farang

2.7.2009 parking lot soccer

yesterday we pulled into a bus station, and had an hour to kill before our bus left again. there was a circle of men juggling a soccer ball in the parking lot. i walked over to join in, and they hooted and hollered and welcomed me into the circle. (this is not a very touristy part of the country -- no backpackers, beach bums, or sex tourists in sight.) we kicked it around, and they laughed even harder when they saw i could keep up with them. not a word exchanged the whole time; just smiles. after a while, another bus pulled into the parking lot. and all of a sudden, as if on cue, all the men looked at me, gave little bows of the head, and the circle split at once into a dozen directions. i was confused -- and then i saw. these were the bus station staff. they all had sprung into action as taxi drivers, baggage handlers, food stand vendors, mechanics, etc. their afternoon break of soccer was done. i love soccer.

and maybe this sounds really vain, but i also love being that white guy (blanc, gringo, chele, mzungu, farang... there's a name for us wherever you go...) who jumps into the game, to everyone's suprise and amusement and joy. i have been that guy around the world. and people have been so warm and amazing everywhere we've gone. without exception. from these bus station workers, to UN soldiers stationed in haiti, from parks in the slums around buenos aires, to kids on the beach in thailand who do 5 pushups after each goal allowed...


p.s.
we complete our circle round the world on february 13th (!?!) but i've got a backlog of stuff and photos to post here, and on the flickr photo site. so, feel free to check back here for more stuff. and i'll now be online more regularly back in minneapolis, so i'll be better at emailing (ericgruen@gmail.com). i promise.

this post is officially dedicated to the shoe-thrower. and also to www.baangerda.org.

1.20.2009 bangkok.

so, on a bus back to bangkok this afternoon, i was struggling to think of a way to summarize in words the past few days we had just spent at a community called 'baan gerda', in the lop buri area three hours north of bangkok. as this year of ours winds down, i've felt at a loss for new words, and have written less and less (obviously). this place we just visited (as volunteer photographers) was full of such happiness, such warmth, and such an amazing model of caring for HIV-positive orphaned youth, that i was trying to think of some way to summarize the love that i saw there. the hope that it gave me, in just a few days. i didn't think of any great speech, as i daydreamed watching rural thailand whizz by. i was floored by my visit to baan gerda (www.baangerda.org) and will have to gather some words of my own to put here soon. but, not today.


however, seeing as it's martin luther king jr. day, and obama inauguration day this week, i found a mlk jr speech online this afternoon, and found it fitting for much of what i had been thinking about. i figured i would just quote from this speech, at length, and that would count for this month's installment of my blog. (in exchange for my salary, stipend, benz and chauffeur, google requires that i post news here at least twice monthly.)


as for obama, i think that he is truly an amazing individual. and that our choosing of him was clearly the right choice. i know today is a historic day, and that if i ever have grandkids, this will be one of those things that i'll be supposed to tell them about. and i hope that i'll love telling them about it. obama is so many things, to so many people, and being an american abroad, i have already witnessed firsthand the shift in people's attitude towards our country, before he even steps foot in office.


and yet. and yet. in reading mlk's words, i am reminded that these are the things i'd actually like to hear from obama today. i don't wish to get down on him before he's even officially begun his work. but just in case he doesn't cover this ground himself [and i'm not holding my breath], let's just read together some of mlk's words from a speech given at a church in new york city in 1967. in this speech he spoke against the vietnam war, but also connected that one issue with so much more. on the one hand, it's sad to see that 40 years later we still have not made king's words a reality. far from it. and yet on the other hand, these same words --that still need speaking today-- bring me to tears and make me want to jump up and do something. they make me want to shout. and in these words of his lies my hope for obama, and for our country.


i would be thrilled if obama spoke similarly today, with the world watching, about the gap between the world's rich and the poor. about non-violence and love. about how our madness in iraq must cease. and about america's crippling triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism. but just in case he doesn't, here's one more lofty speech for you today:

[notes: just try to mentally replace each reference to "vietnam" with "iraq". and try to imagine him using more gender-inclusive language -- which i'm guessing he would have if speaking now in 2009. yeah, it's long, but well worth reading. as per my contract terms with google, this post comes mixed with photos from our time in thailand so far.]


"...Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:

"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."

Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.

 
As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. ...These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

 
There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.


In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

 
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

 
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

 
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

 
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.


...These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every moutain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain."

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.


This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:

"Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us."


Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."


We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out deperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.


We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world -- a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.


Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the callling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history. "

no news is good news.

by which i mean, i have not put any news up here, but the news that i would have put up if i had been writing would all be good news.

it sucks i've been too lazy to put up more updates here. to sum up our last months quickly: we enjoyed everyone we met and all our work in tanzania. we left tanzania to celebrate christmas and fight off malaria fevers in a riot-happy athens. having conquuered both malaria and rioters, we moved on to thailand (not india -- no visa, long story) where we have set up week-long visits with three different non-profits to go and offer up our photographic skillz. we'll pretend to be official freelance photographers (hopefully they don't read this blog) and will document kids sport tournaments, travelling clinics, orphanages, construction etc etc, and give them the photos to use on their own websites, materials, etc. should be great. and then *poof* we'll be back in the usa by valentine's day. and then... who knows. all i know is that you all (or should i say "you two"... haha) should brace yourselves for the february launching of... www.peacephotography.org. it's gonna be awesome. trust me.

ps
somewhere in these last days, we decided to get married, too. yes, it was romantic and awesome. yes, it was on an island in thailand. yes, i'm totally honored and excited. no, there was no knee or ring. (that's soooo 1900's...) yes, we lead ridiculously privileged and random lives right now. no, we have no money or jobs or prospects upon return to the states.

11.12.2008 defesco office [no electricity, not much else to do. if i write in this notebook, it will look like i'm still working...]

tanzania so far is...

women in bright, beautiful colored fabric sashes carrying impossible loads of plantains on their heads. men in tattered dave-matthews-band concert tshirts pushing carts of pineapples up the lanes of the highway. adorable babies on mothers' shoulders next to me on the minivan-bus, clutching my finger. a family of lions walking one after another not 10 meters from our car in the serengeti. soccer with tied-up balls of rags, anywhere and everywhere. saturday afternoon ultimate frisbee games with a group of tanzanians and internationals who are inexplicably great at frisbee. sitting down for lunch at a cafe, nervous about how to order in our non-existent swahili skills, only to find out that the dude sharing our table is tanzania's olympic swimming champion; recently returned from beijing, and facebook friend of michael phelps. old wise men sitting on curbs. women tilling gardens with rickety hoes and sweat. our night-watchman, a kind massai man named simon, who guards the volunteer house with a smile and a spear. spicy-fried tilapia fish fresh from lake victoria at every cafe, that falls right off the bones, and isn't so hard to eat with your hands once you get the hang of it. kind strangers on the dirt roads who speak fast at me, welcoming me to tanzania, wondering what i'm doing here; "goode aftahnoon, sah!" enjoying time with molly, who has been such a wonderful partner and companion this year. reading emails from a faraway brother mark, who is peace-corpsing his way through the hill of el salvador somewhere out there. highway truck-stop towns, sad and dusty and crippled by AIDS. sparkling hotel restaurants with a scattered few white folks only that make no sense at all. lying to inquisitive acquaintances about how much airfare costs to get here. orphanages in the middle of nowhere with crumbling roofs and bare cupboards. the clicking of hooves and growling of lions in the dark night outside our tent in the middle of the serengeti. the international language of soccer everywhere. cute little schoolkids in cute little school uniforms and cute little ties, following us down the puddled road. welcoming shopkeepers weighing out a kilo of sugar on a beam balance, and wrapping it into a perfect cone of newspaper.

11.7.2008 rainstorm

i love my walk to and from work. the little rows of house-shops. men and women tending small gardens. inquisitive kids. my kiswahili is terrible. lots of men on rickety bicycles transporting things. the soft quiet dirt roads. the chug of the looming mwanza brewery. the run-down homes and the electric-fenced mansions next door to each other. the little rows of market stalls. kind women with avocados and bananas. a little bar with a pool table that we've got to start frequenting. with its plastic tables and chairs set up so nice in the dirt backyard. i love "chips mayay" (potato omelette). love it. people, as in every country we've been to, are so kind and patient and welcoming. everywhere. i would like to be kind and patient and welcoming, too.

opportunity to connect #3765

12 November. Mwanza, Tanzania.

Hello yet again, friends and family. I hope you are well.

I had said that I would lay off the mass emails this year, but I have lied, apparently. Sorry for that.

However, I'm writing to you today to propose to you all just one more opportunity for connection with communities and peoples around the world, this time in Tanzania, Africa.

[Somehow, it is indeed a small world, and we are amazingly able to affect things in places far away that we know nothing about. Seemingly over in another world – except that it’s not… I’m still trying to figure out how that works, and I’ll let you know soon as I do.]

I am working here in Mwanza, Tanzania, with a non-profit organization called DEFESCO (Development of Free Education Service Centres for Orphans, www.defesco.blogspot.com), a group that provides supplementary education, school support, tutoring and supplies for high school students who are primarily orphans or destitute children.

So, the big fund-raising event for DEFESCO happens to be right smack in the middle of my two-month stay here, and I couldn’t resist sending out a call to those of you who might be interested (see attached brochure also):

On December 1st, World AIDS Day, they will hold their 3rd annual fundraising walk to raise support for these students’ public school fees. It looks like it will be 90-some orphans and students, and one tall conspicuous white guy (with one shorter, cuter white girl at his side…), walking 10km along a main road through town here. The goal is for each participant to raise 20,000 Tanzanian Schillings for each one of the twenty kilometers walked. But, luckily for those of you who might be so kind, this turns out to be only $20 in dollars. That’s a deal, I say. I haven’t done a fundraiser thingy like this since “jump-rope for heart” back in the 1980’s, and I’m pumped. (I’m already on a strict exercise regimen to get in shape for the walk – playing soccer twice a week… heehee.)

Anyways, it’s important to repeat that I know that you are all pestered all the time for money, and to make things worse, it seems like my exit from the USA has brought the economy to its knees. And I’ll spare you guilt-trip anecdotes of AIDS and orphans and whatever. (But feel free to stay tuned to ericgruen.blogspot.com for more on that…) Suffice to say, it’s pretty poor here.

So, you might have friends at work or church or wherever asking you to support their bike-ride or rope-jump for some other deserving charity, of which there are many… but I’ve gotta be the only guy you know asking you to do the same for a little stroll in Africa, right?

All participating sponsors will receive an elegant certificate of participation (designed by your truly), that you can keep - or give to someone you've donated "in honor of" as an alternative holiday gift.

For those of you still reading, the best payment process I can think of (unfortunately, DEFESCO doesn’t yet have any online donation system or accounts in the USA – it’s a pretty small locally-run group here) is to reply to me by email if you’re interested, and then send a check written out to me (Eric Gruen) to this address:

Eric Gruen
c/o Betsy Matheson
2015 2nd St NE
Minneapolis, MN 55418
USA

I’ll just donate money directly to DEFESCO here, and then cash your checks to reimburse myself when I get back home in February (okay, I know that’s a super annoying delay, but I can’t think of a better way. How about I’ll cash them on Valentine’s Day, so it’s an easy date to remember. I PROMISE I’m not scamming you for beer money. That would be pretty low.)

[Alternatively, you could instead PayPal me any donations -- I now have an account, and my email is ericgruen@gmail.com, and apparently that's all you need...]

Most importantly, please feel free to forward this on to anyone you know who might be interested. All strangers or interested parties are welcome to follow up with me, at

ericgruen@gmail.com.

And I would like to add here a huge thanks to any and all of you who responded to my last mass email, about Haiti – the folks there really appreciated your support, and have written Molly and me a bunch of times to say so…
So, thanks. Period.

