And, me.

Me in Suchitoto. I've taken to wearing a red bandana because my hair is getting long and the bandana comes in handy often.

Anyway, I'm doing well, working on finishing up my ISP proposal. Once I finish it I'll try to post it here. We'll see.

Pics!

Sorry about the grossness, but just wanted to show that it wasn't nearly so bad as I'd made it out to be. Tiny scrape. No more. And that was taken four days after the event.
The mural of the women carrying the picture of Monseignor Romero is next to the wall with the names of many of the children and civilians killed or disappeared during the war.
From left to right, that is Aynn, our academic director, Ian in the black shirt, Brian in Red, and David in the maroonish color. Ian is one of the few beardless boys on this trip, despite the heat.
The courtyard picture was taken at the convent/cultural arts center we stayed at in Suchitoto.
Thomas (one of the other beardless boys) is standing in the general area of the house we stayed at in Santa Marta. It was beautiful. Nothing like the campo we stayed at in Nicaragua.

I have less than an hour to write this...

So, I believe I may have made a mistake in my last post (other than the obvious grammatical and spelling errors). What I called Guasapa is rightly called El Sitio Zapotal, I think. Well, I'll ask Aynn.

I believe I left off talking about where I stayed in Santa Marta. My host-dad there is called Nicolás and he was involved in negotiating for the form/structure/location/agenda of the peace process. I conducted an interview with him the last night we stayed there (it was a double interview, as Tomas interviewed him at the same time). This was after we talked a bit with COCOSI, the council against AIDS, a project in Santa Marta to educate people about AIDS and such. It was an interesting meeting, but my main question after meeting with them was why all this education needs to be done by the Civil Society as opposed to the government. The answers are obvious and numerous, but the question then becomes a criticism. Should the education of the populace about things like AIDS be left up to an uncoordinated and generally locally specific civil society? Shouldn't it be formalized, regurlarized across the country? The trouble comes though when AIDS awareness talks about (gasp) condoms. El Salvador, while it used to have one of the more liberal churches in the world, is now home to one of the most conservative church regimes there are hoy en día (today).

The interview with Nicolás went very well as he talked at length about the peace process and such. I was more interested in him and his role, which he was slightly more reserved about, but I understood completely that I was a gringo he'd known for a few hours and who slept in his house, not a close personal friend or anything. The next day we packed everything back up and went to Radio Victoria for the last time. This was Wednesday the 24th. I helped produce a PSA about smoking and about women's rights. My voice is on Salvadorian radio as Papa, who dies after saying his few lines due to throat cancer from smoking too much. That, and for the women's rights spot I said the "and the students of SIT Nicaragua" after the Radio Victoria girl said "This message is brought to you by Radio Victoria". Yeah, I'm famous.

We returned to San Salvador on a long busride. I listened to Steely Dan the whole way. People laughed at me as I grooved to Deacon Blues in my seat. The wind felt incredible as it rushed through my hair. The combination of the wind, the music, and where I was emotionally made the trip quite enjoyable. I just listened to music and thought for a few hours. I resolved a few pending issues, thought more of the trip we'd taken to the UCA in El Salvador and how it affected me, thought about the whole Katrina break up thing, and how all of these things related. In the end, I was, as Mr. McPartlin my 11th grade AP US History teacher would say, "moving and grooving". Or in normal person speak, I felt like I was making progress.

That night we went to the Photocafé in San Salvador - a psudo-revolutionary joint where you can sip an Irish coffee while perusing the excellent photography on the walls. They had a small theater, and we watched Innocent Voices, a movie (based on the childhood of one of the producers) about how the children of El Salvador were effected by the civil war. It was shocking, but after all we'd seen already, it wasn't something that really phased us. It was moving and highlighted a part of the war I hadn't given much thought to before, but it wasn't, as I'd been warned, something that would move me to tears. Maybe it would have before, but I believe that threshold has been changed somewhat of late.

The next day, Thursday the 25th, we spent most of the day with university students from Santa Marta who attend the University of San Salvador. When we arrived in the house they share (supported by a fund began by an SIT alumna after visiting Santa Marta and seeing that the kids there, while well educated up until secondary ed, couldn't attend University due to the financial obstacles) Jake and I were introduced to Tulio, our guide for the morning, and we were off immediately for class. The house they lived in was both beautiful and ideally situated close to the campus. How they had the good fortune of procuring such a house is beyond me, and the rent is more than affordable (so says the gringo used to making $150 a week part time - an unheard of sum for a university student in El Salvador).

