From Chiapas with loveOne of the first mistakes I made when coming to IU was thinking that just by studying I could understand people's lives. I thought that if I learned enough, read enough books, talked to enough professors, frequented enough forums, and developed my ability to use jargon artfully, I would be powerful and wise before I knew it. The next mistake I made was deciding to study the Zapatistas. As I soon discovered, the movement that grew around the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Mexico is not something that can be studied, used, and forgotten. It's something that eats away at you until you can't get away from it without seriously damaging who you are. These two bumblebees led me, during my third year of college, to apply for money from the IU Honors College. Chiapas to live in an autonomous community. I planned to study people, their society, their culture and their situation in the world. I thought it would be a good way to complement my anthropology degree - an honors thesis and something that could definitely be called an "international experience." Arriving in Mexico was an international experience in itself. I spent three days traveling through a foreign country before reaching the Mexican border. The country I was born in seemed, in the midst of 9/11 hysteria, far stranger than anything I could imagine deep in the jungles of southeastern Mexico. After five days on buses of all shapes, sizes and smells, I arrived in Chiapas, the southeasternmost state of the Republic of Mexico. What I found there left me, I think, a little outside the bounds of "appropriate distance" I...... middle of paper ...... discomfort. I'm supposed to be a better and more adult person. I can't say that. I am uneasy, thoughtful and constantly see the faces of people I know in my dreams; hearing their voices tell their stories through my throat. I feel deeply uncomfortable in the world I live in and I think every day about our future, the future of the world. I cry at night out of helplessness. I can tell you, my reader, what I learned from my time in Chiapas. This is where I learned the most important lesson of my “college experience,” from people who didn’t understand what graduate school was. So there you go. After all, that’s what college is all about, right? Share knowledge. Education provides the tools. He will never be able to provide the quest. People tell their own stories best, and dignity is what you're left with when everything else has been taken away...