From Chiapas with Love Essay -- Graduate Law Admissions Essays

From Chiapas with Love   nonpareil of the first mistakes I made in coming to IU was thinking that plainly by knowlight-emitting diodegeing I could understand the costs of people. I thought that if I learned enough- read enough books, talked to enough professors, attended enough forums, and developed my ability to artfully use jargon, Id be powerful and wise in the first place I knew it.   The next mistake I made was to decide to study the Zapatistas. As I was soon to discover, the movement which has grown up almost the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico is not something that can 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 thought it would be a nice way to fall off my degree in Anthropology-an honors thesis, and something that could definitely be called an international fancy.   Getting to Mexico was an international experience all in itself. I played out three days traveling through a foreign verdant before I reached the Mexican border. The country in which I was natural 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. later five days on buses of all shapes, sizes, and smells, I arrived in Chiapas, the Southeastern-most acres in the Republic of Mexico. What I found t present has left me, I think, a little outside the bounds of appropriate distance i... ...discomfort. Im supposed(a) to be a better person, and more adult.   I cant say that. Im ill-at-ease, pensive, and perpetually seeing the faces of the people I know there in my dreams he aring their voices telling their stories through my throat. Im deeply uncomfortable in the world I live in, and I think about our future, the worlds future, every day. I cry out at night out of helplessness. I can tell you, my reader, that I learned from my time in Chiapas. I learned the most authorized 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 pass ons 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 taken from you.