The class we went to was Modern Philosophy. The entire class all I could think of was Paul Voice, my most wonderful of philosophy profs, and all of the things he said. They were going over Descartes - which if you think is hard in English, try in Spanish - and thanks to Paul I could understand, more or less, the subtleties of the discussions. The class had 3 students (the school had 40,000) because one didn't show, and took place in the prof's office. It felt kind of like Bennington, but more formal. Small, intimate, but with an underlying structure that in Bennington would be a joke. When they got to Cogito Ergo Sum (I think therefore I am), I was so excited to jump into refuting Descartes and foundationalism (his method of inquiry), that I was almost disappointed to realize that I was a gringo who was there to observe and that I hadn't read the "First Meditations on Philosophy" (I think that's the name of the book) in two years. But the prof did it for me, which made me all kinds of happy.

We lunched at the University Comedor (eatery?) and then went back to the house. There, a few of us started messing around with a soccer ball. That tid bit is important for later. Then we went to the Museum of the word and image. This was a museum to preserve the historic memory of El Salvador. The curator of the museum is the man who started and throught the civil war continued with Radio Venceremos, the guerrilla radio of the FMLN. We were lucky enough to have him be there during our visit and he spoke to us a bit about the museum and how he sees its role and such. I asked him how he saw these two projects, Radio Venceremos and El Museo de la Palabra y Imagen, were there ties between the two? He said that they are the same project, one done in war, the other in peace. Raise awareness and preserve historic memory, these are the goals of both. Very cool guy.

Upon our return to the house of the students, we started fooling around with the soccer ball again, and eventually were asked if we could play soccer (gringos vs. slavadoreños) that night. We said sure, if Aynn said it was okay (I need to ask my mommy first). Aynn said it was fine, but that they'd have to walk us home after the game that night. In the mean time we went to a field (a basketball court in a public park) to play. If you'll recall, my shoes were still a bit ruined, so I was wearing flip flops. I'm not sure if I described how I messed up my right foot at Radio Victoria, but suffice it to say that Aynn was convinced one of my toenails would fall off. It hasn't yet, but there is still blood under the nail. Gross. So as we were playing, I was barefoot. I'd cleared all the sharp things off the field beforehand, so I was safe in that regard. There was one time though where I overextended my leg to stop the ball from going out and stepped on the ball, but rather than being able to bring it back where I wanted it my weight was such that I continued to roll and my foot was scraped along the cement for a bit. That was gross, but as I didn't have any hydrogen peroxide to deal with it at the moment, I decided to forget about it and continue playing. We had a great time during that game, and then later, after we ate about a thousand pupusas (small tortillas filled with cheese or beans or spinach and such) for dinner, we played again. This time was uneventful. We met a woman (gringa) from Michigan who was working across the street from the Santa Marta house teaching English and she played on our team for a bit. She was nice and the Salvadoreños all made crude jokes when she helped walk us home (in good humor, of course). That was the last night we would spend in El Salvador. We watched the Boondock Saints (the spanish subtitles were a bit off) and then I went to sleep.

The next day I already talked about. We got up and headed to the legislative palace. Nonsense ensued and we left without speaking to the ARENA party. We went to the mural, I took some pictures, and we left for a market. I was a bad capitalist and didn't buy anything. We lunched at the Galaría Fernando Llort, the artist that did the front of the national cathedral (he pretty much created the style of art associated with El Salvador), where I was a good capitalist and bought some art (hopefully for Christmas for the family) and a book for myself. We returned to the Casa Oasis for the last time, finished packing, had a long evaluation/check in, and left for the airport. There we pigged out of DIANA junkfood (the main junkfood dealer in central america, $.50 for a big bag of popcorn and such) and hung out listening to music and such. We got on the plane, and just as I was falling asleep (about 30 minutes later) we began our descent.

Awaiting us was a wonderful potluck dinner put together by all of the moms, there was music and much frivolity. I ate, spoke with my host-mom breifly, and we left. I crashed around 10, feeling like I was, more or less, home. What's it going to feel like when I come back to the US? I can only imagine.

