the map's edge - spring 2015

6.

THE CALL TO

ADVENTURE

Out of the

Ordinary, Into the

Extraordinary

by COLETTE PLUM

8.

ENGAGING THE

UNKNOWN

Bewildered,

Humbled & Alone

in the Shadowlands

by ELIZABETH JOHNSON

10.

GAUNTLET OF

TRIALS

Seeds of Resistance:

The Chico Mendes

Reforestation Project

by ARMANDO POCOL

12.

REVELATION &

TRANSFORMATION

Photo Gallery:

Images from an

Unvanquished World

by REBECCA BURNS

16.

THE RETURN

Wanderlust, Home

& the Web of

Interconnectedness

by CHRISTINA RIVERA COGSWELL

18.

REINTEGRATION

Reverse Culture

Shock: Blindness,

Super-Vision & the

Unconscious Mind

by JASON PATENT

IN THIS EDITION: THE HERO’S JOURNEY

SPRING 2015

Global citizenship and leadership programs in the developing world since 1993

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2 THE MAP’S EDGE SPRING 2015

THE CALL TO ADVENTURE

The hero begins in a

mundane situation of normality

from which some information

is received that acts as a call to

head off into the unknown.

ENGAGING THE UNKNOWN

The moment when

the hero crosses into

the field of adventure,

leaving the known

limits of their own

world, and ventures

into a realm where

the customs and limits

are unfamiliar.

THE GAUNTLET OF TRIALSA series of tests or ordeals that the hero

undergoes to begin transformation.

Often the hero fails at one or more of

the tests, but ultimately perseveres.

TRANSFORMATIONThe hero achieves

the ultimate goal of

the quest, such as

finding the elixir

of life or attaining

enlightenment. All

the previous steps

serve to prepare and

purify the hero for

this moment.

TRANSFERENCEThe hero escapes

with the boon and

often encounters

difficulty with the

newfound knowledge.

It can be just as

adventurous and

dangerous returning

from the journey as

it was to begin.

THE RETURNUpon returning, the hero must retain the

wisdom gained on the quest, integrate that

wisdom back into their life, and share the

newfound wisdom with the rest of the world.

REINTEGRATIONHaving found balance between the

temporal and spiritual, the transcendental

hero is now comfortable and competent in

both the inner and outer worlds.

REVELATIONA spiritual death that evokes a state of

divine knowledge, love, compassion and

bliss within the hero. Alternatively, this stage

can be a period of rest, peace or fulfillment

before the hero begins the return.

the hero’s

journey

This edition of The Map’s Edge is a literary mosaic designed to illustrate Joseph Campbell’s model of the Hero’s Journey. Each article represents a “stage” of the journey and is drawn from the experiences

of our contributors. We hope that by sharing their tales of adventure, you might find parallels and inspiration in your own journey. As Campbell wrote, “Opportunities to find deeper powers within

ourselves come when life seems most challenging.” Let the journey begin.

departure

the return

initiation

3WWW.WHERETHEREBEDRAGONS.COM

words by CHRIS YAGER

A LETTER FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

CHRIS YAGER is the Founder and Executive Director of Where There Be Dragons. After graduating from Bowdoin College with a degree in Asian

Studies, he worked with Colorado Outward Bound for several years before launching Dragons as a 25-year-old and leading the first courses in China and

Tibet. Having worked with over 1,000 field instructors, Chris has been closely involved with the design of Dragons’ curriculum, in-country programming

and new program development.

is a guy I knew only briefly, but one who changed my life.

I don’t know a lot about his story. I know that he was an outlier from an early age,

a Beat before there were Beats, a wanderer. I know that after World War II, he smuggled cigarettes between Europe and Libya.

I know that he became an accomplished race car driver. I know that he spent time in India, and

that he was transformed by learnings that he picked up there. I know that sometime in the 1950s, he found his calling as a teacher.

I subsequently read that Jerry Garcia, guitarist for the Grateful Dead and an icon of his era, considered him the most impactful mentor in his life. His name was Dwight Johnson, and when I met him I was a 17-year-old like any other. And then I was transformed because this teacher, whose class was loosely titled

“Ideas,” opened a door to mysticism, to the notion that the hu-man experience could be a bold adventure in search of mean-ing—a Hero’s Journey.

In Dwight Johnson’s class, we read sacred texts and legends from around the world. We read stories of daring self-exploration, and of finding meaning in unimaginably dark experiences. I don’t recall ever being asked by Dwight to find a “true” or conventionally accepted interpretation of a primary document; rather Dwight would ask us to explore a writing’s deeper meaning on personal levels; to consider a writing’s impact on our own psyches, on our own definitions of self.

A hero’s journey begins with a question, “Who am I, and why do I matter?” Dwight Johnson gave his students the permission to ask this question. He provided a space and a true guru’s talent for deftly allowing his students to go deep with the material without throwing up roadblocks of judgment and criticism. We were allowed to consider the existence of a higher self and then to have a conversation with that self, undaunted.

Years later, while visiting a Dragons semester course in India, a holy man said to me, “It’s wonderful what you’re doing here, providing a spiritual boot-camp for adolescents.” I had

never thought of our work this way, but at that moment I saw the truth in his words: we were providing an opportunity for students to develop a relationship with their spiritual selves. Hearing those words, on the banks of the Ganges, I thought of the teacher who had shown me at 17 years old that the best educators teach not only to the head, but also to the heart.

Since beginning work on Dragons in 1993, I have had the privilege of working with educators who, like Dwight, have sparked students to begin their own hero’s journeys. Ben Bogin, Shannon Clements, Stew Motta, Luis Alverado, and many others have helped every one of their students see in themselves their greatest selves, their highest potentials, their hero-selves… they have helped their students imagine and undertake their own personal journeys. They are educators who awaken, who inspire, who give to their students the greatest gift imaginable: they cultivate in their students an understanding that at their highest selves, they can be anything.

Like the class and the mentor who set me on my path as a 17-year-old, Dragons as a medium and our instructors as guides engender in our students the confidence to begin the long and arduous journey to becoming their hero-selves. Dwight Johnson started me on my hero’s journey. The educators with whom we work inspire me and countless others to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to walk a path that is epic and hard and honest and true.

—Chris Yager

my personal hero

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NOTES FROM AROUND THE WORLD

It takes courage to admit you are wrong, or scared, or out of line, and it takes courage to embark on unknown things, big or small. It was on this trip that I realized how courageously cowardly I’d been all along.MARGARET WENG Los Angeles, CA

Courage: To face the known, the unknown and the un-knowable with equanimity and compassion.OLIVER CREECH Burlington, VT

Courage is exploring your discomforts, trusting your discoveries and laying your ignorance to rest.JON WEXLER Philadelphia, PA

Courage means witnessing a lofty wave, recognizing it may inundate you, but gallantly walking toward it nonetheless.JORGE MEJIA Bronx, NY

WHAT IS COURAGE? We sent a questionnaire asking Dragons alumni to “define courage.” Here are a few responses:

The Elders is an independent group of peacemakers, peace builders, pioneering women and social revolutionaries dedicated to using their collective experi-ence and influence to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. They no longer hold public office and are indepen-dent of any national government or other vested interest. The group was chaired by Nelson Mandela until his death in 2013.

