8/5/03 San Cristobal Today we visited the Centro Integral Para Capacitacion Indigena, or CIPCI. CIPCI provides vocational training to indigenous people in its location on the outskirts of San Cristobal. They have about 75 people on the school grounds being trained in such skills as auto repair, electronics, agriculture and a host of other skills. They live communally with an emphasis on self-sufficiency. They grow their own organic vegetables and raise chickens and rabbits. It is amazing how politically aware people are in this area. They know a tremendous amount about the issues of GMOs, agribusiness and globalization in general.
"The final jet-booster of this trend is the airlines' extraordinarily
successful frequent-flier programs, which have provided the burgeoning
hyperflier culture with its own currency, lexicon, and class structure. ...
The hyperfliers may think they're getting something for nothing, but they're
actually playing the airlines' game. By tightly restricting free flights,
airlines have rigged it so that a passenger flying for free almost never
displaces a paying customer, and typically costs the airline only about $20
per flight. But to earn that $20 flight, hyperfliers will go out of their
way to book all their tickets on one airline, and may waste hundreds or
thousands of dollars building their status."
--Warren Berger, "Life Sucks and Then You Fly," Wired, August, 1999
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