Okay, that’s all from here. Thanks much.
Hope y’all are well.

Eric

obama in tanzania

11.5.2008
tanzanians love obama. this morning, november 5, people see molly and i on the streets of mwanza, and they yell "obama!!" and smile. we got into a packed little van-bus to come into town this morning, the students and mothers and babies and men that we crawled over to get to the back seat murmured "merikani?!", then said "obama, obama!" and all of us, strangers, clapped.

********
10.28.2008
the other day i met some new friends for their weekly soccer get-together. [two captains picked the teams for the scrimmage. moussa used his second pick on me, and i laughed and said "that makes no sense; you've never even seen me play..."] after a great friendly sweaty game between tanzanians, austrians, finnish [or finlandians? i'm drawing a blank] and americans, we quit just as the sky turns green and purple and the wind gusts in circles. the birds disappear from the sky, the trees shake, and we grab our gear and split as fast as we can. i walk with moussa and haji down the dirt paths towards the main asphalt road where i can catch a van back towards home. the clouds ferociously let loose and dump on us. along the way, haji the electrician/midfielder stops at a house and says "well, here is where i live. you can stay here if you'd like." i thank him, but moussa and i head on, shortcutting between homes and laundry lines and creeks down to the main road. at the road, i look up and out over lake victoria. the sky is grey-purple, and the sun is setting just as the storm is rising. there is lightening and sheets of rain out over the lake, and clusters of people huddled under awnings and bus-stops all along the road. to either side of the water, hills rise up covered with houses clinging onto the rock every which way. setting out from the lakeside fish market, a huge group of white birds takes off and swoops out over the water, flying as one, with the lightening and the purple and the rain and the rainbow and the last light of the day all just behind them. i am in tanzania now. crazy.

********
10.28.2008
our trip from buenos aires to mwanza went like this over the course of about 6 days [don't ask why]: buenos aires, argentina [adios, grey hulking metropolis with a familiar language]- lima, peru [2 days, i turned 28 there]- sao paolo, brazil [just long enough for a chocolate shake]- madrid, spain [best airport yet] - london, england [24 hours, waffle with chocolate was great] - nairobi, kenya [sat on floor of airport, ate a fantastic meat pie thing] - kilimanjaro, tanzania [3o minute stopover, saw the peak of mt. kilimanjaro from the airplane window, awesome] - mwanza, tanzania [hola, colorful hot hilly lakeside town with brand new language and people].

so, in the nairobi airport, tired and out of it, we land and are unsure whether to get in the superlong line of people at immigration that DO need a visa, or the superlong line of people at immigration that DON'T need a visa. we're just continuing on to tanzania, but we have to get our baggage and re-check in on a different airline, so we're unsure. we wait like an hour in what's surely the wrong line, but by the time we make it to the front we've come too far to turn back, so we cross fingers and step up to the dude. he looks at our passports, our lack of $50 visas, harumphs, frowns. i explain we're just transfering, that we have 5 hours here but we promise not to step outside the airport, etc. he says "mr. gruen, are you a democrat, or a republican?" i hadn't even thought about the fact that we were in kenya. "democrat, of course, we've mailed in our votes and are crossing our fingers" i say. he says "okay, i'm going to hang on to your passports, and your girlfriend stays right here. you go run down to baggage claim, grab your bags, and bring them straight back here, i'll point you where to go next." thank you, sir.

a few days later, i'm getting orientated to my new volunteer post at a little locally run non-profit called DEFESCO [Development of Free Educational Service Centres for Orphans]. The director and I are lunching at some popular downtown place, picking fish apart with our fingers. [the waiters come around to your table with pitchers of hot water to pour on your hands before and after the battle. the first time they came round on the afternoon we arrived, the guy stood there with the pitcher, and i just stared blankly at him. i hadn't ordered any juice or anything, i didn't understand.] so he eventually says, in a grave and serious tone; "eric, i hate to ask you this, but are you a democrat or a republican?" i laugh. i think on november 5, we'll either be the most popular folks in mwanza, or we'll have to pack our bags and skip town in the dead of night...

********
11.3.2008
mkula, tanzania. two hours from the nearest city of any size. 10 kilometers from the nearest paved road. 1 kilometer from the nearest water source. sits an orphanage with 24 kids, aged 5 to 16. we pay a visit this afternoon, bearing gifts of bread, bananas, beans, and rice. a soccer ball is promised on the next trip. the kids are all smiles, and immediately warm. mr. mathew, with his constant cackling giggle, makes a kind speech to introduce molly and joey and i. the kids smile, shake our hands, curtsy, stare at my white feet in sandals. one kid darts away to shoo some cows away from the makeshift kitchen area. three gravestones sit beside a crumpling pit latrine. someone has painted the bedrooms inside with bright and fantastic designs and murals for the kids. the girls rooms are so much neater and picked up than the boys. the boys have not made their beds. these kids are in school, cook and clean and do their own clothes. they tend to a field of crops a kilometer away, but the area is in a drought three years running. they are supervised by peter, a kind looking man with a young baby in tow who lives here at the center, while his family stays in the nearest village, apparently. i don't know what these kids have been eating, but the program directors at the home office in mwanza are ragged with worry and desperate to get food and funding out there. an addition to the building stands unfinished, as the project no longer made sense in the wake of food shortages. these are 'street kids', orphans, 'most vulnerable children'. i don't know their stories or pasts, but if this is the best option they've got, their original homes must not be a good place to be. or might not exist. this area has been ravaged by hiv/aids, and i imagine many of them are without parents. they are warm and caring with each other, and you can tell they are a tight group, yet genuinely welcoming even to visitors here just for the afternoon. and almost all i can think is that this is so cliche. adorable aids orphans in rural africa. what a tired metaphor for the most vulnerable and precious thing you could ever think of. and yet. and yet. here they are. and they literally are the most vulnerable and precious thing i can think of. but i am just a visitor for a day. we've bought them a 40 kilo sack of rice, but that sack won't last forever.

a perfect circle

10.7.2008 buenos aires

we have just a week left in buenos aires. then on to tanzania for two months, then to india another two months, before heading back home mid-february.

i was walking around the busy downtown streets on a fresh, cool, beautifully sunny day today. on those infrequent days when i can remember to charge the batteries on my old and ailing mp3 player, the sensation of having music on headphones while walking between waves of pedestrians, motorcycles, cars, buses all in fluid motion in rhythm with the song -- is something otherworldly and soothing and beautiful. today was one of those days. i guess i've spent many days back at home with headphones in as i walk or bus my way around, but somehow being in such a crowded metropolis of a city with so many people on every side elevates the feeling to something else entirely.

today i had on the album "emotive" by A Perfect Circle. as i watched the waves of people wash by me in lockstep with the soundtrack, one track stuck out; "peace love and understanding".

i was making my way along florida avenue, the busiest pedestrian-only shopping street in the city. the newspapers stands on each block screaming headlines about "black monday", the world economic systems shuddering and toppling, and the ripples here in argentina...

As I walk on through this wicked world,
Searching for light in the darkness of insanity,
I ask myself, Is all hope lost?
Is there only pain, and hatred, and misery?

people in this country know about financial collapses and bank-runs and the punishing effects of an economic system propped up on debt; argentina declared the biggest international loan default in history in 2001, as the public here lined up outside banks that would not give withdrawals nor guarantee deposits, as the local currency was cut to a third of its previous value overnight. people here seem to live with that recent history clearly tattooed upon their distrust of banks and begrudging acceptance that what they once had, they don't now, and that it will take some time to build it back.

i walk by flocks of businessmen with their cigarrettes and shoe-shines, nervous tourists with their backpacks worn on the front-side, more headlines about suicide bombs and photos from iraq that we would never print in our own sanitized press in the usa...

And each time I feel like this inside,
There's one thing I wanna know,
What's so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding?,
What's so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding?

i walk as a stream with the hundreds of others threading through the gridlocked traffic at the light. past the street performers applying their makeups, the dismembered veterans in wheelchairs, the dozens of folks giving out little paper ads for their restaurant, or jewelry store or strip club. tango dancers with p.a. systems playing their backing music in the street. missionaries in shirt and tie and neat black nametags. workers filling potholes, eating sandwiches on the curb, listening to radios.

what is this world we live in? there is the possibility for so much good. but there is also such pain, and such ever-present suffering. do we have what it takes? i don't know. maybe we never get to know. maybe this is just it. it's just gray. there is just the little kid in the jersey on a curb across the street. selling ball-point pens. rocking back and forth singing a song. tapping his feet. we never see the end of the story. maybe all we do is play a bit cameo part, but no one among us sees the whole script...

And as I walked on through troubled times,
My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes,
So where are the strong?,
And who are the trusted?,
And where is the harmony?,
Sweet harmony

old men sip "mate" tea together. mothers walk their kids home from school. couriers whiz by on a million motorcycles. the more i see of this world, the less i understand it, and the more i see it as so connected. in beautiful ways, and in ugly ways...

Cause each time I feel it slipping away, just makes me wanna cry,
What's so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding?,
What's so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding?

i don't know why i've been reading so much about the us presidential elections while i'm down here. it's absolutely hilarious to read the us press coverage of it all, but hilarious in a not-at-all funny, terrible, you-can't-be-serious, way. i don't want to look, it makes me sick, i feel dumber for having bought into it, but i just can't stop. like gawking at a car crash as you drive by. or itching a mosquito bite, or picking a scab.

the boundaries of the entire political discussion in our country are so well-defined, and small, and suffucating. and not a word of it makes sense, unless you first swallow the premise that we, the usa, own the world. once you've got that lie swallowed, consciously or not, the rest goes down easy.

but what if we don't own the world? i think it's a lie that more and more people are seeing through. i don't know if people know what to do once they see it, though. i can't really claim that i do, myself. i think so many people see that the stories don't add up. that if you flipped any single argument around and asked if it applied to us in the same way, it tumbles down...

So where are the strong?,
And who are the trusted?,
And where is the harmony?,
Sweet harmony

the faces are rushing by me faster now. young folks sitting in the park in a circle on the grass with their tea. kids holding babies. croissants everywhere. people are nervous. haiti is still drowning. iraq is still burning. i have no idea what people in the us are feeling right now. the world is not ours. but we are not disconnected from it, either. i can't figure out how simultaneously so many different worlds exist at the same moment. seemingly oblivious of each other, yet also interdependent and all so clearly of the same cloth...

the bookstands sell poetry, che guevara, mein kampf, biographies of eva peron, love in the time of cholera. the shoestores sport 100 varieties of the same exact style of men's sporty-soccer-street shoes. the kids all wear chuckies, though.

on saturday we visited the "memorial for the victims of state terrorism". 30,000 bricks in a wall, for each of those lost, disappeared, tortured, and gone. on the banks of the plata river, where many of them were tossed. i don't understand how people could do that to each other. i also don't understand how a society could recuperate from such years, and i admire how argentina has tried. we're about the only ones there on a saturday afternoon. a guy walks up with his dog, clearly there to visit a specific one of the nameplates. for a moment, i feel embarrassed being there; i don't know any of the names, i have no clue what that pain is like in real life...

now walking through a park, there are lovers making out on benches to my left and right. the sun is gorgeous. a huge argentine flag blows in the cool breeze, at the tomb of the unknown soldier. (falkland islands war -- or malvinas islands war, depends on who you're asking.)