5 JIMMY CARTER United States

Former President of the United States, Nobel Peace Laureate, veteran peace negotiator

6 GRO BRUNDTLAND Norway

First female Prime Minister of Norway, Deputy Chair of The Elders

7 FERNANDO CARDOSO Brazil

Former President of Brazil, acclaimed sociologist, advocate for drug policy reform

8 HINA JILANI Pakistan

Pioneering lawyer, pro-de-mocracy campaigner, leader of Pakistan’s women’s movement

9 ERNESTO ZEDILLO Mexico

Former President of Mexico, economist, advocate of multi-lateralism

10 MARY ROBINSON Ireland

First female President of Ire-land, former UN High Com-missioner for Human Rights

11 GRACA MACHEL Mozambique

First Education Minister of Mozambique, advocate for women’s and children’s rights

1 MARTTI AHTISAARI Finland

Former President of Finland, Nobel Peace Laureate, interna-tional peace mediation expert

2 KOFI ANNAN Ghana

Former UN Secretary-General, Nobel Peace Laureate, Chair of The Elders

3 ELA BHATT India

The “gentle revolutionary,” founder of the Self-Employed Women’s Association in India

4 LAKHDAR BRAHIMI Algeria

Algerian freedom fighter, For-eign Minister, conflict media-tor, UN diplomat

GLOBAL ELDERS

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HEROES UNDER 20 “When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful.” MALALA YOUSAFZAI

Krishna, our main teacher, is a chill, charismatic 22-year-old who recently completed a perma-culture course in Jordan with one of the top permaculture scientists in the world. Growing up on a farm and learning from his father, Krishna seems to already be a master of his field. However, he was not always like this. He was homeless for a few years after he decided to drop out of high school. Between begging, manual farm labor and a lot of personal growth, he realized that “Krish-na-style” permaculture was his true calling. His family welcomed him back in to help further develop the farm and toy with new systems of permaculture to increase efficiency and output, the way nature does it. Pak Iskandar, Krishna’s father, is the kind of person that mesmerizes an entire audience with just one spoken word. His wisdom and perspective on the world through a natural and spiritual kaleidoscope captured us students for hours and hours of lecture discussion. He often compared permaculture to a religion, and showed us how traditional principles of Islam related to sustainable living. One of my favorite quotes from him was “Live as nature lives. Remember, it is often smarter than you are.”

FELIX FINKBEINER Germany

Felix, the 17-year-old Harry Potter look-alike, has planted more than four million trees with his international orga-

nization Plant for the Planet, a global network of child

activists who aim to mitigate climate change by reforest-

ing the planet. Inspired by Kenyan Nobel Prize recipient, Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt

Movement, Felix started his organization as a school proj-

ect when he was nine years old. Today, Plant for the Plan-et works in 131 countries and

employs 12 staff members.

MALALA YOUSAFZAI Pakistan

17-year-old Malala Yousafzai became the youngest recipi-ent of the Nobel Peace Prize

in 2014 for the simple and unrepentant act of attending school. In the days after the

Taliban prohibited music,

television and female educa-tion, Malala published a blog about life under in Pakistan’s

occupied Swat Valley and began advocating for female education.

She was subsequently targeted by Taliban gunmen and shot in the head while waiting to board a school bus. She survived and

has become a symbol of courage for millions of girls worldwide.

WILLIAM KAMKWAMBA Malawi

William came to the attention of the world after building a

makeshift wind turbine in his village in Malawi. Due to severe

famine in 2001, William was forced to drop out of school at

the age of 14. But with the help of a textbook with a picture of a wind turbine on the front cover, he built a windmill to power his

family’s home out of a broken bicycle, tractor fan blade, old

shock absorber, and blue gum trees. He has since authored

a book entitled The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.

CASSANDRA LIN United States

Cassandra Lin is an inspiring social entrepreneur from Rhode Island, USA. At

the age of ten Cassandra Lin initiated the project Turn Grease

Into Fuel, which collects waste cooking oil from residents

and restaurants to turn it into biofuel. The biofuel is then

distributed to families with a low income who cannot afford

heating. She has since partnered with hundreds of restaurants

to turn waste oil into biodiesel, benefiting low-income families

all across the region.

YAK YAK words by BRAD BOLLER, Indonesia Semester


words and images by COLETTE PLUM

THE CALL TO ADVENTURE

nodded as our chief doctor declared, with no diagnosis but with certain prognosis, “We will make you pregnant; you just may need a little extra help.” Double strollers with fertility twins were hip in our San Francisco neighborhood. Medical intervention was the known path, the popular path, to 30-something parenthood.

Adoption was another avenue—appar-ently most people’s second choice—and one I believed I was open to. But when we went to adoption information nights we grew dizzy with the details: the paperwork and fees, the indefinite waits, the uncer-tain outcomes. And the choices: Domestic? International? Open adoption or closed? It seemed prohibitive to graduate students on research stipends, and the pencil-push-ing alone felt more daunting than our research and teaching combined.

When I mentioned to my dissertation advisor that I was considering adoption, he gaped at me, stunned, “Getting pregnant while you’re still young is one thing, but adoption? Can’t you wait to do that later?” Apparently birthing babies is what young grad students do: it’s “natural” and it’s romantic. Adopting children is what tenured professors do: it’s practical and it’s prudent.

a talismanThere were babies at weddings, and I played with one, Toby, child of Dragons instructors, Charlotte and Brad. For a day and a night and the morning that followed, I confided in Charlotte about my affliction. As we parted at the beach in Gearhart, Oregon, she spontaneously slipped a ring on my finger: a thick silver band that held a smooth red garnet. “It has healing properties,” she said. “Just rub it,” she said. “You are not alone.”

I wanted to know that the ring could do something. From the internet I harvested hope about the healing

properties of garnets. I mined commercial gem sites for action words to string together: “relieves depression,” “stops hemorrhaging and heals wounds.” I touched Charlotte’s garnet on my finger and imagined it flushing out some undiagnosed ailment, allowing me the effortless option of a “surprise” pregnancy. But each month hope hemorrhaged with a renewed cycle of wait and want.

the call to adventureIt was an historically windy day in San Francisco. My husband, an extreme weather addict from Montana, convinced me to meet the gale with him at the coast. While he and our friend, Ed, fired a frisbee at one another in 30 MPH winds, I set off alone down Ocean Beach.

Like many seasoned Dragons participants, I took a pit stop in the dunes. But this was not just any pit stop. The brute wind whipped sand all around me, nearly overpowering me, leaving me with little control—my hair lashed my face, my eyes watered and wept, my most sensitive exposed skin prickled and stung as I quickly squatted, urine blowing everywhere. Months of fertility treatment had rendered me vulnerable in countless intrusive ways. But this wind was more than intrusive; it blew violently. And I felt thoroughly humiliated in the face of forces beyond my control.

But afterwards, when I could look around me with my hair tucked under my hood and my clothing tightly cinched, I began to marvel at the immensity of the winds howling round me. Pearly jade sea foam skated in airy tufts across the billowing sands. The ocean beyond rushed towards me, white and roiling.

I threw my arms wide and leaned into the force that I had feared, moments before, would bowl me over. Instead of being knocked flat, I found my weight supported. I stood alone and faced the

remapping our worldEver since I was a child, I knew that one day I would be a mother. I knew this with the same certainty I knew that, after months of school, there would always be summer, or that on my next birthday there would be cake and can-dles. I skipped along on a path towards “Parent-hood”—a long season and a peopled location. My children would be tow-headed and long-limbed, a boy and a girl. And so it was mapped.

out of the ordinary Until it wasn’t. Until we actually tried, month after month with open hearts and an open womb, and there were still no signs of a baby. The other babies started coming instead: the neighbors’ babies, our siblings’ babies, our best friends’ babies, and all those babies in markets and in restaurants and snuggled against the breasts of pedestrians on city sidewalks. And what had begun as a gentle and certain longing turned into a full-blown affliction, a ceaseless and painful gnawing—a child-hunger.

There was an ordinary route out of this affliction. My husband, Jason, and I were grad students in the Bay Area, with good insurance and access to some of the best fertility doctors in the world. After a round of tests at the Stanford clinic, residents smiled over the promising numbers, declared us “fertile,” and


COLETTE PLUM is a former Dragons instructor (China ’98-’01) and a China historian (Ph.D., Stanford University). She and her husband, Dragons co-

instructor Jason Patent, have recently relocated with their daughters back to the Bay Area from Nanjing, China.

vast sea head-on as the wind rushed over the Pacific and swaddled me in a soft deafness. And within this deep calm, I felt a tremendous presence, the quickening of another life and of a new kind of knowing.

This baby I sought was not of me, or from me. It would come from somewhere I could not yet imagine. I might have to choose the uphill trek to find her, but I was already connected to this soul who would blow into our lives and our home in ways we could not control. Something had beckoned, and I would move towards this.

