Eight volunteers converge to help camesinos build a water system in Chiapas - a strategy to bolster the Zapatista insurgency by helping locals assert their autonomy. These outsiders come to question the movement they've travelled so far to support - and each other - when forced into a world quite unlike the poetic communiques of subcomandante Marcos: a world of endemic rural poverty, parochialism and shifting loyalities to the movement. The echoes of B. Traven, Conrad, Camus and the quiet dignity of local companeros round out this epic yarn.