I packed my rucksack twice, first time, it was full, second time, I packed it with a question instead: what do I need to carry, and what am I only carrying out of fear?
That question is following me now, as I prepare to fly to San José Manialtepec, a small coastal village on Oaxaca’s Pacific shore, where I’ll spend my time teaching English to local children. It’s a place most maps skip past, tucked between the Sierra Madre and a lagoon so full of bioluminescent plankton that at night the water glows blue where a paddle disturbs it. It’s also a place that nearly disappeared. In 1997, Hurricane Paulina sent the Manialtepec river over its banks and through the village in the space of two terrifying hours. The people who tell that story today are the same people who rebuilt their homes by hand, on the same ground, beside the same river and the same lagoon. That’s not a footnote to me. It’s the whole reason I want to go carefully.
Because the lagoon that gives San José its beauty, its mangroves, its birdlife, its glowing water, is also its flood defence, its fish nursery, and its water filter, all at once. Mangroves don’t just look striking in a tourist photo; they hold a coastline together, absorb storm surge, and shelter the fish that families here have always relied on. A community living beside that kind of ecosystem doesn’t need a lecture on sustainability. They live inside the consequences of it, every hurricane season.
I don’t want to be the volunteer who flies in, teaches the alphabet from a laminated flashcard, and flies’ home having changed nothing about how I move through the world or having added, even slightly, to the pressure a place like this already carries. So, I’m trying to pack differently, literally and otherwise. A notebook, not for photos of the lagoon at night, but for the things I hope to notice and learn about resourcefulness, about resilience, about a relationship with the coastline that goes back generations.
Teaching a language, I’ve realised, isn’t really about grammar. It’s about handing someone a tool and trusting them to build something of their own with it. I suspect sustainability works the same way, you don’t import it, you notice how it’s already being practised, and you try not to get in its way. I’m not going to San José to fix anything or to bring some outside idea of “green living” to a community that has spent nearly three decades quietly proving what resilience looks like. I’m going to teach what I can, and to listen for what the lagoon, the mangroves, and the people who rebuilt beside them have to teach me instead.
That’s the version of sustainability I hope to bring home from Oaxaca. Not a slogan, but a way of packing a bag and a life so there’s room left for what a place can teach you, wherever the next journey leads