Cause each time I feel it slipping away, just makes me wanna cry,
What's so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding?,
What's so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding?,
What's so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding?

on these downtown streets, men and entire families sift and sort through every bit of trash on the curbs and corners, compiling all the cardboard they can onto huge carts to be sold somewhere for pennies. they're called the "cartoneros", meaning "the cardboarders". the trash-sorting that takes place on every corner, spilling into the streets, doesn't draw stares or merit much attention whatsoever. people are neither rude nor polite as they pass by. it just is...

i don't know what to make of it all. depending what music i have on my earphones as i walk, the world either seems like a lost maze of tired beaten people devoid of any hope or happiness or chance at change -- or it seems like a bright space of unknown futures and vibrant strangers with so many lives and stories i don't know, that maybe turn out to have a better tomorrow, whether or not i happen to know it.

you shall know our velocity

i recently read the book "you shall know our velocity" by dave eggers. it happens to be about two guys travelling around the world in one week attemping to give away some $30,000 to strangers along the way. the book is way more amazing, breakneck-paced, tortured, and beautiful than i could describe here, so i won't really get into it. while their journey wasn't really too similar to the one that molly and i are on now, nonetheless i gathered these several quotes that jumped out from the pages at me, and captured thoughts i've had in ways i could never put in my own words:


"all i ever wanted was to know what to do. in these last months i've had no clue, i've been paralyzed by the quiet, and for a moment something spoke to me, and we came here, or came to africa, and intermittently there were answers, intermittently there was a chorus and they sang to us and pointing, and were watching and approving but just as often there was silence, and we stood blinking under the sun, or under the black sky, and we had to think of what to do next."


"but it felt so strange. to travel is selfish -- that money could be used for hungry stomachs and you're using it for your hungry eyes, and the needs of the former must trump the latter, right? and are there individual needs? how much disbelief, collectively, must be suspended, to allow for tourism?"


--you have no right to judge.
--i think i can wonder. i can speculate.
--you can do neither. just one day in my life would cripple you.


"we were done. no cairo. no sunrise at cheops. and from now on, there would never be options, never like this again. lord this was obscene. we should have saved the money, most of it, invested it, so there would always be more. i could have done this every year if i had planned it better. i planned nothing well. i dreaded being back in chicago, or memphis, wherever -- the stasis, the slow suffocation of accumulation."


"what are you writing?"
"a note."
"you can't write now. you're missing everything."
"but this looks like michigan. i'm missing nothing."
"you'll never be here again. how can you not soak it in. think about it -- you will never see this again, ever!"
"i'm almost done. let me finish."
"you're like the people that sleep on the plane. they're going over the rockies or something, and they're asleep, heads against the window."
"you slept on the plane. on the way to dakar."
"that was at night."
he was right.
"just shut up and let me finish."

haiti hurricane relief mass email.

[a mass email pasted into the blog here, for anyone interested. you can scroll down below it for previous stuff about argentina, haiti, etc.]

hello everybody,

eric gruen here.  i hope all is well with you all.

i try not to do too many mass emails nowadays, cause we all get too many of them, and thus we all feel less and less like reading any particular one of them.

but, today, i felt strongly about shooting out an email, and a couple links, to give you kind folks a heads up on a humanitarian crisis unfolding in haiti.  after the passing of four hurricanes in just the last couple of weeks, the situation in much of haiti is pretty ugly -- including the very areas in the northwest where my girlfriend molly and i volunteered for four months earlier this year.

following this note is a quick list of links and quotes and info. (there's also one more detailed report attached).  please feel free to email me (or the folks at www.amurthaiti.org, with whom we worked those four months) with any questions or thoughts or ideas, or forward this along to whomever.  (actually, that's a great idea -- please do forward this.  but not to just anyone; only to cool people.)

and for those of you in a rush, or those of you who always skip to the back of the book to see what happens, i'll skip to the punchline right off the bat:  with one click you can donate online at www.amurthaiti.org, to make a huge difference in the lives of some amazing people.  AMURT is not the UN or UNICEF or OXFAM or something
big.  they are a small group of europeans, haitians, south americans, and unitedstatesians in beards and dirty pants sleeping in tents and crappy shacks in a little dusty village with a staff of 80-some haitians and 20-some dirtbikes and two trucks -- doing some amazing work beyond their means and beyond all odds.


i was given this all-too-appropriate quote recently (aurora levins morales):

"they say that other country over there, dim blue in the twilight, farther than the orange stars exploding over our roofs, is called peace, but who can find the way?

this time we cannot cross until we carry each other. all of us refugees, all of us prophets. No more taking turns on history's wheel, trying to collect old debts no one can repay. the sea will not open that way.

this time that country is what we promise each other, our rage pressed cheek to cheek until tears flood the place between, until there are no enemies left, because this time no one will be left to drown and all of us must be chosen.

this time its all of us or none."


thanks so much.
peace,
eric gruen
[ericgruen@gmail.com]
[ericgruen.blogspot.com]

**********

1.  a little background first.  molly and i worked with a community development group in rural northwest haiti earlier this year, called AMURT-Haiti (www.amurthaiti.org, if you hadn't picked up on that theme yet...).  they're good folks, doing good stuff.  no, actually, they are amazing folks, doing amazing stuff.  they originally began work there as a response to the disaster brought on by hurrican jeanne in 2004, killing some 3,000-5,000 in the nearby city of gonaives and surrounding areas.  since then, they've expanded exponentially into longer-term projects with a local staff of 80 or so working in areas of health, education, water filtration, infrastructure, and more.

2.  however, the string of hurricanes that have hit the island one after another in the last couple weeks (fay, gustav, hanna, and ike) have left the country, the northwest region, and specifically that same city of gonaives, in worse shape than they've ever been.  perhaps you have seen some of the coverage last week on tv or somewhere, perhaps not.  amurt has turned to immediate disaster-relief mode in
the wake of all this.

2.5  Dharma Demeter Rusafov, AMURT projects coordinator, September 9, writing after Hurricane Ike:
"As these last lines come out on the screen the downpour outside is hitting the ground in an increasing crescendo. I think of the short-term memory of civilization, and of the merciless nature which indiscriminately affects all, and the deeply innate connection we can feel to the suffering and happiness of others. It is at times of huge suffering that we realize how profound this web of life is, and how irresistible the call for action is."

3.  there is a decent article in the new york times
www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/world/americas/11haiti.html_r=1&ei=5070&emc=eta1&oref=slogin

summing up the toll of the disaster so far, speaking about (as few other articles did) the fact that before these storms hit, the folks there had nothing.  period. this is the poorest rural area in the poorest country in the hemisphere, a country that rose up in "food riots" earlier this year to cry out against the fact that they could not buy daily rice, etc.  that was before.  an excerpt from the
article:

GONAÏVES, Haiti — Their cupboards were virtually bare before the winds started whipping, the skies opened up and this seaside city filled like a caldron with thick, brown, smelly muck.

Suffering long ago became normal here, passed down through generations of children who learn that crying does no good.

But the enduring spirit of the people of Gonaïves is being tested by a string of recent tropical storms and hurricanes whose names Haitians spit out like curses: Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike.

After four fierce storms in less than a month, the little that many people had has turned to nothing at all. Their humble homes are under water, forcing them onto the roofs. Schools are canceled. Hunger is now intense. Difficult lives have become untenable ones and, if that was not enough, hurricane season has only just reached the traditional halfway mark.

One can see the misery in the eyes of Edith Pierre, who takes care of six children on her roof in the center of Gonaïves, a city of about 300,000 in Haiti's north. She has strung a sheet up to shield them, somewhat, from the piercing sun. The few scraps of clothing she could salvage sit in heaps off to a side. "Now I have nothing," she said
before pausing a minute, staring down from the roof at the river of floodwater and then saying again in an even more forlorn way: "Nothing."

4.  at www.amurthaiti.org there is a good summary of the situation and amurt's efforts to date at the top of the page, and with one click you can get to a page to donate instantly online.  (i have also attached to this email a short report on their immediate and longer-term goals for the situation.)

5  the song "mountains made of steam" by a silver mt. zion
This was our stormy ending
Water sank our boats
Shouldn' t we oh shouldn't we
Throw our hopes into the ocean
The ocean
The warm grey sea

Tell me or
Kick me or
Hold me or
Please believe

This is their busted future
And this is our dream
Which one do you
Believe in, believe in, believe in, believe in
Together together together
Never to retreat
Mystery and wonder
Messy hearts made of thunder

Somewhere there's a soldier
Sleeping in a field
Somewhere there's a mother a mother a mother

Please believe in gentle dreams
The sweetness of people
Whistling in their sleep

The angels in your palm
Sing gentle worried songs
And the sweetness of our dreams
Like mountains made of steam

6.  for a quick youtube video-commerical for amurt's work, you can click to:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCVeK8E_SRM
(it's pretty cute. we watched a bunch of it being filmed this spring, in the village of sous chod where we lived and worked.)

6.5  for a slideshow of photos from my time working in haiti, you can click to:
www.flickr.com/photos/egruen/sets/72157605541792778/show/

7.  for those of you on facebook, you can add amurt-haiti as a friend, or as a "cause" and read and connect more there.

8.  molly wrote this week on her blog:
"Eric and I have been anxiously watching and reading news reports as storm after storm has hit Haiti - and as we have waited for word from our friends there. They sent out a letter today with an update on the situation. As we feared, the situation is devastating - thousands of people are without food, water or homes, in a place where so many were already fighting for survival.

Over and over throughout their history, the people of Haiti seem to have been forgotten by the world when disaster has struck on their shores, and in their lives. But, that does not need to be true this time. I hope you will join me in remembering them and responding as you are able. I invite you pause, to educate your friends and family about this disaster, to donate in support of AMURT's relief efforts ... I invite you to remember them."

9.  so in conclusion.  i know that everyone is asking for your money everywhere.  and that it's not always possible to follow through in all directions.  and that guilt-trips totally suck.  i do believe that help and connectedness can come out of simply being aware of "others" in other countries.  this awareness may not always take the form of donations.  it may be just remembering, knowing, learning more.  being conscious of the lives of those living in worlds outside our own. which, of course, aren't other 'worlds' at all.  somehow, in some way, it's all one.  going on all at once, all at the same time.  i don't understand how that works.

and also, some days, this awareness and remembering can take the form of helping groups doing good work on the ground in afflicted areas, such as AMURT in haiti.  (at the very least, i think i can say that they could put your hard-earned cash to better work than another obama or mcain tv ad ever could.  don't protest.  you know i'm right.)

10.  okay, i've reached number ten.  time to stop.  thanks so much for your time.  let's end with another song from a silver mt. zion, "Built Then Burnt (Hoorah! Hoorah!)"

Dear brothers and sisters,
Dear enemies and friends,
Why are we all so alone here
All we need is a little more hope, a little more joy
All we need is a little more light, a little less weight, a little more freedom.
If we were an army, and if we believed that we were an army
And we believed that everyone was scared like little lost children in
their grown up clothes and poses
So we ended up alone here floating through long wasted days, or great
tribulations.
While everything felt wrong
Good words, strong words, words that could've moved mountains
Words that no one ever said
We were all waiting to hear those words and no one ever said them
And the tactics never hatched
And the plans were never mapped
And we all learned not to believe
And strange lonesome monsters loafed through the hills wondering why
And it is best to never ever ever ever wonder why
So tangle - oh tangle us up in bright red ribbons!
Let's have a parade
It's been so long since we had a parade, so let's have a parade!
Let's invite all our friends
And all our friends' friends!
Let's promenade down the boulevards with terrific pride and light in our eyes
Twelve feet tall and staggering
Sick with joy with the angels there and light in our eyes
Brothers and sisters, hope still waits in the wings like a bitter spinster
Impatient, lonely and shivering, waiting to build her glorious fires
It's because of our plans man; our beautiful ridiculous plans
Let's launch them like careening jetplanes
Let's crash all our planes in the river
Let's build strange and radiant machines at this jericho waiting to fall.

appeal for help to haiti: www.amurthaiti.org (more here soon)

"As this last lines come out on the screen the downpour outside is hitting the ground in an increasing crescendo. I think of the short-term memory of civilization, and of the merciless nature which indiscriminately affects all, and the deeply innate connection we can feel to the suffering and happiness of others. It is at times of huge suffering that we realize how profound this web of life is, and how irresistible the call for action is."