The wind came from the Pacific. I had felt this presence when I faced towards China. I drove home alone—Jason would be returning with Ed. I wanted to bask in this new knowing, this fullness of anticipation.

balking at the callI resolved, as I drove, that despite the uncertainty and the costs and the possibility of being blacklisted by my advisors, we would start the international adoption process. Parking the car, I instinctively moved to touch the garnet on my finger. My fingers were white and cold and trembling. I froze. The ring was gone. I told myself not to panic. I checked my clothing, my pockets, the car seat. I went in the apartment and checked the shelf by the shower. And then, it hit me. I had removed my gloves during my pit stop in the dunes; perhaps the ring had slipped off with them. I checked my pockets, my gloves: no ring. Leaden, I returned to the car and wept. Was this a sign that I would never become pregnant? In saying yes to adoption had I unwittingly closed off other options? I began to doubt what I had known to be certain, to turn my back on that presence in the wind. The path to

adoption seemed so arduous—too long, too expensive, and way beyond my control. And now the ring was gone.

the call, againI drove back to the beach along wide grey streets, darkled by long shadows of doubt. When I arrived, Jason and Ed were on their egress and puzzled at my reappear-ance. Ed offered to help me look for the ring; Jason cautioned me that this was a long shot. They had spent the last 30 min-utes digging out their lost frisbees. By now

the ring would be deep in the sand.I led them to my pit stop, wishing

the roaring wind would drown out Ed’s musings that maybe the loss of the ring meant that I was pregnant and no longer needed it. No, the wind assaulted me, I thought. It stole from me my hope.

We arrived at the dunes and starting sifting handfuls of sand, the wind raging around us. Runnels of grains fell through our fingers scoop after scoop, dig after dig.

It was up to me to call the whole thing off, but I was catatonic. Finally I was standing and watching Jason and Ed, nearly resigned, when Jason rose and held his hands out towards me like he was carrying an injured bird. And there was Charlotte’s ring, the stone darker than

I’d ever seen it, set in a whirl of sand and wind.

I knew I wasn’t pregnant. But I also knew I needed to risk losing the ordinary to say yes to the extraordinary. To open my arms and lean into the wind, to choose what others have marked on the map as the uphill trek.

The next week I got a letter from Fulbright, offering me a fellowship to do my research in Sichuan, China. And 6 months later, without our being aware, our newborn daughter was found in the early morning hours, in Chongqing, Sich-uan, a half day’s drive from where Jason and I would live. She was brought to an orphanage to be cared for until she was matched with us, our adoption expedited because we were now living locally. Her sister joined us two years later, also first orphaned, also Chinese.

Our family of four has flown across the Pacific together more times than I can count or remember—global nomads, with grazing lands on both continents. Our feet are planted on both sides of the Pacific in ways I never could have imagined when I had first longed for a child.

A garnet ring given as a talisman from a friend, gale forces sweeping a beach, a disembodied presence carried in the wind. This is the stuff of myths, of dreams. But to make it thus, I first had to say yes to a trans-Pacific wind that would launch our trans-Pacific family on a journey that I could not have charted.

Sometimes the cartographers are wrong. They accurately measure the dis-tance and grade, but the map doesn’t fore-tell the fellow travelers we’ll meet along the way, the ones who bring their stories and their aid. And the surprising detours, the deep valleys, the extraordinary vistas hidden beyond the margins.

“I knew I wasn’t pregnant. But I also knew I needed to risk losing the ordinary to say yes to the extraordinary.”


words by ELIZABETH JOHNSON, image by CALEB BROOKS


If I had fully entertained the thoroughness of the unknown, I never would have boarded that first plane to India. On the other hand, I couldn’t stay home and leave the world up to my imagination. I was encouraged to pon-der the dangers, all the reasons why a 21-year-old female should not embark on such a foolish journey. I was cautioned, “It is not safe.” And then warned, “There is so much that can happen out there that is beyond your control! The rawness of it all will kill you.” And yet, I had to get on that plane. When I looked in the mirror to question whether there was an inkling of insanity informing my decision to leave, I knew there was no going back. There was a look in my eyes that told me I had made some sort of bargain with myself and was taking a blind leap into my own shadow territory.

Webster’s defines shadow as “a dark area or shape produced by a body coming between rays of light and surface.” Culturally, we are taught that light is good. It is our friend. It is predictable. In light-filled spaces we can see clearly. We know where we stand and whom we are standing next to. We are confident in saying, “I know.” But in shadow territo-ries our “I know” quickly morphs into an “I don’t know,” or an “I can’t see, I don’t understand.” This inability to see, to place, to cognitively compartmentalize makes us frustrated and appre-hensive. We are less capable of making immediate assumptions. We become vulnerable and exposed to discomfort. We are made to think that this is bad.

into the shadowlands

“Through a willingness to sit in the unknown, in the dark, we demonstrate a level of both

vulnerability and courage that promotes compassion and acceptance for those around us.”


ELIZABETH JOHNSON is an expert in the field of community planning and non-profit management and a longtime Dragons instructor (Andes

& Amazon` ‘07, Visions of India ‘12 & ’13). She is currently based in Bend, OR, where she coordinates Dragons’ Princeton Bridge Year partnership

programs.

words by ELIZABETH JOHNSON, image by CALEB BROOKS


With a little bit of probing, we find examples the world over of the hero’s journey. In this voyage, whether it be explored through myth, art, storytelling, or performed ritual, the hero is encouraged, forced or willingly embarks on a crossing into an unknown landscape. The point of this embarkation is to become disoriented, to make a descent into the dark underworld, to grow uncomfortable and humbled, and to then formulate a personal understanding of one’s own resiliency.

So why do the majority of the people we know feel exempt from this process? Why does it feel unattainable? Why don’t we live out our own hero’s journey? Why is the unknown looked upon as a place of defeat and something to be avoided? Unfor-tunately for us, we live in a culture that has tried to clinicalize, euthanize and sterilize the innate rawness out of life. We have bought into the argument that things are supposed to feel good, not scary. Life ought to feel controlled, predictable and agree-able. We have perpetuated this assumption to the point where living things are not even supposed to die. Instead of honest ex-changes that reveal the complexity of our humanness and give voice to the internal impulses that beg for a proper descent, we are reminded to stay safe, to only seek, or dig, or journey so far.

Ironically, shadow is an essential element that inspires hu-man connection. It is the reason we can walk into a rural fishing village in Indonesia or Senegal and look strangers in the eye and feel a sense of compassion. “I too am searching,” we say. “I too have suffered and asked big questions and sometimes come up short.” Through a willingness to sit in the unknown, in the dark, we demonstrate a level of both vulnerability and courage that promotes compassion and acceptance for those around us.

Daniel Siegel, a neuropsychiatrist from UCLA, uses nature as a way to teach us about our own personal resiliency. He argues that organisms that are skilled at integrating a complexity of experiences and outside influences into their core function have the most robust and vital systems. Through exposure to a

combination of both challenging and supportive stimulants and experiences, one sees an advancement of flexibility, adaptability, coherence, energy and stability in an organism. It’s interesting to apply this to the hero’s journey. For one could contend that personal vitality and resiliency are actually dependent upon and fed off of a conversation with the “shadow.” A turning towards indigestible or uncomfortable encounters might actually make each of us more of a hero, both physiologically and emotionally.

Travel is not the only way to take this journey, but it is, inarguably, a potent path. In getting on that plane to India in my 21st year, I had to agree to sit in a place of for-eignness and lose all of my internal points of reference. By eating unidentifiable food, working in the midst of stomach-churning and heartrending poverty, traveling on long 72-hour train rides, I slowly began peeling back the layers of what I knew to be “me” and losing myself to a new and eventually more fortified identity of “I.”

I felt small and out of control and rocked by answerless questions, and I realized that I needed to become a new in-carnation in order to understand myself and life and integrate many irreconcilable moments into the core and unfolding story before me.

The hero’s challenge is to be humbled and disassembled and bewildered enough that we can relinquish the attachments or self-imposed limitations that hold us back from our evolved and resilient selves. Through the journey, the hero learns to find trust in, and the necessity of, conversation with the shadow sides of life. The hero knows that fear and discomfort are part of the digging, of the seeking and our eventual materialization into a more balanced and world-wise version of self. Our own resilien-cy and the integrity of our current culture depend upon people saying yes to this journey. Without it, in the end, we remain only euthanized versions of our most compelling selves.

