‘There is no pleasure in travelling,’ Albert Camus jotted in his notebook while in the Balearic Isles one summer. ‘It is more an occasion for spiritual testing.’ Pleasure, he argued, leads us away from ourselves; travel, which he considered part of the eternal search for ‘culture’, always brings us back to ourselves.

When Cate Kennedy left rural Victoria for an extended posting in Mexico with Australian Volunteers International, she was motivated by a desire for a challenge. Her gaze was fixed on a new cultural horizon. Sing, and Don’t Cry documents Kennedy’s time working for URAC, a microcredit co-operative providing a secure savings and loans system for campesino peasant communities. Based in the town of Tequisquiapan, Kennedy and her co-workers’ role is not limited to financial administration. They travel large distances to coordinate savings meetings, run nutrition and child health seminars, and deliver livestock – even at one point hosting a public meeting with members of the infamous Zapatista resistance movement.