Looking back…
It’s only been a couple days since I’ve gotten home but it feels like a long time detached from the constant stimulation I had in Brazil. As details fade there are a few concepts that stand out to me and will stay with me as I move on to the next chapters of my life.
Looking back one of the things I notice is the complex situations we discussed during many of our visits and outings. With many different people involved, all with their own motives, it’s impossible to make a snap shot judgment of any one situation. I first noticed this with during our visit to Billings Reservoir where many of us, being from an extremely law abiding country, couldn’t understand why people who illegally moved onto land were being condoned and granted government assistance for “regularizing” their community. After learning about the years of government fragmentation between environmental protection and the rights of those people to not be displaced it became clear that more than one point of view needs to be considered before developing a proposed solution. One other time I was faced with opposing views was when we visited the Alcoa Bauxite Mine. As much as it bothered me to see the deforestation and stripping of the land, a part of me felt surprisingly understanding of it. Now, I say this because whether it’s apparent or not each and every one of us uses aluminum in our day to day lives. In fact, life as we know it could not exist if mineral extraction didn’t take place so I was forced to rationalize that the project wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
The strong community and connectedness of many of the places we visited will stay with me. This was displayed even in our excursions to parks where people exercised, picnicked and smoked hookah but even more so in our visits to the MST and the indigenous communities in the Amazon. The MST I will particularly remember after we spent the day eating and talking with them about how materialistic and self involved our society has become. They were inspiring in ways that made me feel that it was possible to go against the norms and live life in a way that is soul fulfilling rather than ego fulfilling. The way they all shared their resources and worked together while all playing their role is a way of life that I believe we have strayed from in our capitalist model. It also saddens me to come back to a society where most people don’t think three times about being in a job, a supposed life purpose, they hate. Although they labeled themselves as communists or socialists which has a very negative connotation in the United States, nothing about their way of life seemed negative to me which threw me and continues to make me curious.
Attempting to incorporate what I learnt in Brazil into my life back home I believe is inevitable as it was such a big learning experience. Sometime it feels daunting to face all the systems in place that stand in the way of us reaching true sustainability and human rights movements. But if there’s one thing I can say about this trip is it taught me that no one person can make a difference; it takes many people, all passionate about a cause, with different strengths to implement change.