CHALMITA, Mexico State, Mexico – Long before the sun appears over the towering white cliffs all around us, this temporary village comes to life. The guardians of the ceremonial fire are stoking the flames for the temezcal; the kitchen crew is chopping and peeling and stirring; smoke is rising from the women’s tipi. Suddenly the resonant call of the conch rings out over the valley, calling us to the salutation of the sun, and the cry of an eagle pierces the air like a blessing.

We are gathered in this enchanted valley for the Call of the Eagle, the tenth intercontinental gathering of a group of dreamers and doers who are quietly changing the world from the inside out: the Consejo de Visiones – Guardianes de la Tierra (Vision Council – Guardians of the Earth).

Some 500 visitors from as far as Australia and as near as neighboring Chalmita – filmmakers and farmers, psychologists and shamans, artists and teachers, spiky-haired punks and lyrical poets – are learning to live together under the blue skies and bright stars of an itinerant ecovillage conceived more than a decade ago under the banner of the Rainbow Caravan for Peace and the Mexican Bioregional Movement. By the end of the week, this event will have touched the lives of more than 1,000.

This tenth gathering is a very special event for many reasons, chief among them that it is seen as the fulfillment of an Inca prophecy. When the Eagle and the Condor fly together, according to the prophecy, this will signal the dawn of a new era – the Eagle representing the North, and the Condor representing the South. Here in this sacred valley, lying in the shadow of an ancient pyramid amid the fertile Bosque de Agua, a high-energy group of visionaries, artists, and activists from North and South has come full circle.

Fourteen years ago, a now legendary group of them, led by among others Alberto Ruz Buenfil, otherwise known as the Subcoyote – cousin of Fidel Castro and son of the archaeologist who discovered Palenque’s fantastic hidden treasures – set off from this region for an epic journey that was to create the foundation for an intercontinental environmental, spiritual and social movement. After holding the first intercontinental congress of the Vision Council, they headed off in a bus painted like an ear of corn through the Zapatista territory of Chiapas, through the volcanic highlands of Central America and the tropical lowlands of Amazonia all the way to the tip of the continent in Patagonia. Using theater and the arts to plant seeds of hope, peace and sustainability in conflict zones, indigenous villages and crime-ridden barrios, they connected and nurtured social movements throughout the continent.

Their second international event, the Call of the Condor in 2002, brought some 1,300 activists and artists to the Sacred Valley of Machu Picchu in Peru to begin the work of consolidating a vision for a transition to a new age. The third, Call of the Hummingbird, was held in Brazil in 2005 and drew more than 1,500.

Now, after 13 years, that caravan has finally come back to its roots, and the seeds they planted here in Mexico and across the continent have come full bloom in an astounding event that is awakening even the most cynical and reserved among us. Tears flow freely in the circles of dance, in the darkness of the temezcal, in the embraces of long-lost friends who have only just met.

But this is far from a feel-good encounter group. In fact, it’s far from anything I’ve experienced. These folks are facing the future with their eyes wide open, painfully aware of the resource and climate crises that loom on the horizon. It’s also not a hand-wringing session. No one here is waiting for government to resolve these pending crises, although government leaders are here to participate in the forums, workshops and demonstrations in areas encompassing ecology, health, spirituality, appropriate technology, and education among many others. Local schoolchildren, too, are brought in to participate in panels teaching self-reliance; local youth participate in forums organizing political and social action preparing for turbulent times in a post-petroleum world. Gaia University is here, sharing a revolutionary model for participatory education, granting diplomas, bachelor’s and master’s degrees while its students are engaged in planetary transformation.

One team is building an oven from mud and bricks, while another is building a solar clock; another group is learning about native herbal healing techniques, while still another is raising the ceremonial tipi that will be the headquarters of a powerful women’s healing circle, and another is discussing strategies for protecting this valley, a strategic but highly vulnerable center for water conservation. Another initiative is gathering momentum to support the Huicholes in a struggle to save their most sacred site, Cerro Quemado in Real de Catorce or Wirikuta, from a transnational mining operation.

Sacred rituals from the world’s great traditions mingle with dance and creations of art and song to raise the energy throughout the week to a level I never thought possible. Activities run from sunup to 3 a.m., but sleep seems superfluous.

