Cancun Dispatch: 9/1

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CANCUN CITY, MEXICO -- The welcome center is open! About 12 of us hold a short ritual there for protection in the morning. It is four stories high, with a radio tower on the roof, and we go through every floor we have access to beating drums and making noise to drive away negative energies, then hold hands and chant on the roof, invoking protection, respect, ease for our work, an open doorway for all helpful influences. We come back down, encircling each room clockwise, the direction of the sun, sprinkling waters of the world, and singing, then ground on the ground floor and the space is open!

On the bottom floor is information and art. The puppet makers have constructed a beautiful styrofoam sculptured head of one of the Mayan Gods and are covering it with tinfoil scales. The second floor is locked, but on the third is a big meeting room and on the fourth are smaller rooms for meetings and trainings. By the end of the day, our Green Bloc has fixed a tarp on the roof to collect rainwater and direct it into the main water tank. This is especially useful, as the water pump has broken, and without water in the top tank it's hard to flush the toilets except by carrying pails of water up the stairs. By tomorrow we will have fixed tarps above the entranceway below to shelter us from the rain and to catch drinking water.

After the ritual, Erik and I take a taxi to the Casa de la Cultura to meet with the director, hop another back to the office of our contact with the city, and then the afternoon is taken up with a long meeting about the actions. In the middle of it, I get a call that Rodrigo, our permaculture ally from Mexico City, has arrived, complete with a bag of worms for compost. Rodrigo is tall and slim, with his dark hair in a pony tail and a sweet, wry smile. He said he simply carried the worms onto the airplane and told us how he managed it:

"What is that?" the security guard asked.

"Worms."

"Worms? You can't bring worms onto the airplane!"

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