-Dharma Demeter Rusafov, AMURT-Haiti, September 9, writing after Hurrican Ike (the last of four storms to thrash Haiti over a couple week's time)


"they say that other country over there, dim blue in the twilight, farther than the orange stars exploding over our roofs, is called peace, but who can find the way?

this time we cannot cross until we carry each other. all of us refugees, all of us prophets. No more taking turns on history's wheel, trying to collect old debts no one can repay. the sea will not open that way.

this time that country is what we promise each other, our rage pressed cheek to cheek until tears flood the place between, until there are no enemies left, because this time no one will be left to drown and all of us must be chosen.

this time its all of us or none."

- aurora levins morales


This was our stormy ending
Water sank our boats
Shouldn' t we oh shouldn't we
Throw our hopes into the ocean
The ocean
The warm grey sea

Tell me or
Kick me or
Hold me or
Please believe

This is their busted future
And this is our dream
Which one do you
Believe in, believe in, believe in, believe in
Together together together together
Never to retreat
Mystery and wonder
Messy hearts made of thunder

Somewhere there's a soldier
Sleeping in a field
Somewhere there's a mother a mother a mother a mother a mother a mother

Please believe in gentle dreams
The sweetness of people
Whistling in their sleep

The angels in your palm
Sing gentle worried songs
And the sweetness of our dreams
Like mountains made of steam

-A Silver Mt. Zion "Mountains Made of Steam"

**********

"all i ever wanted was to know what to do. in these last months i've had no clue, i've been paralyzed by the quiet, and for a moment something spoke to me, and we came here, or came to africa, and intermittently there were answers, intermittently there was a chorus and they sang to us and pointing, and were watching and approving but just as often there was silence, and we stood blinking under the sun, or under the black sky, and we had to think of what to do next."

-"you shall know our velocity" by dave eggers

when the world is sick, can't no one be well. but i dreamt we was all beautiful and strong.

"Dear brothers and sisters,
Dear enemies and friends,
Why are we all so alone here
All we need is a little more hope, a little more joy
All we need is a little more light, a little less weight, a little more freedom.
If we were an army, and if we believed that we were an army
And we believed that everyone was scared like little lost children in their grown up clothes and poses
So we ended up alone here floating through long wasted days, or great tribulations.
While everything felt wrong
Good words, strong words, words that could've moved mountains
Words that no one ever said
We were all waiting to hear those words and no one ever said them
And the tactics never hatched
And the plans were never mapped
And we all learned not to believe
And strange lonesome monsters loafed through the hills wondering why
And it is best to never ever ever ever wonder why
So tangle - oh tangle us up in bright red ribbons!
Let's have a parade
It's been so long since we had a parade, so let's have a parade!
Let's invite all our friends
And all our friends' friends!
Let's promenade down the boulevards with terrific pride and light in our eyes
Twelve feet tall and staggering
Sick with joy with the angels there and light in our eyes
Brothers and sisters, hope still waits in the wings like a bitter spinster
Impatient, lonely and shivering, waiting to build her glorious fires
It's because of our plans man; our beautiful ridiculous plans
Let's launch them like careening jetplanes
Let's crash all our planes in the river
Let's build strange and radiant machines at this jericho waiting to fall"

-"Built Then Burnt (Hoorah! Hoorah!)" by A Silver Mt. Zion

kissinger and las madres de los desaparecidos

7.23.08
writer's block in buenos aires.
so, we've been three weeks now in buenos aires, argentina, and i can't think of a thing to write. the experience is something pretty different from haiti, or from nicaragua. it just doesn't seem that foreign, that interesting, or that 'challenging'. which is such a lame thing to say, since it is, of course, all three of those things. so, i'd like to break this writer's block in one fell swoop, by belching out any and every thing i've thought about this city since we've arrived.

so, i've had far too much free time in these weeks, as i've been playing constant phone tag with the director of the non-profit where i'm interning (www.ecoclubes.org.ar) to find good times to come into the office. so, i've pretty much been working from home, doing some research on water issues in the country for them. (among other things, arsenic in the underground water sources is a big issue here). i'm sure i'll get up and running there soon, but in the meantime i've spent an entirely unhealthy amount of time reading the newspapers, walking around, watching local news, looking stuff up on wikipedia (i've become a new fan of wikipedia -- it's pretty amazing how quickly you can learn the basics about any little historical or cultural or musical thing, in spanish, english... there's something called 'wikiquote' that houses all kinds of quotes sorted by famous person, book, film...) reading up on argentine history, mastering the subways and buses, walking, coffee, newspaper, and more walking.

so, i have nothing new to say about anything that hasn't been said already about being a unitedstatesian living in buenos aires, i'm afraid. i found that there's like 4,200 blogs online from people that like to call themselves 'expats' living here, making neat ironic remarks about how the grocery stores are all different, how there's lots of dog poop on the sidewalks (isn't that crazy!) and other stuff. i guess that makes me just one more. however, for those of you still reading, i have some thoughts on argentina and other things that may be new to you, maybe not.

1. while google-searching to find out where to buy some cheap soccer cleats here, one search result brought me to www.thesoccerproject.com. if there is one thing that anyone takes away from this rambling, it should be their address. that is, again, www.thesoccerproject.com. this is a group of four unitedstatesians who are all into soccer and documentary filmmaking and traveling; and so decided to travel around the world in search of pickup soccer. as simple and as genious as that. they have a blog, which you can get to from their website (it's www.thesoccerproject.blogspot.com) which features some amazing, captivating, warm, inspiring writing about soccer and people around the world, and about the language and love and powerful force that soccer is -- in prisons in bolivia, ghettos in brazil, slums in buenos aires (which was the link to my soccer cleat search on google, somehow...), iraqis playing in london parks, priests playing in the vatican, jews playing palestinians in israel, etc etc. i was struck by their stories in a way that i can't even describe. they're filming it all for a movie, dunno when they expect to put it out.

2. there's a few topics/themes that seem to jump right to the surface of my observations of buenos aires. i'm not that skilled of a cultural private eye -- basically, these are the main images on any rack of postcards anywhere here. i'll just list 'em off, maybe you knew, maybe you didn't:

tango: tango was born here around buenos aires somewhere around the end of the 19th century, in the communities of immigrants that made up almost a majority of the city, and country. it seems so touristed-out here in buenos aires (tango lessons, tango shows, tango dinners, tango street performers...) yet, it seems like people are damn proud of it, and that portenos (buenos-aireans) do indeed like to tango, irrespective of the flocks of tourists.

the obelisk: the obelisk is much like the washington monument in d.c., and is the symbol of the city here. and is on every single post card. and, we live like 6 blocks from it, so i can point to where we live on most postcards. which is likely the only time in my life i'll be able to do that.

che: we all know of che guevara. many know that he's originally from argentina, and that his nickname 'che' is actually what people here call each other all the time (as in, "dude", as far as i can tell). before coming here, i'd known the rough outlines of his story, but always thought the t-shirts were way too ubiquitous to be anything but cliche. being here, i'm struck by what a legacy and force his life was to so many in latin america and beyond, and also (perhaps more importantly?) what a legacy the IDEA of che has become. the photo that we all know from the tshirts is said to be the most famous photo on earth. think about that - to have been the random cuban photographer who unknowingly took what would go on to be the most widely recognized photo in history... people in bolivia, where he was eventually killed, consider him a local saint and say prayers in his name. those that wrapped up his body for burial cut locks of his hair for luck. his image adorns political banners and flyers and posters from all sides of the political spectrum here -- it doesn't matter which cause or movement you're for, it's a good thing to have che on your flag. he embodies the very idea of a cause or movement; of being an idealist, for many, the very idea of change. the littlest bit of anything countercultural, whatever it might be. i happened to also read that
"In February 2008, screenshots from the local Fox News station's news reports showed that Houston, Texas, volunteer staffer Maria Isabel of the Barack Obama U.S. presidential campaign had used the Che Guevara image to decorate her office. The Obama campaign responded: "We were disappointed to see this picture because it is both offensive to many Cuban Americans and Americans of all backgrounds, and because it does not reflect Senator Obama's views." "


the mothers of the disappeared: a recent period of history which seems to underpin so much of current life here is the brutal military dictatorship in control from 1976-1983. i see references back to these bloody years everywhere i look. in that span of time, around 30,000 argentines were kidnapped, tortured, and killed, while the country lived in some kind of awful state of fear and silence and distrust; the likes of which i can't even pretend to imagine. so, just to recap in a touristicly superficial way: since the bodies of these 30,000 young men and women who were kidnapped, tortured, and tossed out of planes into the nearby plata river to die were never actually found, the dictator at the time, ....., coined a terrible euphamism in responding to questions from the press during that time by saying "well, those individuals aren't here, and they aren't dead, so they must be disappeared. and if they're disappeared, we can't really talk about them, can we?". and so, this is what they are called here; the disappeared. (and also throughout many countries in south america whose right-wing leaders were cracking down on any form of political opposition during the 1970's -- just google or wikipedia for "operation condor" and "henry kissinger"**). 'the mothers of the disappeared' (aka 'the mothers of the plaza of may') are those mothers that went to the main plaza of the capitol (think of the mall, in washington d.c.) to demand the return of their children year in and year out. some of them were also disappeared, but they are now national heros, and the emblem of their white handkerchiefs around their heads has become an instantly recognizable symbol, also the feature of many a postcard (and of the final track of U2's 'joshua tree' album; 'mothers of the dissappeared').


and, the other week, when i went to watch a huge political rally (the background of which is too long a story to get into), i was standing there with a couple hundred thousand people singing and drumming in front of the national congress, and i notice that in the packed throngs just in front of me, the crowd is parting and making space for someone, and everyone is turning that way and politely clapping. i look, and the vip's being ushered through the mass, to growing applause, are a line of tiny little white-haired, white-bandanad old ladies -- the mothers of the plaza of may. and i wanted to cry. i don't even happen to think that i agreed with what that rally was all about ( just went to feel the crowd, the drums, the energy). but standing there, watching how people looked at those women, knowing just a shard of their story. i felt in awe. and also, at the same time-- so, so sad.

we in the u.s.a. we know nothing of war being brought onto our own soil. we know nothing of torture being a way of our own domestic life. we know nothing of daisy-cutters, cluster-bombs, napalm and nukes. we do know september 11. what i think we forget is found in our assumption that september 11 --terrible as it was-- was in some way unique. it was only unique in that it happened on our side of the tracks*. on the wrong side of the tracks, it seems so many people, so many countries, live with some memory, some knowledge, of this same anguish of war, torture, and terror. and it seeps through and bleeds into and informs everything in current life in the few countries i've happened to have spent time in; haiti, nicaragua, south africa, now argentina.

and so it goes. seems like most people on this other side of the tracks -- whether rich or poor or left or right or "pro- or anti- usa" -- unanimously hate, detest, war. and all that comes with it. because they know. but we, somehow, don't. we debate the limits of and fine-print of torture. we give bombing campaigns nicknames like "shock and awe"; before dropping nukes on cities we give them names like "little boy"; with no sense of irony whatsoever. we began our current war and occupation in the face of the rest of the world screaming at us not to -- "they don't get it", we said. they do. they do get it. we have so much learning to do.

*(shoot, september 11the in the usa wasn't even the first terrorist atrocity on september 11th -- please google or wikipedia "september 11" and "1973" and "chile".)

**(so, if i was an obama volunteer, and in my office i had a photo of kissinger, would i have made it onto the local news? would obama have said that he was dissapointed, that the image is not what he stands for, since it is offensive to argentinean-americans, chilean-americans, vietnamese-americans... and americans of all backgrounds?)