The culmination of the event comes after an all-night vigil to greet the dawn; a spectacularly feathered and painted group of Aztec dancers await us around a blazing fire, and a mandala of dance and rhythm and song erupts.

As I sit down to try and put this phenomenon to words, I recall those of Coyote Alberto as we stood together on the last day.

“It’s all so perfect,” I told him. “My only regret is that it’s just impossible to put into words.”

He laughed knowingly – the author of several books about the caravan and its Rainbow Warriors, and now involved in a project to bring the lessons of the caravan home in Mexico City, he has struggled with this problem daily.

“Nobody believes you when you try to explain it,” he said. “They say, ‘You’re just writing what you want it to be.’ There’s no way to explain – you just have to live it.”

Never has a human being lived his words more authentically, more powerfully, more beautifully than the man at the heart of this vision turned reality. I can do no better than to end with some of those words, which Alberto shared with us during the closing ceremony.

“Two hundred years ago these lands were the scene of bloody battles; much blood was shed among our grandfathers and grandmothers to make a step forward in the process of evolution, of growth, toward our liberty as individuals, as a people, and as a nation…. A hundred years ago, again in these lands, much blood was spilled once again among our people, with the same goal, to be able to walk with a bit more liberty, a bit more strength.

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I finally caught up with her at a presentation at a local university, and she was worth the wait.

Laura Montoya of the peacock-feather earring, the disarming smile and the passionate rapid-fire defense of the Pachamama, is a one-woman Earth revolution in action. Over coffee, she sized me up and apparently decided I was worth her time, and she invited me to her home and the new headquarters of eReciclaje in the marginal barrio of Belen, up in the hills on the outskirts of the city.

The trip itself was almost as memorable as the actual visit. Starting from the classic Hotel Nutibara, whose elegant neoclassic lines are meant for others with far greater budgets than mine, I climbed into a bus destined for the outskirts. After nearly half an hour of traffic through the modern world of esthetic salons and shopping malls and residential neighborhoods we began to climb up and up into another world, one in which houses begin with brick and end with sheet metal and black plastic, where women still carry water in jugs and corn in tubs on their heads, where the smoke from cooking fires curls hangs in the air, where you or your neighbor may or may not have electricity or running water.

It was here that eReciclaje located its second project, the first one, an urban permaculture center in the rougher Barrio Triste neighborhood, having been undone by a devastating robbery.

Here, according to Laura, Felipe started over again, building terraces and irrigation ditches and working the land. Here is the regional headquarters for A Limpiar el Mundo or Clean Up The World, an international group working to organize mass cleanup projects, and here the plastic detritus of the neighborhood becomes eco-bricks of the sort David had demonstrated to me earlier.

But first, I had to find it. The neighborhood was a network of streets without names, and a misunderstanding led me to get off the bus in the wrong place. Finally, there she was, smiling, brilliant in her green hindu pants, big white sunglasses and peacock feather. We embraced, long-lost friends who had only met, and she led me up the hill to her “finca” next to the brick factory, where trucks rumbled up and down all day long, carrying away red bits of mountain in their cavernous beds.

Ironic, and someone poetic, that their little eco-brick workshop is right next to a brick factory of quite a different sort.

I thought of what David told me the other night in Sajonia as he tended his little fire. The Center for Ecological Arts is similarly situated in a truck-traffic zone near the cantera (quarry) and trucks rumble past all day long. Here, too, one can look out from this little mountain paradise and see the mountain across the valley being slowly eaten away.

“Some might see this as a negative thing, and sure, it’s sad to see the way they are altering the mountain – I wish they wouldn’t do it,” David had said, thoughtfully. “But this is exactly the mentality we are working to change – so it’s better that we are here, rather than isolating ourselves from it.”

Laura, it turned out, is not so different from me at 25, in love with an activist completely dedicated to his work, taking on the mantel of his cause as her own. Only hers had left the whole operation in her young hands. Suddenly I understood her reluctance to meet with me. She had been simply overwhelmed.

Still, her words flowed crisp and clear like the mountain stream outside the window. She spoke of dreams and visions, of tarot and shamans and sacred medicine, of greening and cleaning the world.