“The point of this embarkation is to become disoriented, to make a descent into the dark underworld,

to grow uncomfortable and humbled...”


words by JORGE ARMANDO LOPEZ POCOL, interviewed by SIMON HART, translated by ARIEL STORCH

THE GAUNTLET OF TRIALS

The history of my life with the Chico Mendes Reforestation Project is a history of adventure.

During my childhood, my country of Gua-temala was locked in armed conflict, and teenagers like myself ran the risk of forced conscripted into the army. I’ve always liked to organize and work with youth, and even in those days people knew me as a good leader and coordinator. But due to the war, I realized that my opportunities as a leader were ending. We couldn’t walk around freely or ride the bus because we might be dragged from the vehicle and taken to the army barracks.

I actually escaped from the army. I had been picked up, and I was in a truck being driven to the barracks when, by chance, all but one of the soldiers guarding us got off the truck to stop another bus and search for youth who were in hiding. Some friends and I shoved the one soldier out of the way and, when he dropped his rifle, jumped out of the truck and ran away. As we were fleeing, I realized there were peo-ple in the nearby community who were observing us, people who were loyal to the army. Documents would arrive saying that I needed to present myself voluntarily on

the first call, and by the third call they’d come to my home to take me away. So I either had to show up or come up with a plan. I found a doctor who agreed to draft a document stating that I was sickly. When I showed up at the army and gave them the document, they said I was very clever and asked me why I had done this. Eventually they let me go.

Around the time when they released me, I began to understand the degree of injustice in my country. I had many friends who lost their chance to study and reach their goals because they were forced to join the army. I decided that I would do something different with my life, so I started reading books. My parents didn’t have the means to offer me an education. My father worked in the fields; he was a peasant who worked the land to feed us. He planted beans, corn and wheat, and he farmed vegetables to sell to support the family. We were six kids, and my mother told me they were only able to send me to school through primary school. I tried to study on my own with some help from my mother, but it was difficult. Around the same time, I started to connect with people who were working to preserve the environment, and I saw that it was a strong need. So I decided, along with some other friends who were in university, to band together and create an environmental collective. Ironically, the most difficult for me was that I couldn’t speak in public. People don’t believe me now, but when I used to speak in public, I would tremble terribly. I could barely converse or eat with people at a table because I would drop things or break cups.

To return to my childhood for a moment, the fear of public speaking was particularly

challenging because I am left-handed. In those days, school teachers believed it was a bad omen to be left-handed. They said it was a sign that we were revolutionaries. They would force me to sit in the back of the classroom and demand that I write with my right hand. Since I couldn’t, they would hit me with rulers. And because I was terrified to speak, I had trouble com-municating in school.

In time, I overcame this fear and ad-vanced on my own, and eventually joined with a group of friends. One friend in par-ticular, Carlos, was inspirational and re-ally cared for the environment. He found opportunities for me to speak at confer-ences. He’d speak for the majority of the presentation and give me five minutes to talk. In the end, I found myself speaking in public in front of groups of foreigners in Spanish schools in Quetzaltenango. This is when I started to realize that colo-nization was a violation against the rights of indigenous communities. I realized that we Mayans, and many indigenas like us, had suffered extraordinarily over the centuries. Armed conflict is an injustice. When I watched documentaries about the exploitation of minerals in present-day Guatemala, I saw parallels to coloniza-tion and it left me infuriated. I knew this was the beginning of a new challenge for me. It became clear to me that our rights were not being respected, and there was a tremendous amount of corruption in my government, which continues today.

I was determined to do something positive and practical. My father was

At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I

thought I was fighting to save the Amazon

rainforest. Now I realize I am fighting

for humanity.–Chico Mendes

an interview with armando:founder of the chico mendes reforestation project

“


a real lover of nature; he had always planted trees. I saw how he cared for the seeds, and I felt compelled to follow in his footsteps. There was something inside of me that cared for the environment. I realized that I needed to form a collective, but Carlos and I were hesitant to create a group. Years earlier we had been part of a group, but became disillusioned when the majority of members became political and aligned with political parties. So our small group consisted of just Carlos, his girlfriend Vicky, and me. We started out working together but our visions were different; Vicky and Carlos wanted to start a small garden, while I was always thinking big. We collaborated for a while, but they decided to leave the project when they got married. So it was just me.

All this took place back in 1999, after-wards I really started to form the project. Foreigners would come and ask me the name of the project. At that time we didn’t have a name. I had learned about the life of the Brazilian ecologist-activist, Chico Mendes, and I admired his cause. He motivated me. I could relate to his story because he didn’t learn to read or write until he was 33 years old. And so I told myself, “I also have problems. I don’t know how to navigate technology. I can’t open an email. But if he could do it, then I too have the capacity.” So I started the project and began without any funds.

I started to think about how best to move forward. My dream was to have a group of

foreigners in my community, but I was determined to make the project self-sus-taining. I didn’t want them to just give us money for free, or to give us a plate of food because we’re indigenous. I always wanted it to be sustainable. So I began to work with this goal in mind. The most challenging aspect was that I also had to work as an artisan to support myself while getting the project off the ground. Be-cause I was speaking in Spanish schools in Xela, and perhaps because I had a way of

speaking like a revolutionary (I would say things like, “I don’t want destruction, I want life!”), every time I looked, my proj-ect was being vandalized. I’d find my bags of dirt (where seedlings are planted) cut open and scattered all over, and the small plants would be pulled out of the ground. But I never gave up or felt defeated; I continued working even though there was no money in the project.

At this point, I was about 30 years old and I realized that it was important for me to make a life for myself and start a family. It still makes me sad to remember those days. I knew many women from my community, but I practiced Mayan spirituality and unfortunately it is frowned upon in my country by other religious institutions. So many of the girls I fell in love with would tell me that I was a good man, but they didn’t agree with my spir-ituality and I needed to change my views and practices if I wanted to be happy with them. This was difficult to accept because it meant that many people in my com-munity didn’t view me in a positive light. Even now, some of them still talk about it. But it doesn’t affect me as much now as it did when I was younger.

I lived along with my parents because all of my siblings had already gotten mar-

ried by the time I met Claudia. She was coming out of an unhappy marriage when we fell in love. Claudia comes from a left-ist family, a revolutionary family who has always fought for the rights of indigenous communities and against injustice. She had a job as a teacher, but was forced to leave it when she came to live with me, so we didn’t have a way of supporting our-selves. I earned very little, and she found a job that allowed us to continue working on the project. The biggest challenge was that no one believed in me. Everyone said that what I was doing was crazy. My friends asked me, “Why do you plant trees for free, are you a millionaire? Only rich people who can’t think of anywhere else to spend their money do this. You have needs. And you’re planting trees on com-munity land. In the future, when the trees have grown, you won’t have the rights to sell the timber.”

I told them that I don’t do this work for money. I do it for conservation and to preserve the forests and generate oxygen for the entire planet. One friend asked me, “Is the planet going to give you mon-ey for gifting oxygen? People in the world are eating well and you don’t have food on your table.”

This was a painful reality because

Sally Morton planting beans with home-stay family in Cotzal

continued on page 20


images by the amazingly talented REBECCA FRANCES BURNS

REVELATION & TRANSFORMATION

is an analog photographer, global educator and actor in the field of international development. Over the past two years, she has instructed courses for Dragons in Jordan, China, Rwanda and Senegal, drawing from her years of scholarly inquiry of 21st century education, a decade of experience in the non-profit world and her background as a “third culture” kid. When Rebecca is not in New York, Los Angeles or working directly with students in the field, she finds sanctuary with her husband in the South Dakota plains.

Rebecca’s photography and pedagogy seek to engage the creative in order to find human connec-tion, and to draw on the beautiful, and sometimes difficult, stories of daily life in an increasingly glo-balized world. She collaborates with individuals and organizations in order to seek creative solutions, and to develop curriculum with a focus on interconnec-tivity and the skills needed to thrive in this era. She still shoots film because each capture is a choice, a moment in time that asks her to slow down and find authentic connection with her subject.