3. but anyways. sorry. coming back to soccer. i was reading that in 1978, two years into the regime of kidnapping, disappearing, etc in argentina, the country hosted the world cup. so the biggest game descended into the country, and the players, press, government, all went about the games like nothing was amiss. like the 1936 olympics in berlin or something. the final match was played in a stadium not 1,000 yards from the largest of the concentration camps in the country, the navy school, where some 5,000 argentines were detained and killed. they say the prisoners could actually hear the cheers from the stadium. kissinger, a soccer fan i guess, visited the tournament with his family, giving the proceedings an air of officialdom. or something like that. he's got subpeona's out on him in more than one south american country. and he's a nobel peace prize winner. and he was president bush's first pick to head the commission to investigate september 11(usa)... and nobody laughed.

on a similar note, i'm researching water quality issues for argentina for my internship, and found that in 1977 the UN held the first of several international conventions on water here in argentina, in the city of mar de plata. i don't really know more about it than that, but i'm trying to picture a bunch of UN delegates sitting around some hotel conference room talking about increasing the availability of water and sanitation to the needy of the world. while just outside the doors...

4. but on to more positive notes. i had some somewhere here just a minute ago, hold on there...
the country returned to democracy in 1983, held trials bringing some of the perpetrators to justice (quite a rare and impressive precedent), then had a massive economic collapse in 2001, and since has been getting back on its feet, slowly. per capita, it is one of the more affluent latin american countries, is the so-called 'breadbasket' of the continent, but has it's own fair share of troubles, and the world food crisis is having it's own unique impact here, in ways that i don't quite get yet.


5. but to wrap up, a couple quotes from ray bradbury's 'farenheit 451', from 1953:

"Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real? "

"If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. "

buenos aires, argentina

just a couple quickies from buenos aires, where molly and i are starting out our 3 1/2 months here. we'll each be working with non-profits in the capital here. and will have plenty more to write soon...

you've got to watch this video.

please, please watch this video. it's the greatest thing i've seen in a while. it's some dancing dude who's travelled around the world, but who is way the heck cooler than i ever will be.

i'm not normally a youtuber, but this is a warm fuzzy exception. [although, if this successfully posts into this blog here, it might be the start of a bad habit.]

can't resist a little more quotin'. there ain't nothin' quite like a good quote.

::::: note: so, i'm back in the usa for a couple weeks. which means new ramblings here (see more below), and new photos on the flickr site (click http://www.flickr.com/photos/egruen/sets/72157605541792778/show/ for a slideshow) surely molly will also have new stuff up at www.discoveringubuntu.blogspot.com :::::


"An you ain't gonna preach?" Tom asked.
"I ain't gonna preach."
"An' you ain't gonna baptize?" Ma asked.
"I aint' gonna baptize.
I'm gonna work in the fiel's, in the green
fiel's, an' I'm gonna be near to folks.
I ain't gonna try to teach
'em nothin'.
I'm gonna try to learn.
Gonna learn why the folks walks
in the grass, gonna hear 'em talk, gonna hear 'em sing.
Gonna listen to kids eatin' mush.
Gonna hear husban' an' wife a-poundin' the
mattress in the night. Gonna eat with 'em an' learn."
His eyes were wet and shining.
"Gonna lay in the grass, open an' honest with
anybody that'll have me.
Gonna cuss an' swear an' hear the poetry of
folks talkin'.
All that's holy, all that's what I didn't understan'.
All them things is the good things."
-John Steinbeck, 'Grapes of Wrath'

“Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.... Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose their superiority upon all others.”
-Emma Goldman


“If there is no struggle there is no progress... This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blow, or with both.”
-Frederick Douglass

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies... a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

"what do we mean when we say 'god'?  we mean the source of love; we
mean the source of justice.  we mean women and man, black and white,
child and adult, spirit and body, past and future, that thing which
animates all of us.  something that we cannot touch, yet we feel,
something that we cannot listen for, yet we hear.  behind the words,
whatever words we choose, is a transcendence that is known to all of
us.  we begin with what is in front of us.  i cannot see god, but i
can see you.  i cannot see god, but i see the child in front of me,
the woman, the man.  through them, through this material world in
which we live, we know god.  through them we know and experience love,
we glimpse and seek justice."
-jean-bertrand aristide, 'eyes of the heart'

"All Haiti's Affairs Now in Our Hands... to guarantee the political and territorial integrity of the Haitian Republic."
-August 10, 1915 New York Times headline announcing the occupation of Haiti by U.S. marines (which would last until 1934).
No irony intended.

"Haiti offers a marvelous opportunity for American investment, the run-of-the-mill Haitian is handy, easily directed, and gives a hard day's labor for 20 cents, while in Panama the same day's work costs $3."
-'Financial America', November 28, 1926

"To the extent that the exploited classes, poor peoples, and despised ethnic groups have been raising their consciousness of the oppression they have suffered for centuries, then have created a new historical situation. It is an ambivalent situation, as is everything historical. But at the same time it is a situation charged with promise -- a promise that the lords of this world see rather as a menace."
-Gustavo Gutierrez, 'The Power of the Poor in History'

"We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from teh perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled -- in short, from the perspective of those who suffer."
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 'Letters and Papers from Prison'

"Although the priveleged of this world can accept the existence of poverty on a massive scale and not be overawed by it (after all, it is something that cannot be hidden away in our time), problems begin when the causes of this poverty are pointed out to them. Once causes are determined, then there is talk of 'social injustice', and the privileged begin to resist. This is especially true when to structural analysis there is added a concrete historical perspective in which personal responsibilities come to light. But it is the conscientization and resultant organization of the poor sectors that rouse the greatest fears and the strongest resistance."
-Gustavo Gutierrez, 'A Theology of Liberation'

"Throughout North America, people of good will are horrified by the repercussions of our foreign policy in Haiti and elsewhere in Latin America. Even greater numbers are dismayed by the images of suffereing that reach then via televisions and newspapers. What is to be done? Does the Haitian crisis call for more international aid? Certainly, any physician would be quick to underline the need for medications, vaccines, and the other tools of the trade. But it is important to see that the Haitian people are asking for more that humanitarian assistance, which does little in the long term. Aristide put it this way:
"In Haiti, it is not enough to heal wounds, for every day another wound opens up. It is not enough to give the poor food for one day, to buy them antibiotics one day, to teach them to read a few sentences or to write a few words. Hypocrisy. The next day they will be starving again, feverish again, and they will never be able to buy the books that hold the words that might deliver them."
-Paul Farmer, 'The Uses of Haiti'

"I guess you think you know this story.
You don't. The real one's much more gory.
The phoney one, the one you know,
Was cooked up years and years ago."
-Roald Dahl, 'Revolting Rhymes'

"we need not only have moralism or despair. there may be such a thing as vitalizing anxiety - an ache about the transformation which keeps us alive, which keeps us sensitive."
-rowan williams

water = dlo

5.23.08
water.
it's all about water.
everything.
it's about who's got it.
and who doesn't.
and people in haiti.
they don't.

let me count the ways...

without water, you can't grow crops.
without crops, you don't have a livelihood, an income.
without income, you can't pay for things. like a visit to go to the doctor's.
and maybe you need to go to the doctor's.
because you're sick.
because you don't have clean water.
you don't have clean water, because you don't have money to buy a filter.
you don't have money to buy a filter, because you didn't sell enough crops this season.
you didn't sell enough crops, because the soil is rocky and dry and eroded.
the soil is rocky and dry and eroded, because there's nothing to hold it in place when the rains come.
there's nothing to hold it in place, because people have removed all the trees for firewood.
you remove the trees for firewood, because you can't afford to buy gas to cook with instead.
you can't afford the gas, because you didn't grow enough crops this season.

you didn't grow enough crops is that you spent too much of your days walking to the next village to get water.
so you pull your kids out of school. so they can help bring the water. and you didn't really have the money to send them to school anyway. and the scho0l didn't do much good, cause the teacher's were never there.
because they'd rather be out working on their own crops.
cause their salaries were never paid.
because nobody grows enough crops. to have enough money. to pay those teachers.
and there's no closer water source to go to instead, because neither you or anybody else has the money to build new canals.
you don't have this extra money, cause you spent it going to the doctor's.
you went to the doctor's, because you kept getting sick. from the water you drink.

so, if you had more water.
you could grow more crops.
and you'd have more money.
with that money, you could build a canal to irrigate. to have more crops.
with that money, you could buy gas, and cut down less trees.
if you cut down less trees, you'd retain more of your soil.
with that money, you could buy a filter, and drink cleaner water.
if you drank cleaner water, you wouldn't be so sick.
so you'd have more time to work on your crops.
and have more food.
food.
water.
life.

mental pictures to save from haiti::

the staff party.
last saturday, we loaded up three trucks of staff and canoes and food, and headed for a secluded beach on the other side of anse rouge. a few dozen people in our truck bed headed there, playing the drums, singing, dancing, drinking, as we wind our way through the desert and over the hills. we get to the beach, where three women are already cooking up food for all in huge cauldrons, boss jean the carpenter has set up a tent for some shade, there is a generator plugged to a p.a. system with music blasting all day. and everybody heads straight for the water, jumping 6 at a time into the canoes. like little kids, it's awesome. nobody knows really how to paddle or steer, but they do know how to submerge the things. an inflatable mattress doesn't stop being fun, all day long. frisbee, volleyball, soccer. music and drums and song come and go all day, with the men dancing around the band in circles, tracing tracks in the sand. they bury each other under sand in solemn ceremonies, then bring these 'dead' back to life. tug of war, sack races, egg-on-spoon races. they get so into it. the sack race winners make acceptance speeches at the microphone, giving shout-outs to the crowd. molly dances up by the speakers, in a cowboy hat. bossjean later sings some karaoke, to everyone's amusement. rama is so drunk he's missing the drum skin with his stick as he plays. rita our cook is here, having snuck in along with the medical team.


the water is amazing. the perfect temperature. the sand soft. the beach half submerged in trash and seaweed. i break out the camera, and as if on cue, the guys start making the most random poses. 'here eric, take a picture of me with my shoe tied around my neck... holding this seaweed up... holding a handful of sand up to my face, with my eyes closed...


as the shadows grow longer in the afternoon, we make a huge circle. tell jokes for a while. most of them crass (one punchline was a simple crotch-grab) but they're hilarious even without understanding the words. vishva, sampurna, dada, carlito, all speak about amurt, about the team that is gathered here, about sticking together as a family, about the importance of each piece and member. vishva talks so kindly about volunteers, such as eric and molly, who transcend nation and language and materialism and politics to come here and work in solidarity. i announce that we're leaving in a week, and that it's been our pleasure to live and work with and know them. a gift-bag is passed around, and by day's end everybody is wearing a new pair of shades or a watch or something. i lean between a canoe and a wheelbarrow on the truck-ride back, watching the sun set behind the mountains to the west. the last bits of the sun reflect back on water gathered in tire-tracks in the mud as we drive across the salt flats. i can't even stomach the beauty.

wchenko and fredimix soccer
our landlord's kids, wchenko and fredimix, decided to put on a karate exhibition in our front yard the other day, which quickly became a soccer game. i haven't played in days and days. didn't take much to roll up my pants, put down the grape soda, and jump in. turns out kicking a busted-up plastic gallon hurts the feet. but it's good for the spirit. we played like there was no tomorrow, and soon enough it was three on three, with milirez and molly and pretty cheering. you can tell they don't get that kind of action too often, even as much as they come down to the main square to watch the bigger kids. 'eric, eric, look, pass, goal!'


razor wire
the other friday, molly had gone to gonaives all day to purchase some stuff. so i sat waiting at restaurant rita for lunch. sitting on the patio, silent and at peace, staring at the razor wire on the concrete wall. and all was right with life again.


