Week 2: Flexible Learning

-Mérida


Before left for Mexico, I was warned to expect the unexpected when working with a Latin American non-governmental organization. Initially, I thought this meant, "Be prepared for things like last-minute changes of plan, walking alone in the rain through flooded city streets while searching for a cab home, and digestive dystopia." While all of this may have already happened in the last week, I did not expect to have to rethink the entire purpose of why I am here.  


After settling down in the city of Mérida last week, I began working with NyC's environmental education team on their water conservation project. After the first two days of simply observing their staff give presentations about water conservation to students at an elementary school, I realized it was going to be a lot harder than I expected to do what I came here wanting to do: make a real and immediate difference by taking kids out into nature and showing them beauty waiting to be discovered. It finally hit me that because of various logistical reasons I wasn't going to get to do this until the middle of July, at the earliest.


Fortunately, that same day I met with Barbara MacKinnon, bird conservation legend in the Yucatán Peninsula. Barbara has been working in the Yucatán for over 40 years and possibly has more on-the-ground conservation experience than anyone else here. She is a true conservationist. Although she has conducted some bird population surveys, she quickly denies that she is a scientist. Chatting with her I quickly learned that we share many of the same frustrations with the limiting mindset of "pure science". Given her extensive background, she was the perfect person to express my summer concerns to. Among many things, Barbara reminded me that it is important to observe before doing but it is also up to me to take the initiative to do the things I want to do. She also told me that the most important thing I can do here is show local people their worth by bringing out the knowledge of nature they already have and showing them it is valuable. 

Students eager to answer a question about water conservation

The next two days I went with NyC to the rural village of Dzununcam to help conduct interviews with the landowners about their water use and contamination. While this type of work isn't why I came to Mexico, in these two days I feel like I gained more insight on Latin American conservation than I have in two years at Cornell. Throughout my travels in Latin America I have driven by dozens of poor villages like Dzununcam, but this was the first time I have spent hours walking through the streets, going into people's farms and houses, and actually talking to them. I wish I had photos to show exactly what this place is like, but bringing a camera would have been inappropriate so for now I'll play reporter.


The first man we interviewed went on a ten-minute rant about the government after we asked if he received any governmental support for his farm. He explained how he has seen over and over how political candidates come and visit his village, promise change and support, and then never return. He believes that the government is unfair and corrupt has no intention of helping people like him. The third person we interviewed was a man from Mérida who runs a tiny (and disgusting) pig farm in Dzununcam. While at first he tried to turn us away by saying he had work to do, after just a few questions he was showing us around his property and talking his head off about his problems. His place is absolutely revolting. In addition to the mountains of junk and garbage piled everywhere, the place reeks of pig feces. I looked into his well, the thing that we were there to interview him about, and saw that the shallow, black puddle at the bottom was moving, literally squirming with thousands of some kind of larvae. He brought us into his house, which is a dark shack extremely cluttered with rusty, damp, molding, and crusty things everywhere. Like the previous man, he receives no support from the government and angrily asserts that the government only cares about tax-generating people who work for large businesses. The rest, like him, are nothing more than animals to the government. Yet while he believes that the government looks down on him, he as well looks down with racism at the indigenous people of this village, calling them "indios salvages", savage indians, who have nothing better to do than go out and hunt wild animals. While we were trying to ask him about things like water contamination, he just couldn't stop telling us about how these "indians" are sabotaging his farm by poisoning his pigs and stealing his fish. He also sees them regularly going out to hunt birds, anteaters, and even Oncillas, a rare and threatened feline.


The place I have just described is actually part of an ecological reserve. If you have never lived in Latin America, you may not realize the disturbing lack of law enforcement there. It is not uncommon, I've found, for natural reserves to be heavily developed, deforested, and exploited. Three of the five people we interviewed didn't even know of the reserve they were living in. While declaring a forest a State Park in the U.S. may be enough to save it and its wildlife from destruction, I am starting to understand why it will not in Mexico. In countries like Mexico, it is more important than ever to collaborate with local communities to come up with solutions that benefit both people and nature. Otherwise neither will succeed in the long run. 


This seems like an extremely hard thing to do. While I do believe that nature is essential to people, it's hard at times to see how to make the two work together. Granted, I have interviewed very small number of people, but most of them have seemed far too focused on their worries to ever care about nature. I don't know how to describe it exactly, but as soon as I look one of these people in the eye and began to listen to them, it feels overwhelmingly impossible to try to get them to care about nature. They just have too much else to worry about.


Which is why I wanted to work with kids. Even in these villages, they are generally happy and outgoing. It was quite a curveball to realize that I'm not going to work with them as much as I thought I would this summer, but I am learning to make the most of this as a learning experience. The biggest change is that for at least half of the summer I will be just learning, instead of teaching and learning. But the things I'm learning are extremely important to my future in conservation. I have learned that rural people will not trust people like politicians who do not understand them. For that reason I am happy to continue working in Dzununcam while learning about the common issues in rural Latin America firsthand, in addition to gathering information in order to solve these problems. Don't worry, I'm still going to try to make a plan this week to organize my own birding trips for kids next week.

 -E.B.

Photo slideshow of the elementary school we went to in Mérida: www.ebarrientos.smugmug.com/merida

Photo highlights from last weekend in Celestún:

White-lored Gnatcatcher

 Mexican Sheartail, a Mexican endemic