South for the Summer

It has been quite a year since my last blog. Here's a short recap to place you back into my head before we continue my journey together: My last adventure brought me to Guatemala via a 3500 mile bicycle ride through Mexico. Despite the travel warnings and the media reports, I found Mexico to be a beautiful land with amazingly kind people, as vast and diverse as my own country the United States of America. Once in Guatemala, I soon discovered that my search for a vocation of justice for the indigenous in that country would take me back to my own country. I realized just how much United States' culture, society, and international economic policy has had (and continues to have) an effect on countries throughout the world - some for the good, some for the bad. This realization drove me to believe that by furthering justice in my own country's society and policies, I could have much more of an effect on other countries throughout the world. This realization is not such a new thought, after all - how many proverbs, secular and spiritual alike, speak to the transformation of the self leading to the transformation of all things outside the self? It starts with me, then my family, then my community, then my city, then my nation, then the world.
Nine months at University of San Diego's Kroc School of Peace Studies has furthered the transformation occurring inside me. I now have have a file cabinet inside my head with labels and dividers for the experiences that I witnessed during the several years previous. What I have learned about the pursuit of peace over violence, both overt and structural, and different theories of what 'justice' is or can be, has had its obvious worldly connotations, but it has also had its effect on the way I live my life. Striving to continue learning just what it means to be human, connected to all other humans and tied to the land off of which we live, I embark on an internship for twelve weeks this summer to the land of the Maya - Chiapas, Mexico. I will be living, working, and researching with a cooperative of coffee farmers, Maya Vinic, that has been striving for social justice and development in their own communities in the highlands north of San Cristobal de Las Casas.
The 'Bicycle Diaries' continues this summer, once again recording the various experiences and reflections I am having during this transformation. You will notice a couple new links on the right of the blog page. One allows you to enter your email address so that you will be notified whenever I create a new post. I have also condensed all the photos from previous trips into one link, where you will be able to explore those photos, and any new photos I snap from the field. Under the link "I'm Following" you will be able to find the links to the blogs of my classmates, who are striving for the same principles of peace and justice through different means in places all over the world, from Palestine to Uganda to Liberia to Ecuador to Nepal to India to Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland, and more. Enjoy all the stories and adventures as we go out to practice all of the new theories and skills we have learned over the past year, and keep a prayer in your heart for the safety of everyone as they pursue noble goals in the face of conflict and contention.
Until Mexico...