“Everything has a message, if we listen,” she told me.

I listened.

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MEDELLIN, Colombia – I arrived just after dawn after a nine-hour bus ride from Cali, but a fresh breeze from the mountains awakened my excitement at being here in this legendary city at last. Known as the City of Eternal Spring, its descent into war and drug-related violence earned it the sadly twisted moniker “City of Eternal Violence.”

Much has been written of Medellin’s unfortunate role as the headquarters of Pablo Escobar, the most ruthless of Colombia’s drug kingpins, and the references continue long after elite forces stormed his palatial home and shot him dead in 1993. Like Cali, a bloodbath of homicides and car-bombings held this city in its thrall for years.

Walking its peaceful, shady streets today, the nightmare of the ‘90s is just a faded memory, but its legacy lingers on – in the 4.5 million displaced by wars and narcotrafficking that live in shantytowns on the outskirts of cities like Medellin. The core of this city is a paragon of planning, with a Metro system that’s the envy of Latin America, an eye-catching collection of public art (most notably, a collection that native son Fernando Botero famously donated to the city) and an inclusive approach to development that seeks to break down the barriers between rich and poor with ample public spaces.

The wealth accumulated here is evident in the gleaming skyscrapers standing proud against the blue mountains that encircle the Valle de Aburrá, most of which have developed in the past decade.

Still, as my first day in this city made vividly clear, those barriers are far from breaking, with thousands in the colonias outside the city living without jobs, public services, education and hope.

Residents of Medellín and the mountainous department of Antioquía, who call themselves “paisas,” are known for their determination, their creativity and their forward-looking approach to life, described by the term “hecho p’adelante,” roughly translated as throwing themselves forward.

Those characteristics aren’t limited to the well-off, as I was soon to see. I found my hotel in the city center, took a shower and sat down with a cup of coffee and the newspaper, and was intrigued by the lead photo in El Colombiano: a group of youths dressed as Gandhi were making their way around the city, passing out little cards written with messages of peace.

On my way to the supermarket, I ran into one of them, a young man whose face still bore the wrinkled makeup from his morning’s event, and who invited me to the group’s next action in the Parque de las Luces (Park of Lights).

“We’re protesting the militarization of our country,” said one of the youths, referring to the obligatory military service for those without economic means, and the millions (mostly from the U.S. treasury) currently being spent on military bases and what former President Uribe called “democratic security,” placing military forces throughout the countryside. Those forces have been credited with quelling the violence, but have also been charged with countless human rights violations. The main concern expressed by the young men was the lack of economic alternatives that compel young people to choose a path of violence: either join the military, or take up a life of crime.

As we chatted, the noise of drums in the distance was growing louder, and soon we saw why. A demonstration was headed our way, and this was like no demonstration I’ve ever seen. Had it not been for the multicolored signs of protest, I’d have thought I was in the middle of a moving carnival. Children on stilts, their faces brilliantly painted, towered above clowns in rainbow-colored wigs and colorful tophats.

A storm was rolling in so I only got to read a few signs before the clouds opened upon us, dispersing the crowds. The main purpose of this group, from what I was able to discern, was to raise awareness about the desperate conditions among the city’s poor, the increase in cost of services like water and electricity, and an assortment of other issues.

I was struck by the colorfulness and the lively, almost joyful atmosphere of their protest, and I mentioned it to one of the Gandhis, a young man who makes his living by juggling, walking on stilts and occasionally performing in public theater events –like the one he was participating in, which, it turns out, was sponsored by the Mahatma Gandhi Foundation.

“We learned awhile back that people pay more attention to us if we approach them in a fun way, instead of being all angry,” he explained. “So we’ve had to be more creative.”

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Just a few minutes ago, these sixth-graders were reciting the standard visitor’s greeting for me, then grilling me, along with a roomful of their peers – ordinary kids in an ordinary classroom. Now that it’s just the six of us, I’m passing the recorder and asking each of them to tell me their stories, and the tears begin to flow. Tears of grief, but also tears of gratitude.

These are the kids who fell through the cracks, but then were caught by a nurturing network of teachers and volunteers. The School for Street Children (Escuela de la Calle, or EDELAC) began as the quixotic dream of three teachers and a U.S. volunteer who quit their jobs to hold classes in the streets.

