This month, 25 youth from Mexico and around the world arrived in Oaxaca to participate in the first School for Warriors without Weapons in Mexico. Participants worked in a neighborhood of primarily rural migrants on the periphery of Oaxaca City towards the construction of a project that had to be ecologically sound, economically viable, socially just and based in the dreams of community members.
The School for Warriors without Weapons was started in Santos, Brazil by a group of architecture students tired of being assigned to design five star hotels when what they really wanted were tools to address the conditions of the fast growing urban slums they saw all around them. Underlying their interest to put architecture at the service of the poor rather than the rich was a belief that all the resources necessary to make change happen exist within marginalized communities. These students founded the non-profit organization ELOS (Links), and developed the School for Warriors without Weapons as an experiential learning program for young people anxious to change the world to start introspectively and work their way out.
For the warrior, change starts at home. The School for Warriors without Weapons believes that if you want to have a broader impact, you must first make sure your own actions are consistent with your own values. Through daily chores, workshops on non-violent communication, and an emphasis on re-establishing a more profound relationship with the natural environment, the School for Warriors without Weapons promotes reflection on participants’ personal search for that congruence. Each week in Oaxaca began with a ritual celebrating one of the natural elements—earth, water, fire, or air—to engage how we relate to that element. We hiked high up the Sierra Mixe and into a cave where we made a sacrifice to the earth that feeds us, followed the river downstream in the rain to a powerful waterfall, chanted together in a sweat lodge, worked in the cornfields in the Northern Sierra and received limpias, traditional cleansing rituals with herbs to balance the good air and the bad air within us. At the end of each week, we held a Fire Council, a bonfire which each person approached, one by one, to reflect on what qualities of the natural element celebrated that week represented what we had learned, achieved, or what continued to challenge us.
The warriors also participated in a series of talks designed to provide them with tools to support their work in the community. Guest speakers gave lectures and workshops on ecological architectural practices, up-cycling (making something beautiful or useful from garbage), water scarcity and alternatives in Oaxaca, indigenous practices of self-governance, gender, the paradoxes of solidarity, organic agriculture and local responses to global warming. The program’s main form of transportation, fondly known as the “Che-bus”, was an old school bus revamped to run on reused vegetable oil.
The underlying philosophy of the School for Warriors without Weapons is one of abundance rather than scarcity. The 30-day program is aimed at nurturing a new vision of the world capable of seeing what resources, skills, dreams and beauty exist in any given community, to re-train eyes taught to see only conditions of misery. In Oaxaca, we worked in a community called El Diamante, a neighborhood near Oaxaca City that suffers both intense flooding during the rainy season and serious water scarcity during most of the year. On first glance the neighborhood looks like many others in Oaxaca: no house has running water and wells dry up during the long dry season, meaning that very low-income families are burdened by outrageous costs of water that has to be brought in trucks from great distances. Families burn garbage because there is almost no city-sponsored garbage collection. The piping of toilets end near the streets, as there is no water treatment system. However, the School for Warriors without Weapons pushed participants to reframe problems as opportunities and to learn to perceive the wealth we have been taught not to see. We soon discovered that El Diamante is much more self-sufficient than most economically wealthy neighborhoods. Neighbors make decisions and resolve conflicts in assembly and depend on unpaid communal labor called tequio, rather than government, to meet basic needs, such as building roads or cutting grass in shared spaces. The more the warriors spoke with the neighbors of El Diamante, the more colorful and rich the neighborhood became to us. We found people who know how to build houses, people who grow beautiful vegetables and flowers, people who speak Mazateco as well as Spanish, people who cook wonderful meals, people who have migrated far from home to help feed their families in Oaxaca, women who have walked three days through the mountains to Juquila to ask for a miracle to cure a sick family member, bright children who love to make art and play volleyball, traditional dancers from the coast, gifted storytellers, and an incredible openness and generosity towards those of us who were coming from far away to spend a month in their community.
The School for Warriors without Weapons is divided into five phases: Perception, Information, Reflection, Proposition and Action. During Perception Week, participants walked through the neighborhood without speaking, their focus on feeling rather than thinking, and on taking in the neighborhood with senses other than sight. Some walked barefoot, and some closed their eyes as they walked. During the following week participants had the chance to collect information by talking to neighbors about their values, origins, beliefs, dreams and ways of celebrating life. They were also responsible for discovering both the physical resources (land, materials, tools) and cultural resources (skills, knowledge, technologies, customs) available in the community. Participants were asked to talk to everyone in the neighborhood including children, old people, women and men, people with special needs, and people who belong to different affinity groups.
Following Perception and Information weeks were several days of reflection, which culminated in Day of the Oasis, in which participants presented their findings to both neighbors and the larger community of Oaxaca. Participants made a slideshow and several creative maps (a tree and a snail that presented the organizational structure and dreams of the community), and then divided all those present into small discussion groups.
Following the Day of the Oasis, participants had three days to create a proposal for action in the community. The rules: the action had to be done without money, it had to be based in the dreams of community members, and it had to be spectacular. “How can we build something spectacular with no money?” some participants asked. “Make use of the resources you now know exist,” responded facilitators. Participants made models to present the action, after which neighbors made critiques and suggested changes. The proposal in El Diamante included a soccer field, a garden, water-conserving trees, a tire swing, a see-saw, a gazebo for community meetings, a mural, and the expansion of ditches for improved drainage. Children wanted more swings and more toys in general, several women wanted an altar where they could go to pray, and other people envisioned having fruit trees as well as water-conserving trees, so all those were added to the proposal
Now that the proposal had been agreed upon, participants had the big challenge before them: making it real and making it spectacular. The first day of Action Week, participants ran around looking for materials: things neighbors had lying around from old construction projects, piles of old wood or bricks around dumpsters, seedlings that families or greenhouses were willing to donate. They also had to get neighbors involved, rounding up women who knew how to make adobe bricks for the altar, men who had worked with cement and laid rooftops, youth from the coast with experience weaving who could make soccer nets, children to sand down old metal pieces and paint pots for plants. With the help of all of the neighbors, all of the participants and many volunteers who came out from Oaxaca City, in a week the Jardín de los Sueños (Garden of Dreams) was inaugurated with music from Los Raices, a son jarocho group, traditional dance from the coast, and a play produced by an indigenous theatre group from the Northern Sierra. Children played on the see-saw and organized for everyone who had worked on the playhouse to put their hand prints in bright colored paint.
What was built in such a short time with so much creative energy from so many people was, indeed, spectacular. But most of the magic wasn’t the work of nails and boards or ditches dug. It had much more to do with the bridges built on dreams and laughter, on sweating together under the hot summer sun, on tearful goodbyes and on the stories we all carry with us.
