Barra de la Cruz

Before arriving in Oaxaca, I never expected to return to Barra de la Cruz. This project was aimed at helping the communities along the rivers of Southern Oaxaca. Barra doesn't rest along any of the rivers that we paddle. It's a seaside village, tucked into a bay about 15km east of Hualtulco. Other than the fact that it had some amazing surf, I knew little about the town or the people that lived there.

My friend Mark and I had visited the town 4 years ago on a whim. Someone in La Crucecita had recommended it for surfing. When we got there we found the beach deserted and the waves simply awesome. Where are all the gringos?, I thought. This place should be packed with surfers. I was sure that Barra had been discovered, and that maybe it was just the off-season. But where was all the evidence? Where was the second-hand board shop? The crappy burrito stand and taco bar run by the tourists that never went home?

Much like the casual visit of four years ago, I came again to this quiet little village by the sea not expecting much of anything. It was more so that my father could swim in the Pacific for the first time in his life and see a beach with no hotels, no houses, no nothing. And just as it did four years ago, Barra completely surprised us.

I was a little worried, frankly. The gringos (and this is not a negative term - I'm a gringo) certainly had found this place by now. The question was: how much damage had been done?

Driving into town though, I had to blink again at the pastures and palms lining the dirt road. The town looked exactly the same. There were no new houses on the hill, no condos for rent, no crappy burrito stands and tourist bars. There were surfers though, a bunch of them.

We ran into Pepe, the mayor of Barra, more or less by accident. In looking for Barra's school, one of the boys at the toll gate had pointed us over to his house. He was busy rewiring an electric fan and looking generally perplexed, when we arrived. Have a seat, he insisted, I need a break from this thing anyway.

For the next hour, our conversation moved from education to land rights to the political organization of Barra itself. In responding to question after question, Pepe tirelessly delivered to us Barra's concepts of its past, present and future. I am convinced a book could easily be written on the vision of this place. The unity and cooperation of the people are truly amazing.

Nowhere is the value system more apparent than in Barra's schools. 30 years ago, the government built the structures for the primary and secondary students. Since then, not a penny of state or federal aid has come from above to maintain them. Yet the buildings are spotless, freshly painted, and equipped with chalkboards, desks, and tables.

Everything we have in the schools, everything we do to maintain them is payed for by our own money, says Pepe. Everyone in the community contributes, he says, it is the only way that we can provide what our children need. Along with health, education is priority number one for Barra's kids. For that reason the community has one of the highest graduation rates not just in Oaxaca, but in all of Mexico.

The success of education in Barra has everything to do with the parents, says Pepe. There's no skipping school to go surfing. This is a small town, he says with a smile, a place where parents always find out.

Still, with all the support from parents and the community, maintaining the quality of education in Barra is no easy task. Teachers must scrape together money for their own supplies. Extras like crayons, notebooks, art materials must all be bought with community funds. The community also has to provide lunch, as there is no (functioning) school lunch program in the area. The secondary school, which houses around 60 kids, is literally falling down. Pepe has three times now petitioned the state for partial funds to help build a new one, all to no avail. So, he says, we'll just have to do it Barra style - save our money , and do it ourselves.

After talking with Pepe and seeing the schools in action, it was truly a no-brainer to decide to donate much of the Rivers of Tomorrow supplies to this community. With the help of the school principal and a few other leaders, we unloaded over 400 pounds of pencils, pens, paper, notebooks, crayons, calculators, and other items into the municipal storeroom. The teachers and principals would sit down that night, Pepe assured us, and decide upon how to distribute the goods.

I assured them that all the supplies were donated, that there were no strings attached and that they could do what they want. I explained how much of it had been sitting around in teacher's closests for years, that it was never going to be used in the States. They couldn't quite believe it. How could you not have a use for all this stuff?

In the end Pepe and the principal took us on a closer tour of the school. We visited a sixth grade class where kids were working on long division. 'They're so well behaved,' my father said after the visit, 'in 33 years of teaching I've never seen kids so respectful.'

'We are different,' said Pepe.

Indeed they are.