idonel
riding around on the back of idonel's bike, behind his long gangly frame. zooming across salt flats and winding around the curves of the sea. the green mountains rise sharply behind little fishing and salt towns. people wade in the shallows with fishnets, women sell food at road stops. but there's nobody else out on the road. kids yell 'dharma!' every once in a while.

exam de kalite dlo
the other day i gave an entire training on conducting water quality tests, in kreyol. to two doctors and two nurses, in the lab in the clinic. i was nervous, and unsure. it's been a long time to wait for these testing materials, and now with a week left, it feels like an odd letdown and crunch. but they totally got the training, and my kreyol.


minustah
the two weeks that the UN soldiers were here was a riot. driving around with the four soldiers, and their four pistols, looking for the hidden beach; giving english lessons, explaining what a volunteer is, talking about the significance of the invention of the cellphone. being gifted a box of orange juice for my efforts. returning through the village in their white suv with radio and air conditioning, commenting that people are going to see me and think that i'm a bit more important than i really am...

one commander said while we bathed in the pool here "i think people that live in a country, the usa, with so much development, it is easy to lose a part of your humanity, that which people in a country like here, haiti, have so much of." or something like that.

the top commander of the UN forces in the country said of their work for the salt project "this kind of work is good, it is good for the head. sure, i'll shoot down bad guys, chase the criminals, i'm a professional. but this work is good." and they don't do it too often, based on his very visit, the amount of photos taken, and the presence of all their UN press corps. this same commander also pulled this one on molly; "i think maybe we've met before? maybe in port-au-prince?" to his credit, he invited the two of us to look him up at the hotel charles in the capitol, to go out for a beer, if we were ever in town.

the two soccer matches i talked them into were highlights. the crowd gathered at sous chod was something else. leanna and emmanuel running water out to us at midfield during halftime. everybody trying on their spanish skills. the equalizing penalty kick as the sun set. the latinos complaining vehomently about the hometown ref afterwards, as the crowd circled about us as the final whistle blew. me yelling and laughing in spanish, "bienvenidos a haiti! we're not in south america, we're in haiti. welcome! thanks for playing. asi es. that's just the way it goes."

the line of kids at the edge of the pool when the un would come to bathe and fill their water tanker. how special i felt at that moment to be able to speak both kreyol and espanol. watching those dudes, regular old dudes, swim and chainsmoke in their underwear.

thunderstorms
finishing hand-washing the last load of laundry i'll ever do in haiti, bathing under the faucet, just as a lightening cracks across the sky with a rumble, the wind changes, and i realize that my nice hand-wrung clothes aren't going to get dry anytime soon.

sitting on our front porch, watching and listening as the fat drops pound down on the tin roof. several times we step back and shut the door, to allow the several families of goats scurry in to take shelter under the patio roof just to the side of our seats.

just sitting there. the rain, the clouds, the warm air, as the sunlight fades out. i will miss this place. it has been an odd blur here. that's really all i can say.

wilmic
wilmic, edwish's brother, whose name i didn't know for the longest time --and who i really bonded with when we showered together the other week-- passed us on the street this afternoon. word has gotten around that we are leaving, and he asked what day it was next week that we'll take off. we have a brief goodbye schpiel in our vocabularies, but we should be working on a better one, i think. anyways, he lamented, as many others have, that i(we) will not be around for the summer vacation soccer league, when the sous chod team travels to play other villages in the area. i said i was sad not to be there. he said, if i understood correctly, that each goal (chak gol) they score they'll think of eric...

tidbits

so, i haven't been on the internet much recently (can't complain, though, it's kind of an odd luxury here in rural haiti in the first place) but here's some tidbits from recent weeks non-adventures... don't know if i'll be able to get up any photos to go with.

[by the way, thanks much for any and all comments; i do read them, i just have problems connecting to comment back myself...]

*******************
5.3.08
bernard:
bernard joseph is the supervisor of the water filter project here.
he was the guy who invited us along his grandmother's funeral last month.
i've been helping out with the program, to keep an eye on the inventory of filters and other matierials, and to communicate with the overall project coordinator, who returned to the u.s. recently. so, the other day molly and i are walking past the filter factory, and bernard is in the middle of a heated discussion with the 8 or so workers there. he sees me, stops talking, jumps up, and in front of everybody, he shakes my hand -- and starts playing thumb war -- to my suprise and everybody else's. he's good. he's got a huge hand, and he's fast. everybody's hooting and hollering and cheering, and eventually he beats me. and returns to the argument.

so, we now have a tradition. each time we see each other, we stop what we're doing, jump up for a thumb war. the score is now 2-2. although, i'll have to admit that one of my victories was due to a slick distraction move -- pointing with my other hand and yelling "you've lost money!" on a day when he stopped in the middle of counting their stacks of money from filter sales...

5.3.08
i decided that i will leave behind my blue vintage 1993 viking grand lodge souvenier tshirt from mormor, as a donation. that way a piece of her will stay here in haiti, which is where i lost her, kind of. she'll live on, on the back of some kid, and she'll get to see haiti that way. and it will be a bit of leaving behind and letting go for me myself.

one month left to go.
we're already making plans for a june visit home.
i'm trying to do what i can to soak this place up while i'm here, to not let it all slip by without my noticing it go. the time will of course pass quickly, but i'd simply like to do what i can to engage with everything around me while we're still here.

5.5.08
work:
i'm helping out to design a flyer that will be plastered around the surrounding villages (now, here's a riddle -- if the village doesn't have electricity, that means it doesn't have lightposts or phone poles -- so where do they stick their flyers??) for a sports tournament this coming saturday. i included in the flyer photos i've taken of haitian kids doing karate, and volleyball, but i don't have any good soccer ones yet. so, i find an old photo of mine from a native american soccer tourney in new mexico last year, and paste it in. i ask krishna when i'm done; "hey, how does this look? this soccer photo kid clearly isn't haitian, is that okay?" krishna spreads his arms wide, smiles, and says "it's cool. we love everybody."

the materials should be arriving any day or week for doing e.coli tests on the water sources around here. setting up a little lab in the clinic, and working together with the nurse there to do sterile tests of water sampled before and after it's been filtered throught the water filters (canadian bio-sand filters, by the way, a great piece of 'appropriate technology').

still working on finishing a googleearth map of all amurt projects. it's pretty cool what you can do with that program. it's been a lot of driving around on the backseat of a motorcycle gazing at rural haiti, mountains, deserts, oceans, rock, dirt, sunburn, bouncing back from a couple of slow-speed crashes with goats and rocks, you know...

the other day a dog was chasing a goat, and the two of them ran right into molly's legs, as we were walking down the middle of the road. she went flying onto her butt. weren't too many people around. however, today our landlord, ticompe, came to the door to say hi, as he had just come back to town the night before. and the first thing he asks is, "so, i heard molly fell on a goat and dog?"

a UN team of twenty or so argentinians and other south americans comes to town on friday to [finally] begin three weeks of work with some big machines to help move earth at the salt fields. i've been asked to be a liason and helper/communicator for the work, due to my espanol skillz. which, is awesome. i'll also be helping the actual salt coop members to measure and level off the individual salt basins after the UN gets a start moving out the dug-out dirt to create a levy to one side of the whole area, to block floodwaters.
[by the way, for a great description of this new salt method that the coop is putting to use, check out the story at: http://wncgis.blogspot.com/2007/04/haiti-salt-of-ocean.html]

and, i'm also asked to go to a handful of villages to use the gps unit to map out, and count, private water connections cutting into the public line, so that the communities can begin to solve some disputes around those arrangements.

so, i've kind of lost the blogging itch for the time being. don't know why. molly's been putting up good little stories over at her site. it feels good to email you guys, but i don't feel poetic or interesting enough to write on the blog. i feel like i've seen so much of all this before, enough that it's not shocking, but none of that makes for interesting writing at all.

oh, the argentines are also bringing soccer equipment, and want to play friendly matches with the local villages while they're here. i'm asked to help organize that. how awesome would that be if you were a haitian soccer-playing teenager (who all idolize either argentina or brazil in the world cup - that's the big matchup here) and you got to step onto the field against a team of argentinians who had come to your village? (leaving aside the fact that they're part of a UN occupying force that semi-routinely massacres civilians in the poorest districts of the capitol. a force that stepped in in 2004 to smooth over the changes after the US's kidnapping [quite literally] of the elected president at the time, aristide.)

anyways, a group of these southamerican UN guys were up at sources chaudes for a more preliminary meeting back in february, and they're pretty cool, regular, guys, engineers, my own age. with wives and kids and daily lives back in their home country. they seemed kind of wide-eyed and curious (much like molly and i were back then) to find themselves in haiti, perhaps only choosing to come here in order to save up a little extra 'hazard pay' or whatever. but, they do look kinda funny with the camo and the guns and kevlar vests, nervously putting their SUV around a little dusty village, fingers a tad bit too close to the triggers..

4.21.08
so, in other news.
i'm riding around on the back of a dirtbike recently, clicking on GPS points to create a googleearth map of all of amurt's projects here. it should be pretty cool once i'm finished. still waiting on salt project and water testing materials.

and, i'm trying to learn more about myself. this time abroad feels very different from my experience in nicaragua. for many reasons. but, i am having less time to myself here, making less time to read or write. i'd love to write more. love to write YOU more. it would be cool to have enough scrawlings to put together a book, together with photos, at the end of the year.

but, i can't think of anything to say. i mean, nothing original. now, i'm not an author, never thought i was. but i just figured that sitting here, i would have a bunch of romantic or idealistic thoughts or analyses that would just flow out of me onto paper. like tolstoy or chomsky or kahlil gibran or somebody. yeah right. ah well.so, the weeks are flying by here. as they always do.
we are seeing our date of departure creeping closer, and putting things on our 'to do' list to make sure to fit in, such as a visit to port-au-prince with friends, next week during a national holiday and festival on may 1.

speaking of p-a-p, we are all safe and fine here. i've heard snippets of the riots in haiti and around the world in recent weeks, having to do with the rising cost of rice and other food, but i don't know much. we tried to do a google search once, and saw some of the headlines. we're just fine here. i'm sure people here will soon feel the pinch of the higher prices, but there's no violence to speak of. i can't really understand what people are talking about on the street, so tough to say how much of a topic of conversation it is.

4.8.08
we tented on a deserted beach on the coast that faces cuba, on sunday night. went swimming, made a fire, played guitar. the stars and the waves and the wind. and sitting for an hour the next morning, watching the surf crash into the cliff below. letting the spray fall over me sometimes. looking across the ocean and trying to picture you guys somewhere out there on the other side.

3.10.08
yesterday i hiked an hour each way in the glaring sun to 'ti plas' where there is a two-week training conference going on at our environmental projects center. it's a conference to train and equip and grow local leaders and organizers. led by the founder of MPP (which stands for movement of peasants-something-something...) who is this super charismatic and humble and well-spoken guy who has been organizing peasants and production cooperatives in the country for 35 years. a true communist, he says of himself at one point in the morning.