Fifteen years later, the project has grown into a well equipped school for 200 children, a shelter for the most needy of them, an internationally known trekking company staffed completely by volunteers and an innovative model for social entrepreneurism.

My first contact with the school was a couple of weeks ago when I prepared to climb Tajumulco, the tallest peak in Central America. I’d heard about Quetzaltrekkers, the tour group who donates all its profits to a school for street children, from Edgar Chitop, a local journalist who serves on the board. Naturally when I chose a trekking company, this was the one.

I encountered a lively group of volunteers, housed at the back of the bohemian youth hostel Casa Argentina, going over gear for the next day’s trek. Yes, they still had room for me, but there was no time to waste. The story of the epic trek is here.

Two days and a summit later, Alexa, a geography major from Pennsylvania, and Dara, a pre-med student from New York, shared a little of what motivated them to give three months of their life without pay to work seven days a week, trekking in the rain and mud, to this organization.

“It sounds like a cliché, but it’s really true – we do it for the kids,” said Alexa. “I came up here because I wanted to hike, but once I saw what was being accomplished, I ended up feeling really invested in the organization.”
Dara agreed. “I feel like I’ve been given so many opportunities in my life, and I’ve wasted a few. If I can do something to help a few people along the way while I’m doing what I love, why not?”

The volunteers take three-month shifts, and they run the organization itself, not only leading the treks but doing marketing, publicity, fundraising, budgeting, preparing the vegetarian meals that are hauled up the mountain on every trek – everything, in short, that is needed to make the program run. And somehow, for 15 years, they’ve made it work.

On the other end of the equation is a very different group of dedicated individuals – the founder, the teachers and the volunteers of EDELAC.

****

Las Rosas lies far off the beaten track for most travelers to Guatemala’s second city. Here in one of the city’s poorest districts on the edge of town, dusty gravel streets cut into the hillsides where traditionally-dressed women try to sell tortillas and sliced fruit to passers-by.

The bus deposited me at the bottom of a long climb, but helpful neighbors pointed out the way. The Escuela de la Calle is probably the only thing for miles around that draws an occasional international volunteer or intern.
A teacher dressed in traditional traje was out front, her students listening attentively from a grassy jumble of stones. “We have the right to… education, health, a family,” child-painted murals declaimed from the whitewashed walls.

I had arrived.

Claudia Cortéz, the director of educational programs, took me on a guided tour, beginning with the second grade. She no sooner mentioned my name when the group burst into a carefully coordinated and practiced greeting. One youngster raised his hand eagerly.

“We’re so pleased to have you hear, and we hope you will enjoy your time at EDELAC,” he recited.
We went from class to class, the children obviously delighted with the opportunity to show off their English and pepper me with questions.

Then Henry, Lesbia, Damaris and three other sixth graders joined me in a different room for an interview, and I was able to see the stories behind those fresh faces, stories I won’t soon forget.

Soon it was time to let them go, but first they led me out to the playground, where each of them posed for me in front of their symbol from the Mayan calendar.

Next I met with Guadalupe, who told me the story of how the school was formed.

“I kept seeing children in the streets, taking drugs, sniffing glue, and I said to myself, I have to do something about this,” Guadalupe recalled.

He was a teacher at that time at a special school for young people who were working at jobs, and two of his colleagues, Ubaldo Ruiz and Miguel Quiroa, were feeling the same way. Together, they decided to quit their jobs and they began gathering the children like modern-day pied pipers, giving classes to the children in the streets. Soon they were joined by an American student, Michael Shorr, and they were four.

“It was a good job I gave up, and here I was earning nothing. But gave us a lot of energy to be with the children – the eyes of the children, the faces of the children, the need of the children, and to see the children so small, 6, 7 years old, sniffing glue, it was so painful to see, and nobody doing anything about it.”

The young men began doing outreach to raise money for a school and a shelter for the homeless children, contacting restaurants for donated food and Spanish schools for donations of money and volunteers. That’s how they found Gavin Barker, an Englishman who started working with the group to help find ways to raise money.