Rebecca Frances Burns

UMUGANDA A national day of community service held on the

last Saturday of each month. Byumba, Rwanda

SUNDAY SACRAMENT Quetzelan, Mexico


images by the amazingly talented REBECCA FRANCES BURNS

REVELATION & TRANSFORMATION

SUNDAY MARKET Quetzelan, Mexico

RED SHORTS Serer Wrestling on the island of Niodior, Senegal


words by PETAL NILES

EMERGENCE

ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF NAHIN, a far-flung outpost just off the old Ho Chi Minh trail in central Laos, I sit at the river’s edge and watch the sand come alive with the move-ments of ants and spiders. On the riverbanks nothing is still. Even the silent kingfisher darts its eyes across the current, ready for a glimmer of iridescence to flash beneath the wooden skiffs lurching on their keels, themselves in stasis waiting for working hands to untether them and push them into the shallow depths.

As I linger, I sense something unseen and restless here, a spirit caught in the for-est of tangled vines and ever-growing bam-boo. But the source of the spirit is unclear, lost in the shadows under the banks. Unable to remain still, I step into the river and feel the spirit follow as I traverse shifting sands and climb roots of ancient trees onto higher ground.

Some hours pass until I am together again with my companions in the heat of the day. Drenched in sweat, we head where light cannot follow, just upstream from where the mouth of Kong Lor cave, a seven-kilome-ter-long subterranean river, gapes from its rotting karst mold. We enter the chasm on longboats. Our battery-powered lights fail, and we are left to imagine just how high the ceiling vaults within the belly of the moun-tain as we venture deeper into the earth, swallowed whole by the black ether. I retreat to a place of placidity balanced in the thin skiff, straining against the current, counting my breaths in the cool, wet darkness.

As the memories of light fade so does my serenity, and I begin to feel a nameless fear kindle and burn like embers within me. The darkness settles on my skin and squeezes my lungs until I am only my fear. I try and to surrender back to my breaths but they

catch at my throat and linger there. I am trapped in the heavy silence. At last, there at the heart of nothingness, my mind clears.

Then I realize: this is where water and rock live, where the flitting life cycles of creatures warmed by the sun give way to the slow work of forces that know no time. Here, where the water courses out of black-ness, here is the source of the restlessness. The meeting of the jungle and the cave is the meeting of different worlds, and at the frontier both forces become clear, more defined. But even in the silent, dark death within the cave, there is a sense of life wait-ing in the currents, a chance that the water connecting the two worlds will offer up the hum of existence. But the boat engines rev, tearing apart the silently stitched unity, and my thoughts return to my temporal breaths and lingering fear once more.

A fracture of light emerges from the

current like a knife slicing through the opaque underground stream. It grows, overtakes the boat and burns my eyes, burns this moment upon my mind. Black becomes brown and slowly my pupils adjust to the sunlight. The spirit too feels burned away by the winds and warmth. Something obfuscated exists, like the shadows under the bank at morning, but I don’t know if I’ll encounter it fully again.

SOME WEEKS LATER FARTHER SOUTH, I find myself in a cave outside Thakhek. Sitting in pure darkness I feel the restlessness descend again, but this time my mind re-mains clear. This time the restlessness moves within me, but I do not move with it. This time I let fear dissolve and disperse power-lessly into the ether.

The first time I encountered the dark-ness I had, “the experience” as T.S. Elliot

“But the present moment can be a dangerous moment...”

the echo within


PETAL NILES is a Dragons alum (Nepal ‘13 & Life

Along the Mekong ‘14) and is currently back in Nepal

helping her past instructor, Amrit Ale, organize his

annual free Nepal Health Camp.

wrote, “but missed the meaning.” But now I realize that during my time crossing the fast paced, sunlit world, with no home and yet at home, I have become more than a stagnant stitch on the cloth of life. I sense the rest-lessness because I have become part of the buzzing at the edge of the unknown between past and future. The spirit in the darkness has returned me to the stillness. The transience of the past months and the stability of the place I sit now are no longer in contrast.

In this place of unity, I see that it is no chore to let time slip by in a haze of nos-talgia and exaltation of the future. It is a simple thing to ignore the sensations that sight, sound and place inspire in us, and it is natural to feed fear. But I can also see that both past and future are held in this darkness as one, waiting on the currents of the river. There is no need to dream of other times when Time is present in every swirling drop. But the present moment can feel like a dan-gerous moment.

UNTIL I FACED THE DARKNESS, I FEARED THE PRESENT. The past and future offer a cocoon of distance, a fog of anticipation, expectation and memory, but the present mo-ment rips us open. Within its sharp embrace, we become vulnerable to every sensation. Feelings demand recognition. Intuition and impulse guide us. In the present, we become the river in all its darkness and all its light. Yet for all its force, the present is a subtle force.

The present is the moment in between. As the water of our life rushes onwards, we pull ourselves onto the bank and blink as it passes, constantly looking back and ahead. I know now that I do not have to spend so much time fixated on that which was and that which will be when the real challenge is discovering that which is. There is no need for fear. There is beauty in the fragile hum of vulnerability. Past and future will forever remain as my protectors. I call them forth when I focus on the ground beneath me. I find them in the echo within.


FROM THE JUNGLES OF LATIN AMERICA TO THE TIBETAN PLATEAU, Christina has spent

the majority of her adult life exploring and documenting the far contours of the globe. Check out

her photo galleries at: www.flickr.com/photos/seekingsol/sets.

words and images by CHRISTINA RIVERA COGSWELL

THE RETURN

When I first left the country I was an angry girl: ashamed of my country, annoyed with American tradition and culture, dismissive of my family history, disappointed with my education and no longer on speaking terms with religion.

It was the story of Santiago, the young shepherd in The Alchemist, that filled my spirit with an insatiable fire to move, and specifically to buy my first open-ended plane ticket to what would eventually accumulate into seven years of adventures abroad. But I still vividly remember the moment when I closed that little book and said to myself, with notable disappointment, “Wait. The boy ends up where he began?” I was just barely clever enough to discern, with a squinted and suspicious eye, the personal foreshadowing.

Of course, I ignored the winking omen and picked up the challenge of the chase. Home? I don’t need one. House? On my back. Family? They can live without me. Country? Never belonged there. Religion? I’ve got big skies and starry nights to answer those questions now.

Over time, my notion of home as an outward place harboring social detest devolved into something much softer and closer. For somewhere along the path, I picked up meditating. And I remember for a few years telling people that “home” was that warm little nook in which I centered myself every morning—with eyes closed—for about ten minutes, deep in meditation.

But this version of home is lonely. As every long-term traveler eventually learns, the charms of a transient life are, mockingly, transient. I began to feel myself scraping: the surfaces of cities; the shallowness of temporary friends; the stereotypes of a cul-ture; the Lonely Planet highlights of a country. My travels weighted too heavily on the side of quantity, I added a few stones to the quality side by slowing down my itinerary and stationing myself in small communities for three to six months at a time, usually working with this or that NGO with the goal of fostering the connection between local and international circles. Over time I finally learned full names, foreign languages, local bus routes, and the best street food stand in town. Still, I found myself in the strange position of never asking a person his or her name because I was forced to ask myself a conditional question, “How long would I be staying?”

And that is perhaps when the big “C” word entered my mind and vocabulary. I decided that I did not care where in the world I lived, so long as I was surrounded by people with whom I shared like-minded values, trust, curiosity and intentions. In a word: community. One in which I could foster my new understanding of the concepts of interconnectedness and interdependence. A place and people in whom I could invest and connect. Just as I, in perpetual pilgrimage, had learned that my travels were less about the goal than the journey, so had I learned that my relationships were less about the people than my interactions with them. And I needed a circle…of brothers

where we...


CHRISTINA RIVERA COGSWELL is Dragons’ Director of Princeton Bridge Year programs and a

past instructor (Visions of India, Himalayan Studies, Guatemala). She currently lives in Vail with her

husband and their two adorable babies.

words and images by CHRISTINA RIVERA COGSWELL

THE RETURN

and sisters and parents and lovers and extended family and community with whom I could exchange trust, teachings, experience, dependence, beliefs, challenges, support and, of course, love.

But before I continue, I must also include the most noble, impactful, profound and beautiful lesson that my travels have BEATEN into me: humility. Reminiscing about the arrogance and ignorance with which I stomped upon my world gathers within my cheeks the cold shades of shame. That I left my country on the spit and snarl of these two charges emphasizes the depth of my personal projection. What self-righteousness we assume in the task and name of seeking change.

