So I’m down in Guatemala with my family visiting the Plenty volunteer camp in San Andrés Itzapa. We’re friends with several villages and one of them is really nice, it’s almost intact. It’s up quite a way from Guatemala City. You know, in Guatemala City, everybody wears western clothes and if they’re poor, they really look poor. Then back a little way from Guatemala City, up toward the hills, you get to where the Indian people live; the Indian ladies wear traditional garb and the men don’t — they wear western clothes, and too many drink and beat their wives. But farther back up in the hills, even the men wear their traditional clothing, they have a fair amount of dignity, and are good to their wives.
It was amazing; I could hardly drive around in that place because I couldn’t go past those people very fast. I wanted to take in each one. They were so good, you know, it was a groove to see each one of them. Loved it. We worked there and we went through a lot of changes with those people.
When we headed back to the United States from that trip, most of us cried the first two days after we left Guatemala, straight through.
We just cried for two days. Every time we’d think about it, we’d all load up and start to cry a little again. We realized that Itzapa had become our heart’s home. I feel that all us wonderbread people need an Itzapa of the heart, if I can use that phrase. We really need that bad, because that’s what could let us understand what’s happening to our world.
The people of the world who truly understand the situation and the condition we’re in are not the Club of Rome, and not even Buckminster Fuller, as much as I love him, but the people in Papua New Guinea and the Inuit and the Basotho of southern Africa and the Hopi and the Sami; the tribal people of the world, who are being squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. To understand that truly, you must think planetarily. You have to realize that what goes on here affects what goes on there.
Although we have an infinitely open system, eternally regenerative like Bucky Fuller says, as far as this material plane goes, this is pretty much what we’ve got to work with for now.