Eventually he hit upon the idea of forming a tour company to sponsor trips to destinations that at that time were virtually unknown to visitors to Quetzaltenango – places like Tajumulco and Lake Atitlan and Santiaguito volcano – and to donate the proceeds to the school. Guadalupe knew the trails, so they recruited volunteers and he taught them the routes, and they were on their way.

In the first years it was extremely challenging; they started out with no gear and no facilities, but eventually people donated gear, and word got around. More people started signing up for volunteer shifts.

Making matters more difficult was that the country was still at war and the people in the highlands were extremely suspicious of outsiders. Guadalupe remembers once when he arrived in a village with a group of trekkers and was surrounded by peasants with sticks and machetes.

“They thought we were guerilleros, and they didn’t want us there. Since I spoke Quiche I explained to them we were an organization that was supporting a school and invited them to come, but it was very difficult.”

Those days are long gone. Now with the help of funding from international organizations, they’ve built the new school in Las Rosas, but the bulk of their funding still comes from Quetaltrekkers.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Guadalupe, the last of the founders to remain and now at the helm of a vibrant school that promotes the preservation of the natural environment and Mayan cultural values, which are one and the same.

He hopes that the word about EDELAC and Quetzaltrekkers will spread and it can become a model for others who want to start alternative schools. I share with him that hope.

Here’s the Interview with Guadelupe Pos, and some photos from my afternoon with the kids.

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“My father told me a long time ago, ‘Martin, God wants a vocation for you.’ And I always looked for it,” he said. “Then one day, God touched me with fear. I was listening to a radio program about the way the climate is changing and it scared me so bad I ran to my room and hid under the covers and trembled. But then I realized I had to do something about it. Instead of hiding in the house, frightened, it’s time to find solutions.”

Martin is a curious mixture of many things that on the surface don’t seem to blend. He’s a business-minded environmentalist and an evangelical Christian working to revive the Mayan cosmovision. He’s the founder of Projuve, short for Youth Program for Sustainable Development (Programa Juvenil para Desarrollo Sostenible), and his enthusiasm for his subject matter is contagious. A youth leader in his evangelical church, he’s managed to attract nine others to the cause, including Carmina, now his wife-to-be, and they’ve all put their work aside today to meet with me at their new Forestry Center, a small protected plot of tree seedlings they are nurturing for a reforestation project.

The youths begin with a brief and very professional introduction, each telling me which of the Projuve departments they belong to: environment, programs, fundraising and business development. The young women are dressed in corte tipica, the traditional Quiché Mayan woven skirts and lacy blouses. The young men are all business casual.

“Here it’s normal for the young people to wear their hair long and their T-shirts loose, but we don’t want to do that,” Martin explained to me later. “We want to have the respect of the community, so that’s why we dress this way – formally. We are trying to earn their trust.”

In the year since their founding, they’ve garnered the support of a local cooperative, which has given them the land and supplies for their forestry center. They’ve held a Christian eco-concert, Una Sola Voz por el Planeta (One voice for the Planet) to raise money for their cause.

They’ve established a recycling project in their town; in a place where the idea of recycling was once as far from most minds as the moon, villagers are now separating their plastic, glass, metal and paper from their organic waste and saving it for the Projuve volunteers, who collect them every two weeks and truck them to the recycling center in Xela.

On an ordinary day, many of this dynamic group can be found hauling bags of rich volcanic soil and mulch from the surrounding forest to mix into the tiny nursery bags for the seedlings in their Forestry Center. Already they’ve got some 8,000 sprouts here, including white pine, oak, cypress and the endangered pinabete, or Guatemalan fir. Their goal is to plant 100,000 in the surrounding deforested areas by the end of the year.

But this is only the beginning. Their long-range goals include an ecotourism program in the surrounding mountain valley, built around a spectacular waterfall in the forest near here. They’re collecting plastic and glass bottles in a warehouse near here that they plan to use as the base for an adobe Earthship-style ecological house, and they’ve enlisted the aid of a green architect to help them design it.

The only thing standing between them and the conversion of Paxtoca into an ecovillage, it seems, is money – but they have faith it will come.

We took turns telling our stories, and each of the youths, from 16-year-old Nicolas to 24-year-old Carmina, shared their fears of a devastated planet and their dream for a green future for their children.