The world is change. It’s the predominant characteristic of nature and the Earth and nothing less than comical to presume that we need seek it out. We human beings, both individually and cumulatively, will constantly be presented with the challeng-es and opportunities to evolve to our higher selves regardless of the continent upon which we happen to find ourselves born or standing. I need not cross the world on a jet engine to solve the puzzles of the planet or recognize the mystery of life. But perhaps, like Santiago, we must undertake the physical journey—with good humor, self-deprecation and humility—to come to that same conclusion.

A few months ago, I drank yak butter tea in an underground stone house at 15,000 feet on a shelf of the Tibetan plateau. And as I watched the children playing with puppies, and the women chatting happily over the meal cooking on the fire, and the father spinning yak wool while checking in with the teenagers coming in from the fields, I realized that every community is precious, none more or less than another. Be it a tiny village high in the Himalayas or the park of a busy urban city street, the challenges, lessons and connections are the same. We don’t need to cross borders, but only to venture consciously into the unknown. For only by leaving all that we know, can we examine ourselves objectively. And there, sipping tea in one of the most remote corners on the globe, I concluded that the joy of travel is not where it takes us, but the new awareness of where and who we already are. It matters very little where we go. Where we begin is the only place in the world in which we can end.

In the concluding passages of The Alchemist, Santiago returns to the sheep, fields, trees and family of his upbringing with a smile. His community had not changed. But his awareness and appreciation of his role interwoven within it did. Home, to me, is defined as the circle of people and places in which we choose to foster kindness and love. It’s a community of friends, teachers, lovers, mentors, family, students and every messenger met along the path. Home is the web of our interconnectedness. And once we realize the degree to which we are interdependent, the rest, I believe, becomes irrelevant. The home we return to is nothing more than a deeper awareness of what’s been there all along.

begin.


words by JASON PATENT

REINTEGRATION

God bless parents, especially moms. At least, especially my mom. Just after I turned 24, in 1992, I returned to my parents’ home in Mis-soula, Montana, USA, after having spent the academic year teaching English in a medium-sized industrial city in the far, far northeast of China. “Reverse culture shock” is a term I may or may not have heard before that homecoming. Either way, I was utterly unprepared for what was about to hit me…and my mom.

I was rude, insensitive, and sometimes even cruel to my mom, who only wanted to welcome her son home and make me feel at home. Nothing she did was enough for me. She tried to empathize, she tried to nurture, she asked questions. Nothing worked. I was just too jumbled. My case may be extreme, but I know that the gen-eral sense of instability, of not feeling quite right, is common for people just back from big adventures in new places. And it turns out that the brain has a lot to do with it.

Please indulge me in doing a brief exercise. Hold this page at arm’s length. Now, while keeping your left eye closed and your right eye laser-focused on the plus sign, slowly (slowly!) move the paper closer to your face. At some point something will happen to the dot. (If the paper ends up at your face you’ll need to try again. It’s crucial to start with the paper far away, to keep your right eye squarely focused on the plus sign, and to bring the paper in very, very slowly.)

How could the dot just disappear like that? It turns out that each eye has a blind spot, where the visual field is blank. The retina gets no information from this part of the visual field. Why don’t we see some kind of hole or emptiness where the blind spot is? Because the brain invents something to “put” there—in this case, the color or pattern of the paper around it.

How does this work? The brain just invents it. Volumes of evidence from vision

experts have proven that the world we see is a massive illusion. Just twenty percent of visual information comes from the retina; the remaining eighty percent is pure fiction, manifested by the brain in order to create a sense of coherence. Think about that: four-fifths of what we see is just the brain’s best guess. It’s not actually there.

I love this simple exercise because it gets right to the heart of two key issues when it comes to human identity. First, reality is a product of our own brains, based on our particular set of experienc-es. Second, our brains have a primal need to create coherence. They are doing this constantly, in the background, completely out of our conscious awareness.

Another thing our brains do all the time, automatically, is warn us of threats in the environment. One part of the brain in particular—the amygdala, or “lizard brain”—gets highly active when it thinks we’re being threatened. And when the amygdala is active, it inhibits activity in

a blind spot... obviously


the prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain that govern our “higher” func-tions. The amygdala is fast but coarse: it knows nothing about nuance or subtlety.

In one important sense this is a good thing: it keeps us alive . If a tiger jumps out of the bushes, we really don’t have time to consider the tiger in all its unique-ness. We just need to know right away that it’s a tiger and that it’s dangerous.

The problem is that the amygdala does its thing even when we don’t need it to. It sees almost anything new as a potential threat, and since difference is a form of novelty, we tend to see people different from us as threatening.

This leaves us with a rather bleak pic-ture of humanity: If our brains are busy inventing coherent realities about the threats posed by groups of “other” people, then we don’t stand much of a chance of getting along. And isn’t this, when it comes down to it, the story of humanity’s dark side?

Now for the good news: we can relate to difference in ways that aren’t dominat-ed by threat. It just takes a lot of aware-ness and hard work.

When I returned from China in 1992, I had a lot going on in my brain. During my year in China, my brain had started out in full-on threat mode, re-acting negatively to the confusing behaviors all around me. Over then next nine months, my brain gradually created a sense of coherence, as I began to understand all the new patterns I was seeing, and to empathize with the people around me. I was starting to understand why people did what they did, and even though it was different from what I was used to, I could at least see the logic. New worlds were opening up to me, and it was thrilling. I was a new person in a new world, eager to return home and share my bounty.

But when I came home I found a place that looked exactly as it always had, inhabited by people whose worldviews hadn’t budged an inch. The “mistake” I made is a common one for returnees from abroad: I had replaced a single view of the world with a different, single view that I’d judged to be better than the “old” view.

And this is where the brain’s good news begins to come in handy. Thankful-ly, we’re not slaves to the amygdala and

to our brain’s tendency to create a single, coherent story. As humans we have the ability—thanks to the prefrontal cortex and other more recently evolved regions of the brain—to see the world from multi-ple perspectives.

And it turns out that this is the key to reintegration—indeed, to what reintegration is all about. Joseph Campbell wrote, “‘The Cosmic Dancer,’ declares Nietzsche, ‘does not rest heavily in a single spot, but gaily, light-ly, turns and leaps from one position to another.’” We don’t have to fear “other” ways of being. Fear is natural, but we don’t need to let it rule us. What we need is to thank our amygdala for keeping us alive, and to ask it to please quiet down while we listen and look for what there is for us to learn.

We all can, in Walt Whitman’s famous words, “contain multitudes.” Indeed the future of our species depends on it. So let’s keep asking, keep reaching, keep learning.

Four-fifths of what we see is just the brain’s best guess. It’s not actually there.

JASON PATENT , Ph.D., is a leading cultural interpreter on China-related issues and previously served as American Co-Director of the Hopkins-Nanjing

Center for Chinese and American Studies in Nanjing, China. He is a former Dragons instructor (China ‘98-’01) and co-founder of the Dragons China

Semester Program. Currently Jason is Chief of Operations and Director of the Center for Intercultural Leadership at UC Berkeley’s International House.

He lives in the Bay Area with his wife, Colette Plum, and their two daughters.


continued from page 11

THE GAUNTLET OF TRIALS, CONT

I would arrive at home and my wife would tell me that we need food. I’d see my three kids, who came from her first marriage, walking to school without shoes. And yet, I didn’t see another way. If I looked for another job my project would terminate. So I started going into Spanish schools in Quetzaltenango to see if they could help. They were already using the project and my work as a source of in-come for themselves. They were receiving donations of 1,000 quetzales ($140 USD) periodically, which would have been a huge sum of money for me. But they were taking advantage of the situation, skim-ming money off the top, and giving me only 100 quetzales for the project.

I tried to look for other ways to gener-ate income and continue working on the project; I dreamed of opening a school. We had the resources in my communi-ty—teachers, families and space to build the facility—so I took the initial steps and brought together a group of teachers to train. They asked me if there was going to be work for them, and I told them yes, even though I knew there wasn’t any. I didn’t have anyone whom I could count on, only the hope of waking up from a dream and seeing a line of students arriv-ing at the project. It took time, but even-tually the community began to support

the project. Still, that didn’t alleviate the problem of financing it. We didn’t have anything. I couldn’t even dream about having an office; I just wanted to cover our basic needs and costs.

