From Chiapas with LoveOne of the first mistakes I made when coming to IU was thinking that simply by studying I could understand people's lives. I thought that if I learned enough, read enough books, talked to enough professors, frequented enough forums, and developed my ability to use jargon skillfully, I would be powerful and wise before I knew it. The next mistake I made was to decide to study the Zapatistas. As I would soon discover, the movement that grew around the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico is not something that can be studied, used and forgotten. It's something that eats at you inside until you can extricate yourself from it without seriously damaging who you are. These two mistakes 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 intended to study people, their society, their culture and their situation in the world. I thought it would be a great way to round out my degree in Anthropology, an honors thesis, and something that could definitely be called an “international experience.” Coming to Mexico was an international experience in itself. I spent three days traveling through a foreign country before reaching the Mexican border. The country I was born in seemed, in the midst of the 9/11 hysteria, far more foreign than anything I could have imagined deep in the jungles of southeastern Mexico. After five days on buses of all shapes, sizes and smells, I arrived in Chiapas, the most south-eastern state of the Republic of Mexico. What I found left me, I think, a little outside the bounds of "appropriate distance"... middle of paper... discomfort. I should be a better, more grown-up person. I can't say. I am uncomfortable, thoughtful, and in my dreams I constantly see the faces of people I know; hearing their voices telling their stories through my throat. I feel deeply uncomfortable in the world I live in and think about our future, the future of the world, every day. At night I cry from helplessness. I can tell you, my reader, that I learned from my time in Chiapas. There I learned the most important lesson of my "college experience," from people who didn't understand what graduate school was. So here it is. After all, that's what university is, isn't it? Share knowledge. Education provides the tools. It will never be able to provide the research. People tell their stories better and dignity is what you have left when everything else has been taken away from you.