The Indian village of San Juan Chamula

The last day in San Cristobal de las Casas, Annina and I decided to visit the indian village of San Juan de Chamula, around 10km from San Cristobal. There were a lot of organised tours to closeby villages, but we didnt really feel comfortable joining an "authentic meal" with the villagers, or participate in a "wedding ceremony", so we picked a "chicken"-ride on a minivan to the village on Wednesday afternoon . (Unfortunately no chickens this time..)

Already in the van you could notice the different features of these people, and everyone was speaking Tzotzil, the most common language in this area. Annina sat with me in the backseat next to a beautiful little girl around 3 years old, with big brown eyes, and traditional braids in her hair. From the window you could see some houses passing by, mainly made of metal-roofs and poor walls.

When arriving in San Juan de Chamula, we were immediately surrounded by little kids asking for a peso, or selling handicrafts. Since it is forbidden in the village to take pictures, we dont have any. The village is famous for its church with quite specific rituals. Inside the church the floor was covered with pineneedles, and candles were burning everywhere. I was suprised how normally all the villagers were acting inside, although there was a lot of tourists staring at what they were doing. Close to the altar, there were two old ladies sacrificing a chicken and holding it above some candles. In the back end of the church some men were playing the accordion, guitars and other instruments. The church smelt strongly of incents, and the smoke of candles blurred the statues of saint which were ligned along the wall.

The habitants of San Juan Chamula have traditionally combined pre-Hispanic beliefs with Christianity, and they believe that this church is the centre of the world. There are healers in the church, offering a combination of eggs, Coca-Cola (heaps of bottles were being carried in all the time) and candles, in order to heal the diseases of the people visiting them.

When we got out of a church, a cute little girl offered to explain to us in Spanish about the different traditions of the church, and the village. She had done a great job learning by heart all kinds of intersting facts, and we were quite happy listening to here stories, and rewarding her for her knowledge.

We went walking around in the village, looking at the artisanias on the streets, and visiting the church graveyard. The villagers nowadays live much of tourism, and you could see how eager they were to sell their products.

Before leaving the village, we decided to sit down for a drink. Another little girl came up to us and asked for us to buy her a drink. So we offered her some grapejuice and she sat down to hold us company. In only a moment, her brother joined us, and we ended up buying him a drink too, since they were quite persistent in asking different things as gifts :) we asked them the typical questions on their school, home and what games they like to play. Just made me realise that kids really are the same everywhere in the world. We bought them some notebooks before returning to San Cristobal, and in some way I felt that at that moment, I could do just that little thing for these kids, although I´m usually not a big fan of giving money to people begging, but rather try to support more sustainable ways of charity.

It was just really interesting to see this completely different way of living, but now I start to understand where all of the 40 million people living with under a dollar a day in Mexico are. The poorness just cannot be grasped. Needless to say, we were quite emotionally exhausted on our way back to the city..