Episode 14 – Anaïs van Sull’s story: Empowering the youth of Mayan communities
/When Anaïs heard about Tulum for the first time, her life looked pretty planned out. With a PHD in sociology the passionate, successful women in the academic field had a promising career ahead of her. But her intuition told her to follow this Belgian kitesurfer (and now husband and father of her daughter), who had told her about this beautiful place in Mexico…In 2013, she left to Tulum – to stay.
The decision to leave everything behind wasn’t easy for her. But she went for it, because she felt that Tulum gave her the possibility to be who she wants to be without pressure. Only when she arrived in her new beach town home, she realized that she had been stuck in a framework of social and professional expectations back in Europe. In Tulum everything was open for her: to live more connected to nature AND to develop a job with more freedom of how to do it. „To take this opportunity was no luck, it was a choice,“ she looks back at this life-changing times.
„If you arrive in a country or in a place with no respect and no knowledge about where you’re going – what’s the land, what’s the culture – the risk is to be part of the destruction of it,“ says Anaïs van Sull. To protect these lands, there is one thing every person coming here should bring: empathy.
After a year of research „in the field“ she founded a non-profit organization with her anthropologist friend Julie, in 2017. They wanted to create not just another NGO, but an organization tailored to the needs of the area – something that had a real impact. Movida Maya was born. Its work focuses on the up-and-coming generation of the Mayan communities surrounding Tulum, who is torn between their traditional world and the glitzy globalized world. The teenagers are lost in that contrast and miss a feeling of belonging. Movida Maya supports the indigenous youth to find and reinvent their place in the society by offering workshops or field trips opening their horizon for their possibilities. These activities with professionals sharing their skills with the 12-to-18-year-olds have the goal to increase their capacity, whilst preserving their cultural identity to build a sustainable future for themselves and their communities. By giving the native youth a push to be more conscious and proud about who they are, respect is key: it’s in their own hands what they might take from their traditions and weave it into a modern way of living. Movida Maya wants to help them to revalue and strengthen traditional knowledge as potential livelihood and economic income. And also generate new leaders models of self-sufficiency in the indigenous community and society, with a particular focus on women.
Learn more about the work of Anaïs in the Mayan communities and the context about the topics moving Tulum in our conversation and get some insider tips for your trip.
Website of Movida Maya
Instagram of Movida Maya