More about El Salvador

So, the first day I already said something about Equipo Maíz. After that we wet back to the Casa Oasis and we sat down in the largeish living room in many couches (something you don't see in Nicaragua) and chairs, and the proprietor of the hotel came and talked to us. His name is Damien Alegria, pretty much the coolest name in the world (Alegre means cheer) and he told us about his time in El Salvador during the war. This was a heartwrenching testimony and an hour and a half ready, he was exhausted and we were in wonder. We then had the first of what would become some of the best meals we'd had yet with Damien's wife as head chef.

The next day (Friday) we went to Divine Providence, the church where Monseignor Romero worked. We recieved a talk from the protavoz of the order of nuns that worked there, and then she gave us a tour of the buildings. His house had been converted into a museum of sorts where his clothes and such are preserved. Interesting sidenote, Romero is considered a Saint in much of Central America. They have his miracles picked out, things like his organs not breaking down after death, disappearing from paintings and such. The Catholic Church hasn't quite moved fast enough for Central America in declaring Romero a prophet, martyr and saint, so they decided to just call him these things anyway. On his house there is a sign that reads, 'Monseñor Romero, Prophet and Martyr' and then slightly below that it says 'So say the poor without preventing the judgement of the church.' After that we went to CEMUJER a women and human rights organization. We learned several interesting facts there - abortion is illegal and penalized in El Slavador, and Opus Dei has quite a bit of power in the country are just two of the more interesting. 'Who doesn't have the power to maintain their dreams won't have the power to maintain their lives' was the quote hanging off the wall from the founder. Then we went back to the Casa Oasis and had a talk with Luis Perdomo, a leading organizer in CARECEN, and international NGO that deals with the problems of immigration. And there certainly are immigration problems in El Salvador. I'm not sure if I mentioned this yet, but almost half of El Salvador lives in the US. 7 million is the population of El Salvador, 3 million is the amount that have immigrated. The Salvadorian economy is propped up by the remittances the Salvadorians in the US send back. When I say 'propped up' I mean it in a not very propped way. It used to be that over 700 people were leaving the country every day due to economic distress. Now, 1000-1200 every day leave the country. When young people in college and such are polled and asked if they want to live in El Salvador they say no.
Here's a selection from my journal on 10/19/07 - "Divine providence this morning was powerful. I'm still attempting to come 'round from that. I'm sick of taking so long to process or understand these experiences and events. I feel like if I could just focus on the events and stop being distracted by depression or nonsense I'd be able to come to some sort of Conclusion - or at least profundizar (go deeper into) a bit my understanding of these matters.
I wasn't quite able to hear Lydia (the portavoz) this morning, but Katie (a fellow student) and I entered into a breif conversation about how she felt about it - and she did hear it. What, indeed, can we do? Romero was killed in 1980 by a government supported by 'our' country. This unquestioned support continued into the 90s. I was born in 1987 in October. This is the year Escipulas II (Central Amerian Peace accords) was finished. The 'peace' was finalized in 1992. I was 5. Do I, personally, have some form of responsibility towards El Salvador do to 'my' government's actions from before I was born? If so, then I have a responsibility to every country and people that 'my' country has ever interfered with. And when does that end? Do I only have a responsibility for the actions of 'my' country as far back as my ancestors were part of it? And then does my responsibility transfer to those countries they came from?
I say 'my' government entre comillas (in quotes) because I feel like there is - there must be - some kind of disconnect between my responsibilty for my government's actions or my 'ownership' of my government and how long I've been alive/aware/legally able to be involved or legally a citizen - with full rights of participation (as far as that goes)."

It continues for a while, but from that you can kinda see what kind of issues I'm trying to work my head around.

One of those nights we went out to La Luna (The Moon) a wonderful jazzy joint in San Salvador. There was live salsa, another group of gingos, lots of chatting, and I even danced (if that's what you want to call it). The only people that compliamented me the next day had been a bit too drunk for me to really take their word, by and large.

I am omitting here our trip to the UCA in San Salvador because I am still attempting to... I'm not sure, think about it I guess. Maybe I'll talk about it in a few days, maybe never, we'll see.