I’ll never forget the day my wife and I hiked into the mountains with 15,000 trees

to plant and only 25 cents in our pockets. We didn’t bring any food; we didn’t have any. There were about 400 people from the community who went with us to plant trees. We carried every-thing up and planted the trees and then came lunchtime. When everyone else from the community pulled food from their sacks, I looked at my wife and kids and thought, “What do we eat?” We just sat in silence for a moment. And then something happened, something that I value about my community. When they saw us without food, one person brought over bread, and another gave us tamales, and someone else meat. We suddenly had a banquet. We were in a remote area below the peak of a mountain and we were all tired. But there was a dirt road nearby where cars travel. That afternoon, a man passed by and told us all to get in his truck. When we got back into town, the others began to get off and were

asking the man how much they owed him. He began to charge. We didn’t have any money to give him, so I told my wife I’d talk to him and see if we could pay him back in the future.

“There will come better times, Ar-mando,” Claudia assured me. “We’ll see what happens.” We got off the truck and I asked how much we owed. The man said, “You don’t owe me anything.” He said, “The money I paid for gas is so that you can eat tomorrow.” I told him that what he did for me and my family I considered to be a huge action. I admired him. This small act gave me the strength to continue fighting, to continue working against min-ing companies, to continue planting trees.

Even though I know there are organizations with official papers, I’ve always

been the type of person who doesn’t want to waste time in congress. The congress of the Republic of Guatemala is extremely corrupt. But by 2006, we had arrived at a crossroads. We still didn’t have anything to eat. Claudia was working, but she hadn’t been paid in six months. Chico Mendes was doing well, and we were busy. Quite unexpectedly, some government officials arrived one day with a proposal. These people were friends of mine, people who had known me since childhood and knew me as an activist who loved working within the community. They proposed that I take a salary from the government of 15,000 quetzales. They offered to give me any car I wanted and to help improve the project. In return, I would have to renounce my ideological beliefs because it was a black eye on the government. I would also be required to advocate for mining projects and the privatization of water. I refused directly, and told them that I would continue my efforts.

They left and told me to think about it. I spoke with Claudia that night and she said, “You decide and I’ll follow you. I am your partner, but you know what they are doing is wrong. I’m ready to endure what-

Dragons group with a local Shaman in Guatemala


JORGE ARMANDO LOPEZ POCOL is founder of the Chico Mendes Reforestation Project in Pachaj, Guatemala, and a mentor for hundreds

of Dragons students since 2006. Of Mayan descent, Armando recently completed a speaking tour in the US where he discussed environmental

preservation, the privatization of water and indigenous rights.

ever comes. Maybe I can find a better job and we won’t lose Chico Mendes.”

When I declined their offer, they told me I was going to die of hunger. They warned me that I would end up with nothing, and that what I was doing didn’t make any sense. “The government and the mining companies have power,” they said. “Your project will wither away and die.”

This is when I first encountered Dragons. I don’t know how they found out about the project, but I met with Simon and we walked though the forest. Claudia and I still didn’t have anything at this time. Occasionally volunteers would come, but only on a work-exchange. It was still a huge challenge to continue trying to establish my community. So when Dragons arrived, it lit a light in my soul. Just seeing the faces of the students made me realize I was doing something good. The day when they arrived I didn’t want to sleep because I wanted to make sure they were taken care of. When the first group left, I realized that with this re-lationship it would be possible to continue advancing the project. When more groups came and wrote about their experiences in Pachaj, the government backed off too. The presence of foreign students and out-siders caused them to stop pressuring me.

This is when things started to get easier. E ach year we would wait for Dragons students

to arrive like rain in May because they were the only group that believed in us. There was something we really liked about Dragons: their instructors prepared the students before they arrived at the com-munity. They explained to the students that they were going to use an outhouse, that they may find themselves eating in a house with dirt floors, and so the students felt prepared. In 2007, the arrival of two Dragons groups helped pull me out of the abyss and allowed me to see that I could do something great. The Dragons instruc-

tors didn’t see me as just a coordinator; rather they told me that I was inspiring, and students valued our discussions great-ly. I realized that my self-esteem had been very low. Their words, their presence, gave me security to confront life and the challenges of the project.

Still, there was a final threat where agents of the government destroyed a seedbed that held about 70,000 seedlings waiting to be transplanted into bags. The threat was mainly symbolic: This time it’s your plants, the next time it will be you. I told my wife, who looked at me and said, “If they already said it, they’re not going to do it. They’re not going to kill you.”

I spoke with one of my friends who said, “Look, Armando, they are doing this because you’re an important person. But it’s your decision. You can continue or stop here.” In that moment I decided to continue, to keep going, to refuse to tire. I told myself that the day they stop bother-ing me is the day I become no one. And so the project continued to grow, and my wife began to promote Chico Mendes in her work, and the youth of the communi-ty started to ask me what they could do to improve the environmental situation.

When I started the project, I was thinking about protecting the water sources in my community. I never thought that we were also generating oxygen for the planet, along with everything else that trees give us. I also realized that I was collaborating with teachers to generate work and earnings for home-stay fam-ilies—families who are truly grateful to have students live with them.

One of my friends asked me, “What do you want to do in the future, what are you looking for?” I told him that I want to go to the United States and talk about my project. Not with the idea of filling Pachaj with thousands of foreigners, just to learn about life in the US and how people live. When they granted my visa, I was both very content and afraid because I had never

stepped foot on a plane or crossed a border, and I didn’t know what was going to hap-pen. When I arrived here it was a different world. It had been 20 years since I’d seen my brother and nephews, which was the first thing I did. We talked for a long time.

I know that this story of Armando is a small story. There are others who have been

threatened and tortured in my country, who to this day hide when they see or hear the army because they think they are still living in the war. They also deserve to be mentioned. I consider myself a small man in comparison to them. I don’t consider myself a person who has done a lot. I know I’m a person who has done a little and that I am one of many who want to improve the planet.

I’d like to leave a small message for all the people who are going to read this. We need to believe in indigenous peoples. We need to support them, not with money but with confidence in their ideas. We need to teach them to be self-sufficient because this helps preserve their ideologies. A man who works for a cause and is gifted lots of money will lose the money. I believe that if someone wants to do something, they need to suffer. They need to pass through the fire and navigate the wind and water. And when they arrive, they arrive to the joy of triumph.

So my advice for the young people of this country is to challenge life. Leave what they have at home and “put on the boots” as we say in Guatemala. Begin to walk on the land, have contact with the mother earth, and know that the earth is where everything comes from. It’s where our sustenance comes from and where we need to be and receive that energy. They say that those who listen to advice reach old age. I hope that if they listen to these words they will grow to be old, or how we say in my culture, “elders with grand knowledge like the moon.”


THE ALUMNI TOOLKIT

alumni updates

‘07 ASTRID SCHANZ-GARBASSI China

Language Intensive, Summer

Astrid is working on a nutrition-based project that a.) she’s really excited about; b.) affects travelers and adventurers of all kinds; and c.) might appeal to some of you health conscious folks!

It’s called Phi Bar, and she’s teamed up with a nutritionist to create an energy bar that’s not full of sugar and carbs, and is built for that time when you’re summiting Kilimanjaro—or for the plane ride that’ll get you there.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CHECK OUT: www.eatphi.co

‘12 BAHEYA MALATY Jordan: The Fertile

Crescent Semester, Fall

This past winter, Baheya was honored as the Colorado College recipient of the 2015 Davis Project for Peace Award. She will travel to Bethlehem, Palestine, with her friend and co-founder, Mary Jones, to initiate their project BINAT: Bethlehem Inter-camp Athletics.

Their project aims to use soccer as a platform for women’s empowerment and leadership, and to provide a safe space for the girls of the three Bethlehem refugee camps to play soccer.

IF ANYONE HAS ANY QUESTIONS OR WOULD LIKE TO DONATE USED SOCCER EQUIPMENT, PLEASE CONTACT BAHEYA AT: [email protected]

‘14 GABE GRESCHLER Visions of India, Fall

Starting this month, Gabe will bike 314 kilometers from Seattle to Portland to raise money for children at The Little Stars School, an elementary school in Banaras (Varanasi), India, that serves underprivileged youth in the Assi Ghat community.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT HIS RIDE, CHECK OUT: facebook.com/seattletoportland

jobsRETURNING TO THE UNITED STATES AFTER A DRAGONS COURSE CAN BE MORE CHAL-LENGING THAN YOU MIGHT EXPECT. With all the opportunities available, figuring out your next step and finding ways to stay involved in inspirational work can feel overwhelming. With that in mind, we have collected a list of organizations scattered around the country, focused on environmental and social movements, which are seeking passionate employees, volunteers and interns.

