From Chiapas with Love Essay -- Graduate Law Admissions Essays

From Chiapas with Love   One of the first mistakes I made in coming to IU was thinking that simply by analyzeing I could understand the lives of people. I thought that if I learned enough- read enough books, talked to enough professors, attended enough forums, and developed my ability to slyly use jargon, Id be powerful and wise before I knew it.   The next mistake I made was to decide to study the Zapatistas. As I was in short to discover, the movement which has grown up around the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico is not something that butt be studied, used, and forgotten. It is something that eats its way into you until you cant extricate yourself from it without seriously damaging who you are.   These two bumbles led me, in my third year of university studies, to ask the IU Honors College for money to go to Chiapas to live in an autonomous community. I planned to study the people-their society, their culture, and their situation in the world. I tho ught it would be a nice way to top off my degree in Anthropology-an honors thesis, and something that could definitely be called an outside(a) experience.   Getting to Mexico was an international experience all in itself. I spent three days traveling through a extraneous state of matter before I reached the Mexican border. The country in which I was born seemed, in the full flower of September 11th hysteria, far more foreign than anything I could imagine down in the depths of the jungles of Southeast Mexico. After five days on buses of all shapes, sizes, and smells, I arrived in Chiapas, the Southeastern-most State in the nation of Mexico. What I found there has left me, I think, a little outside the bounds of appropriate distance i... ...discomfort. Im supposed to be a cave in person, and more adult.   I cant say that. Im ill-at-ease, pensive, and constantly seeing the faces of the people I know there in my dreams hearing their voices telling their stories through my throat. Im deeply awkward in the world I live in, and I think about our future, the worlds future, every day. I cry at night out of helplessness. I can tell you, my reader, that I learned from my time in Chiapas. I learned the most important lesson of my university experience there, from people who didnt understand what graduate school was. So here it is. After all, thats what the university is about, right? Sharing knowledge.   Education provides the tools. It can never provide the quest. People tell their own stories best, and dignity is what you have left when everything else has been interpreted from you.