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Helen Samuels calls herself the "absent link" for many disenfranchised youth in Mexico City who grow up without adult role models in their lives. She mentors different groups, including Tierra Viva, that seek to transform society, and tries to facilitate their vision. Through Mexcalibur, the organization she founded, she unites them for a common purpose: community service. When we visited Mexico last August, Helen brought the punks together with the Aztec dancers for a "tekio" (community service), whose purpose was to teach poor families the hazards of breathing cement dust, prevalent in the slums. Using a technique that the punks learned through permaculture workshops, they covered a cement wall with a natural paste made from clay, cactus and hay. We used the opportunity to talk to Helen about the importance of service in "Fourth World" communities.
HELEN SAMUELS: Tekio [or tequio] is a wonderful word. It really means work but because it's your gift to the community it's a way of bringing people together. It's an ancient thing that the native people do here, and it's something that kept the society together and they can do things that aren't costly for them.
HS: Yeah, and the punks brought it up to the future. It's about service also; it's about doing something for somebody else. It started with the Mexica (Aztec) people, but each culture has a name for it. If you look up and down the Americas you'll find that they all have that element but they may call it something else.
HS: Well they're both tribes, one's the emerging tribe. The punks came in during this part of history and they are urban tribes. But they lean towards the ancient teachings as well.
HS: It gives me the greatest hope on earth. I mean I see the news, and I just have to turn it off and come out here, this is what nourishes me. This is hope. This is the reason I live for every single day I wake up, this is the joy of my life. I would like to invite a lot more elders, all over the world, to stop complaining about kids and turn around and say, "What is happening in the world?" and then say, "Can I share some information with you? Is there anything I can do?" That would be my message.
HS: Well I tell you something, kids are creative, and they'll create a lot of problems or they'll create a better world, but they have to create, we can't stop them. Kids need guidance and things to do. These kids might never be computer experts or something like that, but this is what they can be experts in, and the world needs it actually.
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HELEN SAMUELS: Okay the Fourth World is the growing poverty belts around major cities, which are First and Second worlds. These punks are not even part of the Third World. The Third World has elders; they have cows, a piece of land, etc. These guys are born in a state of decay, the post-industrial decay. Their inheritance is garbage. They have to work with what they have, and very few people know about them because they live in a little bubble. But the majority of the youth of the world have inherited a dysfunctional, a financially dysfunctional system. So we build our own system, we build our own future.
HS: Absolutely, and it's a matter of survival. You know the four elements, energy, water, earth, air -- they're all either poisoned, lacking or in a state of breakdown. How long can you hold your breath, how long can you be without food or without water? All of these kids have suffered hunger, sometimes for days. They've suffered brutality, all of them. And what happens, they're called to do something good to change it. To me, that's exquisite. You know, it's an exquisite song to humanity.
HS: You can't get to this level of communication without them adopting me and I adopting them, I have a very big family. And you know what? Now they're family with other their people as well. We just came back from Chiapas, we had punks, we had indigenous kids all working together, and smiling together. What brings us together is work.
HS: And play yeah, there has to be a lot of that you know.
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HELEN SAMUELS: That when people are living in extreme survival conditions and they've lost a lot of the values of the consumer world, something very beautiful happens: they get creative. If they're not doing drugs or something like that, their natural condition is creativity and I've learned to know that that's our greatest resource. We think our resources are money, fancy cars… our greatest resource is hope and creativity and I've learned that from them. They have more hope and less things, material things than anybody I know and look at them, they have joy. I learned that.
HS: I have hope for the whole world, because more and more every day the work of young people like them and many others. You know, I'm just a little tiny thing. There are many others doing it. You'll find them in different parts of the world. And to the youth out there, I want to say, first think about what your world is like around you, really look at it, see if there's something you'd like to change and do something, anything.
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