Teaching...and learning.

Sustainable development is a very popular catch word these days, often associated with a movement toward social justice and environmental preservation in the ¨developing¨world (I won´t get into the political connotations of development here). Here I am up close and personal with a community based on the principles of sustainable development, La Cambalacha.

In this small town on Lake Atitlán, La Cambalacha serves as a center for the study and practice of the arts: theater, clowning, dance, yoga, painting, and drawing. Woven into all of these practices are values of respect toward all people and toward Mother Earth.

Ashleigh and I have been privileged to work a bit with some of La Cambalacha´s students. They come in the morning and do their ¨chores,¨which keep the place clean and orderly. Then they change into their playclothes and get ready to move.

We are teaching dance, yoga, and theater to students of various ages. Our first class was a dance class for 14 to 17 year-olds, and we managed to teach them an absract movement routine we choreographed to a Guatemalan song. Later that day, I worked with Darragh and his student, Giovanni, on a monologue that Giovanni is hoping to use one day to audition for an acting school or a play. It was a powerful piece from a Guatemalan playwright, a political satire intended to show the inequity between the poor and the rich elites in Central America. Giovanni is also writing his own piece, about violence--again within a political context.

Before I get more into an explanation of La Cambalacha, I want to do some investigative work, so I am going to interview the founder, Gabi, and her partner Charlie who helps run the place. I am also going to interview some of the volunteers.

Before any of that, however, I am going to go to yoga class, which Ashleigh is teaching this morning. Gabi is a former dancer, and she has built a beautiful studio here for the students to use.

More to come soon.