder@gmail.com