Then we went to Suchitoto, a small town on the top (more or less) of a mountain, overlooking a beautiful manufactured lake created by a hydroelectric dam which was built without the consent of the people who lived there, changing the finshing/farming culture into a culture dependent on fickle tourism. The river no longer floods seasonally where it once did, and so farmers on one side are screwed, while on the other side the dam releases water at odd increments and without much warning, so the people who live downstrem are also screwed and often flooded. But the lake is beautiful, and so it attracts tourists. Like us. We stayed with Peggy, a woman from the Bronx who came to El Salvador to help out and will never leave voluntarily. She runs the culture and art center there and is trying to buy the whole thing and turn it into a school/culture and art center/venue for a variety of things open to the public. She's most of the way there. She was a charasmatic and wonderful woman who was once a nun and is now not due to ideological differences with the current Catholic Chruch (she came for Romero and ended up with John Paul II). Some quotes from her, "I hope you're ruined by El Salvador. I hope you're broken open and fall in love with it." The classic, "I want to die on the last day of my life - no sooner." "Look like you've lived, earn your lines and scars." Then, describing us after saying that we are more or less self-selecting. "I mean, you could've gone to Spain or France or something, but you came here. Who really likes throwing the toilet paper in the basket (as opposed to flushing it) and staring at if for days?" A very interesting woman. Then we went out into Suchitoto for a while, even though it was raining. Saw some beautiful mountains, I bought a cool shirt that makes me look ridiculous but may make a good gift, and then we came back, hung out, and went to dinner somewhere Salvadorian. We slept at the Guest House/converted Convent that night where Peggy works, which was fine except that I woke up in the middle of the night with water dripping on my face from the ceiling. Needs a bit of touching up I'd say.

The next day, still raining, we broke our fast and drove to Guasapa. Guasapa is a volcano in between Suchitoto and San Salvador. This was a rather important volcano during the war do to its proximity to San Salvador, and so the FMLN controlled it by the end of the war. There we were treated to an eco/historical-tourism hike up the mountain. We were out in the rain from 10ish to a bit after 2 climbing this mountain. Sounds miserable, but I had a great time. We saw how corn and beans are grown together, an old farmers trick which came from the indigenous people who once populated these areas. Saw the tatus (hidey holes) where civilians and FMLN people would hide when the army began to bomb the hell out of the mountain. Saw many cool plants, heard many cool things, and pretty much destroyed my shoes. I also resolved to by a rain coat or actually carry around a poncho so that next time I don't have to do that in a tee shirt. We lunched at the eco-tourism place, freezing and exhausted, on soup (hot soup, thank god) and chicken. They showed us a terribly scratched up video of what the trail is like when the sun decides to exist (a large portion of the time in Central America) and we asked them and they asked us a few questions. The last question, which sucked, was "so what do you guys feel like you learned today?" The 18 of us, shivering, uncomfortable, tired and wanting badly to bathe just looked at the boy, standing there with his fly undone expecting some profound answer. Finally Maddie gave one answer, David gave another, and I felt like we were free. We gave our many thanks and said our goodbyes. The hour or so ride back to San Salvador sucked, but we made light of it. When we arrived at the Casa Oasis, I showered immediately. I tried to get as much of the mud off my clothes as possible, but at that point they were as much mud as they were clothes. I'm not quite sure what we did after that. I think we watched the testimony of the woman who survived the El Mozote massacre. That was depressing. An entire town, wiped off the map. Women, children, murdered. Lined up and shot, burned inside their houses. Insanity. How could one have not struggled against this? I'm not saying pick up an AK-47 and join the FMLN, but do something. Christy worked like hell to change things in El Salvador, Aynn in Nicaragua. They got what in return? PTSD and a job showing kids around these countries and trying as hard as they can to share with us just what was going on. The nuns before Peggy, dominicans I believe, tried to teach the kids of Suchitoto about economic justice and human rights. They recieved death threats and dead bodies were piled at the threshold of the convent. They had to flee for their lives. Six jesuit priests were pulled out of their beds at the UCA at night and shot in the head because they were teaching and preaching justice. These were scholars in their feilds, shot for being associated with the FMLN. A mother and her 15 year old daughter , sobbing and terrified, shot together in the room where they were staying for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And why were they there? They were afraid to stay at their house because there was fighting there.

The next day we went to Flor de Piedra (flower of stone), an NGO which works with sex workers. They try to educate and empower the women (they primarily work with female sex workers) about health, rights, and AIDS. They were very interesting, and when we left we took a drive through the area where the sex workers work to see the conditions. There were many very (very) small rooms with the women in the doorways wearing things that are reminescent of what some people wear to the october first party at Bennington (or any high school dance for that matter) and calling to passerby. It was interesting, it was terrifying, and it made me think quite a bit about what kind of society encourages this while outlawing abortion, while privitizing health care and education so that only the rich have access to it, while losing 1000 people daily to immigration. Very strange. In the US this is so much more hidden.