3.11.08
so, i spent yesterday touring some amurt projects with this same MPP leader, 'chevon', and a couple amurt staff. we visited the salt coop, a school, a community garden, and this guy just gushed and gushed knowledge and advice of how to continue organizing people to stand up.

and then later last night molly and i both went for the training's end-of-the-week 'cultural night' ceremony over at ti plas. kind of like a talent show. except that it was the greatest, most energetic, sheer pure fun, thing i've ever seen in a long time. song, dance, drama, poetry, drumming, dj-ing, joke-telling. man, it was awesome. thirty people in the training that had come there from all over to spend the two weeks. three of us internationals visiting. and maybe another twenty locals from the village that snuck in the door to watch. people were dancing and laughing and on their feet stomping to songs about life and hunger and rising up and organizing and suffering and working for each other. and it just hits me like a ton of bricks. this is it. you read about revolutionaries, you watch documentaries, hear stories, read books, whatever. but here you are, spending the day with, listening to the real deal. this guy, who for 35 years has been living it. he speaks with such conviction, seems so honest and humble and yet powerful. people say that the left, the peasants, would elect him president in a heartbeat if he'd ever run. at the close of the training, before the party, he gave out his phone number and said he was with them whatever they might need. "we want the direct line!!" everyone yelled as they whipped out their pens and pads hurriedly.

and the cultural night. dramas where people acted their hearts out telling stories of servants and voodou and organizers. a guy sitting behind a borrowed mac laptop with a very serious look, playing cuts of songs between each act, on gigantic borrowed speakers hooked to two lightbulbs and a purring generator. one-man poetry acts speaking of rivers and desert and working together and lifting up. a line of dancing women that began, finished, and stole the show. carlito the dominican-raised haitian who loves speaking spanish with me emcee'd the whole night with incredible energy.

and i sat there, thinking 'look at where i am'. i get so down into self-loathing about being a rich white straight christian male from the united states (what power-weilding percentile does that put me in? i wonder...). but then, i realize, i can drop that for just a moment, and look around and just soak up the fact that i am sitting in a little lightbulbed house in a dark village in rural haiti at midnight with a house full of energy and dance, young people my age and folks in their 50's, bringing dust off the rafters with hope and strength and smiles. insert any old inspirational qoute right here. they all fit.

*********************

miriam ericson 1912-2008

miriam had three daughters. so, there's no more 'ericsons'. however, that's why i'm an 'eric'. and i will gladly, and proudly, carry on the eric torch.


so, a couple days before miriam died, i was invited by bernard, the head of the water filter program here, to come to his 93-year old grandmother's funeral. i had said sure, agreed to bring my camera to take photos for him. then, the day before going, learn that my own grandmother, 95, had died.

so last saturday morning, molly and i got dressed up, and were the only random whites at a gigantic catholic funeral for a woman who must also have been something special, as miriam was. and i found myself sitting there, feeling odd, and sad, and yet so strangely grateful to be at a service for a grandmother, even if it wasn't my own. to be able to have that time to reflect, and let go. even as i sit so far away here. i just decided for a moment, to pretend that it was, in fact, a service for miriam. and that, in fact, a couple hundred haitians were marching and singing and crying and hugging and wailing their way through the saturday market in her honor. for a moment, anyways, that's what it was. i didn't tell bernard that.




and, this blog is for you, mormor. thanks.

...washing clothes by hand builds character. haitians have a lot of character.

...this blog post is dedicated to southside community health services, in minneapolis, who last year gave me a rather unexpected christmas bonus check, which quickly turned itself into a fisheye lens for the camera. thanks!





“What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security ...


To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, regretted.


Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.






Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing) ... You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.”

-German professor, after World War II, describing the rise of Nazism to a journalist

a day in the life

okay, family.
i was thinking, you probably don't know much about my days here.
[and, i don't know much about yours, for that matter. how are you?]

so, let's just rewind through a typical - but not an actual - day here in sources chaudes, haiti. let's go backwards from my evening shower, just for kicks:

7:30pm
i crouch on the cement and get my body beneath a little pvc spout that pours hot, fresh, sulfury-smelling spring water on my sore body. i literally take hot showers here in a village with no electricity or running water or phone or paved road, here in the poorest region of the poorest country in the hemisphere. [define irony...] folks here lack many things, many important and [what we refer to as] basic things; but they are proud of their naturally hot water springing up. [that's what sources chaudes means; 'hot source'].

5:00pm
we gather at the center of town for the afternoon's soccer game. [see previous blog]. any kid lucky [or dedicated or ... ?] enough to make it to secondary school [highschool] has to travel to live two hours away in gonaives, where the nearest school is. these highschoolers have been back in town for easter vacation this entire last week, and they make a point of playing soccer every afternoon. when i miss a game they remind me of it the entire next day, and when i make the game, the next day they make sure to let molly know how many goals i scored.

the other day i got invited to be on the official sources chaudes village team [i mean, official. we had green mexican national team jerseys, shorts, and socks. the guys were so, so proud of these. i don't know where they came from, but it was a treat for everybody, it seemed.]. this was for a game against a team of policemen from another town. we went down to the larger field, where half the village was there to watch, and a generator was running with huge woofers blasting some pregame reggae and 'compa' music. long story short, though, the cops never showed, but another team of guys volunteered to play us, we eventually found a ball [and, later, a pump] and i made my official debut as the first random white guy to ever take the field for sources chaudes. [i don't know that this is a certain fact, but nobody who would ever know otherwise would ever fact-check this humble blog, so why don't we just go ahead and assume it's true].

3:00pm
i sit on a laptop trying to figure out an excel spreadsheet with elevations that franzi and i took at the salt project. or, on another day i might be at the clinic with karen training enoch and other staff there on how to conduct tests on water samples to determine the e.coli content. or maybe i'm sitting in on an amurt meeting as they try to figure out their future hopes for a volunteer program or visioning their hopes for future projects.

2:00pm
lunch, down at the other side of town. we eat in the home rented by several of amurt's medical staffers. rita the cook makes us rice and beans and fish, or goat, for lunch each day. by the time we are done eating, we are sweating, so often stop at the corner store next door for a kind-of-cold cocacola [sold in glorious one-liter glass bottles]. afterwards we slug our way back uphill in the sun towards the office, high-fiving kids and handshaking friends along the way. the nice thing about this being a relatively small village is that i think we know, or recognize, a significant percentage of the people in town already. which feels very nice. at first the sheer number of new names and faces was simply overwhelming, but now routine and familiarity set in, and we feel very popular.

i love kids here. their solid slapping handshakes. their toothless smiles. braided hair. cute school uniforms. callused feet. eagerness to learn games like rock paper scissors, thumb war, or simon says. they are always carrying water, tending animals, helping to wash clothes. or, they are just sitting there watching you. fascinated with you. making it almost easy to forget what tough lives they certainly lead.

9:23am
the day's work. people often ask us for photo-ops for one program or event or another at amurt, which is a great excuse to be able to get out and visit tree plantings, the local clinic, kids' karate exhibitions, women's paper-mache trainings, etc. today i spent most of my day working on creating a digital GoogleEarth map of salt production in the surrounding area*. the other day i very neatly and carefully colored in the bubble letters on a big sign that says "welcome, united nations" that will be displayed this week to welcome in a u.n. crew of engineers that are donating their time and heavy machinery to create canals and floodwalls around the salt production project.

[*this section of the blog is brought to you by GoogleEarth. if you have not downloaded GoogleEarth yet, you should check it out. it's pretty cool stuff. and it will also be a great way to keep up with where exactly molly and i are headed. i will insert a seperate posting with all relevant map coordinates, that you can simply plug into the search field of GoogleEarth and let the program fly you in for a view.]



9:00am
i sit down for a morning's work. at first, we had made it a good 3-4 weeks living here without a pinch of caffiene [a modest feat for both of us coffeeheads], but ever since leoni the office cook taught me the local method of brewing coffee through a stocking, i've gotten used to my cup-a-day again. sigh. i now sock-strain a pot a day for whomever's interested, and start my day by dipping fresh market bread into it.

8:00am
breakfast is spicy spaghetti, or spicy porrage, or spicy boiled plaintains. i'm getting used to all three. the first day of breakfast we had with rita and company, they were so polite and inviting, they were showing molly which condiments they like on the breakfast spaghetti [mayo, tobasco, or ketchup] and decided to be so kind as to go ahead a put a big spoonful o' mayo on top of her plateful. her expression was priceless.

7:49am
this has nothing to do with 7:49. i simply wanted to insert, somewhere in here, the following breakthrough observation: pearl jam is an amazing band. maybe you fell out of love with them sometime in the 90's. maybe all you know of them is the radio hits. maybe you don't care for their political asides. maybe you live under a rock (or in some other country, i suppose) and you haven't heard of them. that's all okay. i want to encourage you today to give them another shot. i have come to realize in recent years -and more and more in recent days, headphones in, sitting in our stoop watching waves of rain come down- that they have simply continued to be honestly and straightforwardly and consistently great for some 18 years now - whether or not anybody was paying any attention. they have the conviction and dedication of no other band that i know of - and churn out some amazing songs, and concerts. i encourage you to stop reading this blog [it will be here when you get back] and go out and buy one of their 'official live bootleg' albums in your local store [if you still have one]. they've put out dozens of them from concerts in recent years, and any one of them serves as a great jumping in point for a band that you may have unfortunately stopped paying attention to back when you wore flannel.

thanks very much [to all four of you...] for putting up with my observations.

anyways...

7:30am
i put off waking up til the last possible moment, wiping out all possibility of fulfilling my grand pledges and promises to myself to wake at 6am to read or write or just sit with the cool air.

6:02am
pigs and goats and chickens and an eight year-old and the catholic church's bells wake me, but i refuse.

2:34am
to any of you who live far away from beloved family members. i have found that getting a tattoo in remembrance of such family members is a fantastic way to have a living memento and reminder of them. put in on your left forearm if you'd like, so that you can be reminded of, and soothed by, their love and warmth and hopes and dreams and blessings constantly - and so that kids in foreign countries can poke and ask about it constantly, too.

2:02am
i just read molly's blog, where she's copied my idea (two weeks before me) to write about a 'typical day in the life of...'. i just want to clear up any confusion; we do, in fact, spend most of our day together. why they sound so different on paper is beyond me...



1:17am
i feel two distinct poles when i am in places like haiti, or nicaragua, or capetown townships.

on the one hand, you travel to some land like this and hook up with an organization doing good stuff as quick and best as they can -- you can't help but to run into individuals that give you hope upon hope in the world. locals living here, or internationals working here, whose very lives or very smiles or very feet make you feel blessed and lucky to be alive. we've met people from canada, bulgaria, zimbabwe, brazil, germany, connecticut, vermont, the dominican republic, north carolina, and haiti; people whose stories we've only heard or understood bits of, but whom have given me faith. a faith in people.

and at the same time, on the other hand, you look around you at the conditions in people's lives, the cards stacked against them from the start, the rocks and hard places. you read a little history, you maybe see that poverty is not some simple force of nature. you see that perhaps "the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. his or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. the poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible." (-gustavo guitierrez) and, you don't feel any hope at all. it all doesn't make me feel like 'it will be allright' if we just donate some money, switch to fleurescent lightbulbs, think really positive peaceful thoughts, and vote obama. i just don't trust that this will turn out okay. or that with enough effort and education and consciousness raising, 'we'll get there'. why would it? why would we? we have created it. we do this to ourselves, or moreso; to others. it's our own monster.

anyways, two poles.
nothing i've ever seen in life assures me that there will be any kind of a happy ending. a whole lot of what i've seen and whom i've met assures me that despite this, there are good people doing good things that i believe in, and i don't have a clue what else to do but to try to be one of them. and i don't have a clue what that really adds up to. that howard zinn qoute to the right side is for me, not you, i suppose.

11:00pm
brushing my teeth on the stoop of our home under a wide sky of stars. looking up at those stars, and wondering who else in the world is looking up at these same lights; and from where. i think it's crazy that light from those stars takes so many years to travel until it's here, and we can see it. so that, when you see a star, the light that you see left that star years and years ago. so when you're looking up at them, you are actually looking backwards in time. think about that.

10:00pm
i don't know what i do at 10:00pm. this has gotten too long and needs to stop. if i think of what i do from 7pm to 10pm, i'll put that in an additional post. on to another 24 hours. we are lucky people to be able to be here. that fact is not, not, not lost upon me.

if you think this is my last fisheye photo of cute kids... you are very much wrong, my friend.