1. PARADOX SPORTS Boulder, CO

Paradox Sports seeks to recog-nize and foster an individual’s potential and strength, defying the assumption that people with a physical disability can’t lead a life of excellence. They provide inspiration, opportu-nities and specialized adaptive equipment so that anyone is able to be an active participant in human-powered sports.

PAID POSITION: PR/Marketing Manager and Donor Manager. Contact: [email protected]

INTERNSHIP: Program Assistant. Contact: www.paradoxsports.org/climbing-club

2. THE REFUGEE RESPONSE

Cleveland, OH

The Refugee Response (TRR) empowers refugees to become self-sufficient and contributing members of their new commu-nities. The Refugee Response was formed to help refugees adjust to life in Northeast Ohio. They work to empower the region’s growing newcomer population, particularly those living in the greater Cleveland area between three months and five years, by providing opportunities to acquire the skills they need to succeed in their new communities.

VOLUNTEER: Home tutoring and Refugee Empowerment Agricultural Program (REAP). Please contact: therefugeeresponse.org

3. SAVE OUR SEABIRDS Sarasota, FL

Save our Seabirds is a non-profit wildlife conservation center working to aid injured sea birds along the Florida coastline. They offer permanent housing for birds who cannot be released back into the wild and educational programs for the public.

UNPAID INTERNSHIPS: For students currently enrolled in a college or university, interested in environmental and/or animal science, biology, or ecology. Interns will have a chance to rescue, rehabilitate, and release injured birds and educate the public about environmental issues and sustainability. Minimum ten-week commitment in spring, fall, summer or winter. Contact: saveourseabirds.org

4. OUTRIGHT VERMONT Burlington, VT

The mission of Outright Vermont is to build safe, healthy, and supportive environments for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning youth between the ages of 13-22. Their youth programs, groups and queer youth space (unless otherwise stated) are for young queer people, ages 22 and under. Their education and outreach work is for all ages and ranges from work in schools to local non-profit agencies.

TO VOLUNTEER at afterschool, weekend and summer events. Contact: [email protected] or call 802.865.9677

WE WOULD LOVE TO HEAR WHAT YOU ARE UP TO; SEND US A NOTE. Write to Admissions Director Eva Vanek,

[email protected] or call 303.413.0822.


5. GIRL UP National

Girl Up is the United Nations Foundation’s adolescent girl campaign intended to raise awareness and funds to help girls in remote places around the world. Through teen advocacy and campus clubs, Girl Up works with girls in the U.S. to provide healthcare and educational access for girls of all nationalities.

UNPAID INTERNSHIPS: Semester-long opportunities for college students or recent graduates. Contact: www.girlup.org/about/staff

TO START YOUR OWN CAMPUS CHAPTER OR CLUB, CONTACT: Grassroots Associate, Rachel Wisthuff at [email protected] or Teen Advisor, Janet Diaz (Dragons Alum) at [email protected]

6. THE GLOBAL SOAP PROJECT Las Vegas, NV

The Global Soap Project’s mission is to reduce waste produced in the U.S. and increase health standards in other countries by recycling partially used bars of soap from hotels and redistributing them to communities in developing countries. By eliminating waste and providing accessibility to basic healthcare needs, The Global Soap Project is helping the environment and individuals worldwide.

VOLUNTEER: Recycle gently-used bars at the Global Soap Factory. Contact: [email protected]

7. NATIVE AMERICAN COMMUNITY

BOARD Lake Andes, SD

The Native American Community Board (NACB) was founded by a group of Native Americans on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota to address various issues relevant to the Native American community. Since its founding, the NACB has been able to open a resource center to shelter and provide support and information for members of its community locally, nationally and globally.

PAID INTERNSHIP: Looking for interns who are passionate about Native American rights and health issues to work from three months – one year. Paid $500.00 a month with free lodging and reduced board. Contact: [email protected] or call 605.487.7079

8. THE MOUNTAINEERS Seattle, WA

The Mountaineers is an outdoor education non-profit based out of Seattle that works to preserve the backcountry of Washington. Through classes, programs, trips and gatherings, the members and volunteers of The Mountaineers promote conversation efforts and sustainable outdoor recreation practices.

VOLUNTEER: Positions include hosting a film festival, leading outdoor courses, being a part of a trail maintenance crew, mentoring youth. Contact: [email protected]

dragons’ partnersDRAGONS WORKS WITH REMARKABLE COMMUNITY ORGANI-ZATIONS WORLDWIDE. COME SHOW YOUR SUPPORT FOR ONE OF DRAGONS’ LONG-TERM BOLIVIA PARTNERS ON THEIR U.S. TOUR.

THE WORLD RENOWNED CIRCUS GROUP CIRQUE DU SOLEIL RECENTLY INITIATED A PARTNERSHIP WITH ONE OF DRAGONS’ PARTNER ORGANIZATIONS IN BOLIVIA, PERFORMING LIFE. Performing Life is a Bolivian arts-based organization that works with children that live and work on the streets in Cochabamba. By training high-risk youth in the performing arts, they promote safer working and living conditions and empower participants to get off the streets and continue their education.

For a limited time, Cirque Du Soleil has allocated a portion of their ticket proceeds to Performing Life. If we can help sell 50 tickets to Cirque Du Soleil’s upcoming tour, 100 percent of the proceeds will go to Performing Life.

DATESSHOW: KuriosDATES: June 11 – June 26CITY: Denver, CO

SHOW: KoozaDATES: October 15 – November 15CITY: Austin, TX

TO PURCHASE TICKETS, EMAIL JULIANNE CHANDLER: [email protected]

your local communityWHY TRAVEL HALF-WAY AROUND THE WORLD TO FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT WHEN YOU CAN MAKE AN IMPACT IN YOUR OWN COMMUNITY? Poet, professor, bio-regionalist and environmental activist, Gary Snyder, once said, “The most radical thing you can do is stay home.” Here are some great ways to support your local community and create a global ripple effect.

• Food Bank

• Homeless Shelter

• Humane Society

• Retirement Home

• Literacy Campaign

• Community Garden

• Refugee Center

• Meals on Wheels

• After-School program

• LGBTQ Center

correction IN THE FALL ‘14 EDITION,

The People’s March Q&A

misstated one of the leaders of

Harvard’s divestment campaign.

Her name is Chloe Maxmin, not

Chloe Hall.

Performing Life

WANT TO CONTRIBUTE TO A FUTURE EDITION? Contact Justin Kiersky at [email protected].

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Where There Be Dragons3200 Carbon Place, Suite #102

Boulder, CO 80301tel. 800.982.9203 | 303.413.0822

Dragons offers semester-long experiential education programs in some of the world’s most transformative locations. Visit our website to learn more about course highlights, college accreditation, our instructors,

and what makes us different. Here are a few of the semester programs we offer.

myanmar in transition AGES 17–22

FOCUS: Democracy, Development, Theravada Buddhism

COURSE DATES: September 15 – December 6, 2015 & February 12 – May 1, 2016

Study Theravada Buddhism, explore the ancient temples of Bagan and Mt Popa, work with

refugees on the Thai borderlands, and examine the challenges of democratic reform in Yangon.

life along the mekong AGES 17–22

FOCUS: Biodiversity, Development, Cultural Immersion


Follow the Mekong River through China, Laos and Cambodia, trek in the Himalaya, explore the

region’s spiritual traditions, and live with home-stay families on idyllic river islands.

rhythms of west africa AGES 17–22

FOCUS: Spiritual Traditions, Music and Dance, Language Immersion


Learn traditional drumming and dance, bond with your home-stay family, examine models of

community development, and explore traditional healing and Sufi Islamic practices in Senegal.

w w w . w h e r e t h e r e b e d r a g o n s . c o m

gap year programsasia | latin america | africa | middle east