We then left for Santa Marta, a beautiful small town (campo) on the Honduran border. We hung out a bit at Radio Victoria, a youth led radio station started by Christy in the 90s. It is small, independent station which we worked at the next two days. In Santa Marta we were serenated by a local public school teacher, a young man who started teaching as a young boy in Honduras in the refugee camp and never really stopped. Speaking of Honduras, a bit of history of Santa Marta. Santa Marta was an FMLN sympathetic town. The government had a scorted earth policy to eradicate the FMLN. This meant they would go to towns like this, murder many of the imhabitants and burn the houses and such so as to cut off the resources of the guerrillas. Santa Marta got word that this was going to happen there, and so they decided not to be there when the army came. This is after years of harassment, murders, and bombings by the army. So they picked up their lives, and tried to race the army to to River Lempa (the border with Honduras) to claim refugee status. They arrived at the river and the army did two things. First, they flooded the river with the water from a nearby dam (hydroelectric plant). Second, they started shooting at the people (men, women, children, elderly) as they crossed. The Honduran army had been alerted to this problem as well, and they came to the other bank. They too opened fire on the Santa Martians as they tried to cross. Thousands survived, many died. So for the next six years they lived in Honduras, occasionally harassed by the Honduran or Salvadorian armies. In 1987 (they'd fled in 1981), they started being repatriated back to El Salvador. They continued to be harassed by the army until 1992 when the peace accords were signed. The meetings about the meetings for the peace accords actually took place in Santa Marta. Senator Joe Moakley stayed in the same house, with the same family I did when he came down in the early ninties to give legitimacy to and to begin the peace process in El Salvador.

I'll write more later. This is getting ridiculously long.

El Salvador

So, before I begin with the pictures - few and far between unfortunately - I'd liek to give a quick (relatively) summary of what we did in El Salvador. We caught a shockingly early (for me) flight to El Slavador, and just as I was falling alseep we began our descent. About a 30 minute ride. My first impressions of San Salvador after we met Christy, our contact, and Enrique, our driver were jumbled and confused. It looked like a split between Nicaragua, Troy and New York. So many signs, buildings, commercialism and such interpersed with barbed wire, corrogated tin roofs and old buses.
That first day we grabbed lunch at the Casa Oasis, a beautiful guest house in a nice part of town where we'd spend the majority of our time in San Salvador, and then went to Equipo Maíz - literally, Corn Team. There we recieved a history lesson from someone who appeared to be a very skilled educator. We were there for a few hours and I spent my first 20 or so bucks - they use dollars there, so it is decieving. You say, 6 bucks for a shirt! and by the end of your week you've spent almost a hundred dollars. Not healthy. So I bought a few shirts and few books, and we returned to the Casa Oasis. I roomed with Maria-Teresa, one of the women who works in the office, a program coordinator I believe is her title, and Melissa, one of the other students. They made jokes, I just smiled, nodded, and realized that I attend one of the only universities in the US where it is not at all weird to room with people of the opposite sex.

Anyhow, the week (9 days) passed in a blur. We visited so many organizations and people that I can hardly keep track of them all. I filled one and a half small notebooks with notes and reflections. I will certainly tell more later, if I can remember to.

The last day, yesterday, we went to the Legislative Palace to meet with legislators from both parties. When we got there, we found the palace was closed to the public. Apparently, the day before, while the parties were debating the privitization of the public health system, a demonstation go so rowdy the building had to be closed and the debate postponed until the next day. We got our way in by having the legislator we were to see first help us out. He was from the FMLN or Frente Farabundo Martí for National Liberation party. This was the primary guerrilla group from the 70s to 92 who fought the government. They gained legitimate political status in 92 and haven't won a presidential election yet. So we talked to this guy, Hugo Martinéz, about everything we could within the 30 mins we had with him. In the middle we heard shouts and chants and we went to the windows to see demonstrators entering the building. They climbed the stairs and filled the FMLN offices. We finished our interview and made our way to the ARENA party headquarters. I forget what ARENA stands for, but it was founded by Roberto D'Aubisson, the man who was behind the assasination of Monseignor Romero and the death squads, constructed solely to inspire fear in the populace. They've won every presidential election held legitimately since the peace. We got there early, and so we waited. On the way there I was able to ask a protestor how they'd gotten in. 'Nuestros diputados nos ayudaron'. Our legislators helped us. We waited for maybe 20 minutes, maybe 45, I have no idea. I was writing. Then a secretary of some sort came out to tell us that the ARENA legislator we were going to see couldn't see us today, that it was too dangerous with all the protestors and that the riot police had been called to disperse the 50 or so protestors we'd talked with. So, as we left we tried to get into the actual parliamentary session (being denied a fiver, we asked for a thousand). Also denied, we left, passed the riot police (chilling on the corner outside the building) on our way out, and went to the mural.