“The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.”

-Wendell Berry

foutbol

i love soccer.
it seems to be an international language. anywhere you go, you can find a game. and anywhere you can find a game, you can find smiling kids, new friends, laughter, humility, and bloody knees.

it is a language in several ways. first and foremost, you don't need any other language in common. i began playing soccer in the street here in haiti during my first week, when i didn't know the first thing in creole. (we quite literally got off the plane without knowing how to say 'hello' in creole... we're procrastinators.) soccer is a language of its own, but with a lovely dialect in each place you go; you can just hop in and play, but then you can enjoy learning the particulars as you go.

for example. figuring out which bushes or houses or barbed wire fences are out of bounds, and which are part of the field. figuring out how how everybody else so effortlessly avoids breaking their ankles in the ravines that run through the 'field' or on the rocks throughout. learning the creole words for 'pass it here!'. learning that whoever gets scored on first has to take their shirts off and be the 'skins' team. learning when to pause the game for trucks passing through this intersection (the only one in town, really) and when to simply play around and dodge the motorcycles and donkeys and bikes and passerby as i make my far-post run.

and, the soccer here is great. i fit in well, i figure i'm about as good as anyone else on the field - but they're much better on these rocks than i am. the teams are tensely sorted out. the arguing starts before the game begins, of course. friends clear the intersection of the biggest stones. rocks are piled up to form the goalposts on either end. arguments ensue to agree on which goal is too small or too wide or just right. sandals and shoes are tied up or taped up. some guy to the side begins doing play-by-play, a constat stream of commentary too fast for me to understand (except for when he screams "blanc gol! blanc gol!" -- "whitey scores! whitey scores!"). i watch as a guy on the other team goes down with an injury, clutching his stomach. he hobbles over to the gutter, sits down. i wonder if he's okay, and i see that a friend has gone over to him to check, so that's good. we argue over hand-balls and fouls, but the games are good-natured and good-humored and friendly. i glance again, and the friend is not checking on the injured -- he is untying his shoes so that he can put them on himself and jump in as the substitute.

and, my creole is getting better. i've been here a month, apparently. (!?). so my trashtalking abilities on the field have grown exponentially from the first week, when all i could do was wag my finger or make faces or whatever. thursday, the guy guarding me said "i am going to eat you". i wasn't quite sure if i understood literally, so i repeated back "you, are going to eat me? (he nods his head, smiles, he must have forgotten that i've got three goals so far...) no no no, it is me who will eat you!" the crowd to the side cracks up and howls. a bit later, the game is tied 4-4, i say to him, "hmm, i'm hungry. hungry for a goal. i want a goal." i point to the goal, smile, rub my stomach. the crowd laughs, i'm not sure at who. minutes later, i put in my fourth, then fifth goals. i would never do that in the states. i never even made varsity in highschool. this could have been the greatest moment of my soccer life, i think to myself, as the self-appointed commentator yells again "blanc gooool! blanc goooool!".

running around the yard at night with a flashlight

3.9.2008 email

hey y'all,
so, i feel like i haven't written much of substance describing what we've been up to here or what it's been like. where to begin. i don't even know. feels like it's been a full-time sensory overload the entire time here. my head has been in nicaragua so much (well, in nicaragua they do it this way... well, in nicaragua it's really similar...) that i feel like i've seen all this before. i'm already desensitized to much of it. which is good and bad. good, in that nothing is too shocking anymore. i don't need to gawk or take constant photos or scratch my head all the time, because i feel like i have a bit of a clue what people's reality's are like, a bit about the history, whatever. but it's bad, on the flip side, because i'm sure i assume i know too much. i don't really know these people's lives of course. it's not all just like in nicaragua. each story and each person are different. i should assume nothing, i suppose.

this is the poorest rural region in haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere. so, a lot of people aren't doing that great here. seems like people are always dying. ("this is jean, he's a good friend. his father just died." "what did you do this weekend robert?" "oh, i went to port-au-prince to help with the funeral of my wife's parents...")



molly is working to create a cohesive set of materials for AMURT that detail each of their programs (health, water, education, salt production, environmental...), their plans for a future volunteer program, etc. so, that's pretty much right up her alley. she's busy most days in the office (a converted barn with solar panels for electricity).

together, we do an english-creole exchange class m,w,f at noon with anyone interested. this has turned out to be about 8 people each time, most of whom are educators within amurt's teacher-training program. we've learned a bunch from them so far, and are working to come up with ways to keep them coming back, as they each know a bit of english already from school.

i myself am working with the salt project, doing surveying and g.p.s. locations for their sea-salt cooperative project. dharma, the amurt point person for this project, told us that after about a year of organizing people and conflicts and doubts and answering questions and forming committees -- on the day of the digging 600 people showed up with shovels and pickaxes. and somehow the thought of that just almost made me cry. amurt does very well in empowering people to have pride and take ownership of their own projects, it seems. i could see it in the gentlemen that ive met each time out at the salt ponds. the pride and worksmanship they put into it, the way they get fired up talking about it.

something we've heard from a variety of people in a variety of ways is that in haiti people struggle to take ownership or responsibility for projects, work, for their own country. and i've not heard this with an insulting tone, but instead with an historical understanding of the centuries of slavery, decades of foreign intervention and control and manipulation, a long period of being invaded and controlled by the u.s. marines in the early 20th century (much like nicaragua, incidentally), decades of a one-family dictatorship up until the 1980's (much like nicaragua), an escape from said dictatorship that found harsh opposition from the u.s. and friends in the 80's and 90's, and now a culture saturated (maybe? maybe not?) with n.g.o. handouts and aid from all over that often does not encourage people to take ownership or pride or initiative of their own. i've heard from several people that in the region of anse rouge where we're at, that a big problem is that for years, CARE int'l. had 'canteens' that gave out food to everyone (an ostensibly good deed, for sure) which in turn let people turn their attention away from finding their own solutions for farming and sustaining themselves.

'sustainable' is such an overused word in this case.

but, it seems that amurt works hard to put locals and local committees in charge of so much. there are many haitians on the small staff, and in charge of various programs. they talk of trying to cut down how much they participate in project management and details themselves, but from what i see, they set such a good example of putting responsibility and power in locals' hands.

anyways, my other project is water quality testing for the water filter project. the grant for the 2000 filters in production will actually be running out soon (they are travelling the area looking for partners and funding to continue the filter program anew) but a study is needed to find out how much e.coli and coliforms is removed by the filters, and how much is present in the water sources to begin with. and, i know how to do that. (yay!) so, i'll do it together with a haitian at the local amurt clinic, so that he knows how to do the process in the future, if required by future grants.

i'm going to cut this short, i've been typing a word document but my turn at the internet cord just came up, so i'm going to take advantage...

hugs!
hugs!

e

from "i" to "we"

"One man, one family, driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and I am bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep those two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate-- "We lost our land." The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first "we" there grows a still more dangerous thing: "I have a little food" plus "I have none." If from this problem the sum is "We have a little food," the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side-meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mother's blanket-- take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning-- from "I" to "we"."

--John Steinbeck, "Grapes of Wrath"

amurt in ayiti

a brief description of AMURT's programs, stolen from molly's blog:
WATER
- Training 8 communities to construct and install Bio-Sand Water Filters in homes, schools and clinics.
- Training and overseeing a network of community filter agents to lead hygiene education classes in more than 24 villages.

EDUCATION
- Training teachers and community leaders.
- Building and rehabilitating schools.
- Introducing integrated education methods
- Strengthening school management structures.
- Building a education training center.

ENVIRONMENT
- 8 school tree nurseries and vegetable gardens.
- Fuel-efficient stoves.
- Mangrove Rehabilitation Project.
- 9 community managed tree nurseries.
- Creation of Micro-Forests.
- Training of community leaders.
- Agriculture demonstration and training center.

FORMING COOPERATIVES
- Establishing a community owned and operated salt production cooperative.
- Setting up a model salt production facility.
- Facilitating additional community collaborative projects.

HEALTH
- Building and rehabilitating health clinics.
- Providing staff, medicines and supplies for three clinics.
- Recruiting training and overseeing 12 community health agents.

INFRASTRUCTURE
- Built a village water distribution system, a park, irrigation channels and washing facilities.
- Community resource in water systems.
- Helped to build 8.6 KM sections of new road.

curiosity

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
-Estonian wisdom

p.s.
Molly's own blog is up at www.discoveringubuntu.blogspot.com. you should check it out, because she is a much better writer than i am. however, my black background makes photos look cool, so at least i've got that...

peacefully

How long will we Haitians be obliged to leave our country against our will? We turn to the Dominican Republic with its cane-cutters' barracks and barely masked slavery; to the United States with its internment camps at Krome and Guantanamo for our boat people, who are returned by the boatload for the slaughter; we turn to the Bahamas with thier periodic pogroms; to Guyana and its slums reserved for the 'Haichiens'; to Canada, where the cold brings frozen tears and our cab drivers and school kids are each day reproached with their color. Foreigners, you don't want us in your country? At least let us live peacefully at home. Let us elect whom we want.

-Paul Anvers, 'Rizieres de sang'

ayiti

so, this is my first time blogging from a trip abroad. i'm nervous. *ahem*.
i've been thinking of what to say, but i'll scrap my ideas and instead enlighten you with an unorganized stream of words that might sum up our first week here:



soccer, pigs, salt cooperative, mosquitoes, chickens, water filters, molly, rice and beans and corn, mice, wyclef jean, creole, babana, hand sanitizer, wide smiles and white teeth, feet, firm handshakes, eye contact, eight teets for seven piglets yet it's still a constant fight, rocket stoves, deforestation, france, www.amurthaiti.org, sadness, malaria, diarhea, blanc means white, paul farmer: uses of haiti, internet doesn't work much, tattoo, language, universal, hot showers from natural springs, english classes, ewick, kindness, stars, stars, stars...

the internet is working today

yesterday playing soccer, the kids were making fun of my shoes. quite literally. these poor, underdressed, underfed, skinny, kids playing soccer in the street on rocks and dirt and shit were mocking my ten-year old adidas gazelles. krishna translated, saying 'they say your shoes don't work; they're too old; they belong in the trash'. hilarious. my shoes don't pass muster in haiti.

i love soccer.

this is a call

This is a call to the living,
To those who refuse to make peace with evil,
With the suffering and the waste of the world.
This is a call to the human, not the perfect,
To those who know their own prejudices,
Who have no intention of becoming prisoners of their own limitations.
This is a call to those who remember the dreams of their youth,
Who know what it means to share food and shelter,
The care of children and those who are troubled,
To reach beyond barriers of the past
Bringing people to communion.
This is a call to the never ending spirit
Of the common man, his essential decency and integrity,
His unending capacity to suffer and endure,
To face death and destruction and to rise again
And build from the ruins of life.
This is the greatest call of all
The call to a faith in people.

-Algernon D. Black

minneapolis is cold

'the frames' should be your favorite band

Breathing in the night
There's nothing else I'm needing now
The wind is at my side
And so are you
And together we will rise
Above all these word and promises we couldn't keep,
Together we will fly above it all
But sometimes we will fall...
From the light
But it shines on us tonight...
And together we will rise

["rise" by 'the frames']

i'm not poor

“If I define my neighbor as the one I must go out to look for, on the highways and byways, in the factories and slums, on the farms and in the mines – then my world changes. This is what is happening with the “option for the poor”, for in the gospel it is the poor person who is the neighbor par excellence…
But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.”
-Gustavo Guitiérrez, from “The Power of Poor in History”

el porvenir

“The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
-Milan Kundera

the horse's mouth

“We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population.... Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming, and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction.... We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”
-George Kennan, U.S. State Department planning memo, 1948

mlk jr.

“If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue?”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.