The Lumberjack

Issue date: 4/16/08 Section: Community

HSU students from the 2006 Parras trip.

Humboldt State University students will travel to Parras, Mexico, this summer for the fourth year in a row, to bathe in the sun, water, culture and appropriate technology.

Starting May 27, the Parras program will take a group of Humboldt State students seven hours from the Mexican border to the state of Coahuila to partake in a cultural, lingual and technological exchange in the oasis city amid Northern Mexico's desert landscape.

The program's directors hope that students come back with a grasp of the Spanish language as well as an idea of what sort of sustainable technologies are at work in Parras and how they have helped to preserve that culture, said Parras program director and Spanish professor Francisco de la Cabada.

Students will stay with a Mexican family for the 10-week trip, and will take smaller trips for a few days at a time to explore what the Parras landscape has to offer.

"Parras is the perfect laboratory for implementing and measuring and becoming sensitive to the needs of the community," said de la Cabada.

"Travel in general has a way of crystallizing your future," said Clair Price, a transfer student from Sacramento State University. "I'm hoping that Parras will help clarify what my next step will be afterwards," she said.

Price is an international development senior and attends Humboldt State this semester to take appropriate technology classes not offered at Sacramento State.

Parras, among other Mexican cities famous for cultural exchange, is the destination of the program for a number of reasons, said de la Cabada.

Besides being safe, Parras is picturesque, with mountains, rivers and underground springs that wind through a colonial town. The town has the Western Hemisphere's first winery, built in the late 16th century.

But most importantly, said de la Cabada, Parras is one of the few places where traditional, appropriate technologies are still applied.

Many of the city's structures incorporate the use of adobe, an appropriate technology that Parras has used for over 400 years.

Environmental resource engineering professor Lonny Grafman is also a director of the Parras program. He said, "Adobe is an example of appropriate technology because the ingredients are local, it has a low material cost but a high labor cost which keeps money in town…and it creates an indoor environment that doesn't need air conditioning."

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