I'll write more soon.

Since that worked...

Leftover Campo pics.
Me looking depressed and sick.
Hannah and I pretending to be Indiana Jones (I'm James Bond, she's Han Solo).
Me looking less depressed but much sicker.
My tryout for National Geographic. I swear she was smiling a moment ago. Now it looks like I'm just trying to say, "everyone in the campo is poor and miserable" and though the vast majority are very poor, and some of the time they are miserable, that isn't the truth so much as the occasional reality.
My campo family.

One more try with pictures

Mr. Westly, a brilliant man.
A panga, or in english 'bloody fast boat'.
The group of us chilling at the guest house.
A bug with an identity crisis.
Miss. Cherry, the best cook this side of my Grandma.

The Coast

Okay, so we left on Tuesday I believe. It really was about 7 hours on the road (we stopped for an hour to check out a museum and eat breakfast) and then an almost 2 hour boat ride to Bluefields. The boat ride was awesome. I doubt I've ever gone so fast.

We arrived in Bluefields and had lunch. The meal is called Run Down (pronounced Ron Don) and it is a series of more or less autocotonous foods. Several types of banana and some chicken. It tasted wonderful, which set the precedent for our time there.

That night I didn't really do anything. 9 hours of travel took a lot out of me. I basically moped, watched some TV and went to sleep.

The next day we went to our communities after a quick breakfast. I an eight others went to Pearl Lagoon. The other nine went to Orinoco (a Garifuna community). Pearl Lagoon is primarily Creole, and the people there speak English, Spanish, Creole and a smattering of indigenous languages (primarily Miskito). We learned quite a bit of the history of the autonomous (caribbean) region (incredibly distinct from that of the pacific region), and we ate incredible food.

We stayed in a guest house owned by one Mr. Westly. This man was one of the brightest people I've come across in some time (and I've come across leaders and intellectuals by the handfull lately). He was able to think and put ideas and concepts into critical and analytical frameworks like Pink Floyd puts words and music together to form wonderful things. Our first day we spoke with someone from the municpality - I never did learn what he did exactly - and we chilled out together in a group.

My initial observations surrounding the coast were a mix of shock at both the level of poverty - it was very similar to the Campo in that regard, and the seeming level of jolity among the populace, and a comfortable familiarity which I believe was born by the fact that everyone more or less spoke a language I understood. The town was small, it couldn't have had more than a few hundred inhabitants, but was the headquarters for the municpality (likewise called Pearl Lagoon). The houses were run down shacks of a similar construction to those in la Amancia save they were elevated off the ground a few feet (I assumed to avoid floods and/or unwanted animals). Some of the houses, however, were beautiful.

Why was this, you may ask. Well, when you put the 2 and 2 of the drug trade together, you get that the largest producer of hard drugs is Columbia and the largest consumer is (you guessed it) the US. When Columbian fastboats run the coke, crack and heroin up the caribbean sea coast, sometimes they get stopped by US anti-drug trafficking forces. These fastboats then dump their drugs into the water. Due to prevailing tides, winds and the positioning of the US anti-drug trafficking forces, these drugs ocasionally drift to where the fishermen from Pearl Lagoon and other Caribbean Coast communities fish. So now a fisherman has a kilo or two of coke (worth about $4000/kilo I've been told). So there are some nice houses. Also, there is now a terrible drug problem. When the stuff just arrives, free, on the shores, there is bound to be someone who tries it. The culture of drugs which was nonexistant almost twenty years ago is now in full force. It was estimated that half of the population of the town were involved with or addicted to drugs (and we weren't counting weed). This was depressing.

