Javier A. Tabush

          We had been talking about going to Finca El Zapote a while ago but to be honest, I didn´t think we were actually going to go since we hadn´t taken the time to sit down and plan everything and all of a sudden we were a couple of days away from going. I have to acknowledge Bert and Ingrid, especially Ingrid, for all of the planning and actually making it happen. This trip definitely brought us closer as a group and also it brought me closer to myself; I got to know myself a whole lot during it.

          One of the most important highlights of this trip was the fact that we watched the movie Agora, which I had never heard of before entering the MPC. This movie had so many connections to our process of learning at the MPC, I now understand why Bert wanted us to wait before watching it. Starting with the Copernican Revolution all the way to Plato, this movie has taken me on an amazing intellectual journey of acquaintances. We learned when reading Plato that in order to be involved in politics you have to betray your values. This can be seen with Orestes and probably most of the prefects in the movie. Hypatia is the perfect example of the exact opposite; she follows her beliefs no matter what.

          One significant topic that came up during our dialogue after discussing Agora, was religion. I wonder why everybody feels that discussing religion is such a taboo in our society. For the reason that nobody discussed their beliefs on their different religions is why there were so many conflicts in humanity just like in the movie with the Christians and the Greek polytheists. We were discussing at the MPC that the world and humanity could have saved themselves from so many wars and stupid conflicts just by having a dialogue and expressing what both sides feel, applying what we have learned so far in On Dialogue and Difficult Conversations.

          We came to a conclusion that questioning everything is uncomfortable and that´s why nobody does it. The important thing to know is that questioning everything is everything. The moment your stop questioning others and questioning yourself, what is next? That is the whole point around our learning process as humanity, asking yourself why?
 

          Going back to our trip to El Zapote, and getting into our meta-dialogue from this week, Pablito mentioned something really important. We were talking about how we should apply our values as an MPC culture, outside of the MPC in our regular lives. He related this to our river walk and the climbing of the waterfall. I remembered he tried life five times before being able to go up but the important thing is that he never stopped trying until he managed to go up. This is how the MPC works, we all pull each other up until eventually we´re all going to be on the top as successful human beings.
 

          One of the most valuable culture teachings I have learned so far is how to approach people. The book Difficult Conversations has helped me in a personal life a lot on how to approach those awkward conversations that everybody avoids but the awkwardness won´t go away until the conversation is affronted. According to David Bohm in On Dialogue, the world can be a much better place if we dialogue and discuss more. These two books have amazing teachings and I am witness that the strategies discussed in these books do help.
 

          During these two semesters I´ve learned to organize myself so much and even though it has been tough it´s been helpful as well. I also managed to set much higher standards for most of the things that I am doing. One example I can give relating it to what I have been writing about, is my camera obscura. I´ve redone it a couple of times now since the first times I´ve done it, it hasn´t worked. Even though I´ve been taking a long time to do it, I know that when I finish it, it´s going to work.
 

          Concluding these two amazing weeks, I feel that we have gained so much trust as a group. I forgot to mention that we did an activity during the Drama epicycle in which we had to share an impacting part of our lives that brought back the same feelings and emotions we felt when we lived it. This activity definitely broke down some barriers and assumptions we had about others since we didn´t know the true story behind some of the faces we see every day. In my case I chose to talk about a really personal matter and it was tough convincing myself of doing it since I´ve known my classmates for a couple of months, but I´m glad I did because that made everyone else open more and that made the activity so much more enriching.