From Chiapas...

We arrived in San Cristobal de las Casas, a town at about 7700 ft in the center of the state of Chiapas, after flight to Tuxla Gutierrez and taxi through the winding mountain roads. Soon after leaving the large city of Tuxla we were in hills that looked like the dry Sierra foothills of California, with different kinds of pines and cedars. Corn is planted on the steep slopes, women and young children in walk along the roads carrying wood or backpacks from school. Immediately we notice the bright woven cloth of the women and girl´s dress, each color and design signifying a different village or community or language group. ¨Curvos peligrosos¨ read the signs, every mile or so, and our driver has to slow down because I (no surprise here) am getting woozey. We pass small communities with more traditional mud brick houses and tile roofs, and newer homes made of the cinder block and aluminum roofing that is so common. Stretching in a valley below us, we see what look like large warehouses, actually greenhouses of frame and plastic where many local flowers are grown for market (like the calla lilies of Riveras murals...). As we enter San Cristobal I am amazed to see the population is over 100,000 (I had thought much smaller) and that there is an SUV next to us at the traffic light with Minnesota plates and a canoe on top! This is our first indication that we are not actually at the end of the world, and that in fact, we are in a place that is known especially throughout Europe and Latin America as a popular eco-tourist destination. The center of the city is filled with narrow, cobble-stoned streets and homes, shops, small hotels that are all connected with one block-long facade. Many have interior patios and courtyards, as does the hotel Casa Margarita where we are now staying. Rooms are simple, a bit small and rustic, but clean and adequate. It is a relief not to be fighting the night-time mosquitos (how much "Deet" is really good for you, I wonder...) and heat of Puerto Escondido. We are several blocks from the town "zocalo," the plaza where their are government buildings and a gazebo in the center where we hear live marimba music in the early evening. SC has 22 churches, and the one in the center has a large plaza in front of it where the Sandinistas arrived and held forth back in ´94. There has been no visible military force evident in town until yesterday, when we spotted a big green humvee with several soldiers near the zocalo, and noticed a big crowd in front of the church. A taxi driver told us it was a special saint day but he couldn´t say which (or my Spanish was too limited!), but after talking with a young waiter later in the day I learned that it was the national ¨Dia del Banderia," Flag Day, and the schools were out. The teachers of the region had come to SC for a large demonstration against the governments current push to privatize all education in the country. The waiter explained that the private schools are of better quality and there are more of them, and the government wants to farm-out the rest of education, which the public school teachers obviously don´t want. There was another rally later in the day, as I walked back to our hotel, with banners and speeches (the speaker spoke "muy rapido" - I could only make our a few words like better education, parents, teachers, children as I walked by. We have learned that many of the indegenous local people feel that classroom education is only a small part of their children´s necessary education needs, and that learning about their indegenous Mayan culture, religious rituals, spirituality and history is at least as important as ABC´s. The other very interesting piece here is the impact of ¨evangelicos¨ from the US who began coming here in the 1950s, started a language institute to translate Bibles and have caused quite an uproar in the indegenous communities. Converts are basically cast out of their communities, and have drifted into town where they no longer have the strong community connections of their pueblos. What is really disturbing is that many of these evangelicos are now converting to fundamentalist Islam....which is not surprizing if you feel uprooted and disconnected without community in a city of 100,000. One of our guides (when we went to Chamula, which we will describe later) informed us that these Islamic fundamentalists are coming from Spain, obviously speaking Spanish and appealing to these people. He said that he believed that this will become quite problematic for the city in the future. This all reminds me of Karen Armstrong´s insightful book, ¨The Battle for God,¨ in which she compares the common authoritarianism and ¨black-white¨ thinking of fundamentalist Christianity, Judaism and Islam. We hope to add more later...think we have located a wifi site where we can add photos, as I am on our hotels computer and can´t download our pictures from our laptop. We are doing well, are overwhelmed by the beauty and complexity of this region (I´m ready to keep going, and board a bus to Guatemala!) and feeling so blessed to be on the journey together.

-ASG