Martin and Carmina took me for a breathtaking hike through the village, up through the cornfields surrounding the forest and down a trail through the woods to the waterfall, which they’ve used as the backdrop for their stunning brochure and their power point presentation.

Then, since the cooperative had loaned them the car for the day, they took me up into the mountains to see another ecological project in the region, the Aprisco Sendero Ecologico, an educational ecocenter in a virgin pine forest near the town of Totonicapan. The hike among the old-growth pines refreshed the spirit while learning stations along the way taught about the endangered birds and trees this forest harbors.

Aprisco is an initiative of CDRO, the Cooperative for Rural Development of the West, an organization that has been promoting sustainable development in the Western Highlands for a generation. They took me by the organization’s learning center, where I had a chat with Ana Victoria Socop, one of the organization’s directors.

Here are a few comments from each of these young movers and shakers that will stay with me.

Martin:

“Jesus loved nature! Remember the story of how he released the doves from the people who were selling them in the temple? Remember how he said, the birds of the air don’t worry about where they will get their food, but God takes care of them. God gave us dominion over nature so that we would take care of it.”

“Our Maya culture is closely related to nature, but we’ve lost a great deal of that. So why don’t we go back and reclaim what’s ours? The Maya saying is, leave no one behind. This applies to nature, as well.”

“We created the concept, ‘empre-ambiental’ (empresarial plus environmental) because we have to have development, but it doesn’t need to hurt the environment. I said to myself, if they can do this in Xela, why can’t we do it here? Here we have the resources, the natural beauty. We should be able to make it work here.”

“I give talks to the young people and I say, ‘Kids, now is our time, it’s the time for us to show what we are made of.”

“If they support us from outside, that’s great but we also have to learn how to generate our own financing. A lot of times groups will arrive in the villages and the people will say, ‘What are you bringing us?’ We say, ‘what do we have to offer?’ We’re trying to change the paradigm.”

Ana, 20 – “We were seeing that the trash was collecting all around and it was really affecting us. Sometimes the grandfathers cut the trees in the mountains and don’t replant them. So we got together and we said, we have to make the change; if we don’t, nobody will. We want to have a beautiful place to hand down to the little ones when it’s their time.”

Jairo, 21 – “I’d been studying science and thinking already about the way the future is looking and feeling really scared about it. Then one day at church I heard a talk that Martin gave and I said, and I loved the idea, I was delighted to join this team.”

Pablo, 20 – “Now that we’ve been going around picking up the recyclables the people are beginning to trust us. Guatemala is changing and I realized, I wanted to be a part of it – we have to really put out the effort to make it better.”

Nicolas, 16: “Now is the time we can raise up a generation of change. Maybe the last generations believed that you could cut the trees down and they’d come back by themselves, but now we realize they don’t come back by themselves, and without trees there is no life, we can’t breathe.”

Josias, 20: “Sometimes we young people don’t really think about what we’re doing, just throwing trash and such. Now we’re beginning to realize what our environment really needs, and that’s why we’ve started all these projects, which are going to require a lot of work. And since I’m in charge of fundraising, I know we’re going to need some money to make it happen, and I’m not sure how we’re going to do it, but I know we have to.”

Jose, 18: “Up here in the highlands, the sun used to just warm us, but now it burns us. We have to do something for our planet. We can’t fix what’s already been done but what we can do is raise the awareness of our friends and neighbors, saying what are we going to leave our children? We can’t give them a destroyed planet. We want them to be able to have what we enjoyed.”

Carmina, 24: “I had the opportunity to work as a volunteer in an NGO, and I was sharing with many foreigners. I realized that the reality we were living – we went to many places where there were not more trees, the mountains were completely treeless. We saw places where there was extreme poverty. This motivated me to do something, but I didn’t know what to do by myself. I saw how the foreigners came to help, but when they extended a hand to help, the people would reach out and say, give us more.”

“Why do other people come to help our people when we can do it ourselves? But then a friend told me about Projuve, and at first it didn’t really convince me. The third time I said, let me see what they’re doing. Then it was Martin who told me the whole vision of Projuve. Then I said, I think I can contribute something here. So I decided to stay and see what I could do to realize the vision of a green Paxtoca.”

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