However, there was some motion going against that culture. Wheels are turning and committed people are actually working on resolving this issue, which gave me hope as opposed to the campo where people were committed to blowing smoke as opposed to working to effect change. You don't get anywhere by being the loudest, I've found, but by networking, organizing and confronting issues with more than just rhetoric. I believe our president, Ortega, Ahmadinejad, Chavez and the like are teaching the world this important lesson as they spout more and more rhetoric and less and less gets done for their people. Sorry, sidetracked.

The second day we had breakfast at the guest house and then I recieved a call from Guillermo, the academic director of the Revolution, Transformation and Civil Society part of the program and the husband of the academic director of the entire program. He sang me Las Mañanitas, a birthday song in Nicragaua. He is deaf in one ear and has only 60% of his hearing in the other, and so our conversation with my limited grasp of spanish and his limited ability to hear me was awkward and comical. We laughed about it when he picked us up on Saturday.

My birthday, which I had intended to pass without incident, was quite the affair. Many people called to wish me well, and I was able to access the internet that day from a local school and so read many of the emails I recieved as well. That was nice. The cake that night, however, I am quite sure was an assasination attempt. Someone wanted me to die by substituting my blood for sugar, and they figured if they put a large enough cake in front of me with enough icing to kill a polar bear (the death Al Gore did not forsee for those poor polar bears in his movie An Inconvenient Truth) it would do the trick. They weren't counting on the fact that I brought backup however, and together the nine of us, the Williams' and some neighborhood kids nearly finished the cake. There was still enough left over the next day for a bit of the hair of the dog (which doesn't work with cake). I had a great time, and kept my moping to a minimum.


I'm intentionally focusing on the cultural/personal observations I have here, because I've already written the academic ones a few times and it gets tiresome. So if anyone is interested in what I am doing academically, comment and I'll extrapolate.

We ate lunch and dinner at Miss. Cherry's (which is her name, not the name of her business). Miss Cherry is an incredibly large creole woman who forces one to reinterpret/add more adjectives to the English/Spanish/Creole langages due to the miraculous character of the food she creates (I wouldn't use such a banal word as 'cooks' for the process this woman goes through to arrive at such marvels of taste). Fish, shrimp, spaghetti, coconut bread and gallo pinto were regular fare, and yet entraoridnarily prepared in way that even I who has long been sqeamish in front of seafood loved this food.

The last night we were in town I almost went out with a few of the group to take a walk around town. When this walk around town became a walk to a country/reggae bar with music so loud (and bad) that conversation in any language was all but impossible, I escaped and returned to the guest house to watch the Blues Brothers. Well worth it. There are certain cultures that I'd prefer not to explore.

We spent the majority of Saturday and Sunday in Bluefields again. A group of Garifuna dancers treated us to a cultural dance exposition Saturday night, and then Ryan, Jake, Maddie, Ian and I went out with a few of them to a restaurant/club to eat dinner and, as was inevitable, dance. After we ate, they wanted to go out to other places, and so I made my way home, watched the end of Romeo Must Die - a Jet Li and Ashanti version of Romeo and Juliet, better for the fights scenes than the terrible writing- and moped and slept.

Needless to say, I am finally recovering and have put the moping, sulking and self-pity aside for the time being. This did take me an exceedingly long period of time, but in my defense I was rather deeply involved with my ex for the better part of the past two years. Anyway, I do need to complete an essay for friday as well as get my ISP hammered out before I leave for El Salvador next Thursday.

Until the next time I have an hour and a half to use a computer!

Coast

I'll write more later, but the gist is that I had a great time on the coast, and I have arrived back safely. I'll write more and try to include a few pictures tomorrow.

To the Coast!

Well, we leave for the caribbean coast tomorrow morning at 4.30 in the morning. We will drive for a few hours until the road ends, and then take a boat the rest of the way to Bluefields. We stay in Bluefields tomorrow, and then leave for our prospective communities on Wednesday. We stay in the communities in guest houses and do outings in groups and the like. It looks like we're going to be academic tourists as opposed to our usual quazi-native roles. It'll be interesting. We return to Managua (via plane, thank god) on Sunday, and recommence classes on Monday. That will be my last week of Spanish classes and my second to last week of classes classes.

Some gringos (gringas in this case) are being boistrously loud outside, and yet they wonder why people get certain cultural stereotypes... oi.

I'm tired, I have finally finished my second essay, and I am ready for my few hours of sleep before taking the bus for (did I hear her correctly?) about 8 hours. I'll post again when I return.