poem

ignorance implicates us
in its fabricated
tapestry of lies
close your eyes
and imagine this world
with out suffering, with out violence
... with out people.
And so you stand alone.
With out responsibility from
the chains that bound you
to this earth
the chains that found you
at your birth
have been cut
all ties to humanity
human sanity
have been cut
you stand alone
pretending you are not a product of a past
but this past
is long living, forever sinning
and will outlast
this current generation
Alone, you stand
upon claimed land
staring into the abyss
of a mass gravsite called Earth.
But who piled on the dirt?
With victory cry
shovel held high, the voice screams
I did this for you!
For you, my family!
For you America!
For you! For you! For you!
and our silence is our complicity
it packs the dirt,
on this massive gravesite city
unless we realize our chains
are from our silence.
no longer bound
creating from silence a sound
of our voice shouting
No!
You do not kill for me
You do not hate for me
Not!
For!
Me!
But its not the guilt upon our backs
that need force us speak out and act
But Love!
And love of life. all life.
Because this world is filled with people

Tumaco

I spoke too soon inside my head when i arrived yesterday. I thought this was a beautiful little town on the waters edge. i was so excited to see the ocean. Alas... my day was smashed with a reality check today when i went in search of boats to float gailily around in. This town is poor. dirty. it smells. poor? very poor. i have never seen a big city this poor. Small towns, yes, worse off. with out electricity, running water, etc. The houses are built into the water on supports for lack of land. Where the water has receded it leaves a big hole of mud filled with garbage for much of the waters edge houses. Lack of resources? I think not. This is a port town. With oil. lots of oil sent from Popoyan as i learned yesterday. as well as various other things. That explains the heavy military presence. They searched my bus on the way in, and made us all stand out in the rain as they checked for... drugs? Costumed men in green are everywhere. sometimes they like to scare me when i am walking along thinking my own little thoughts... a sound hisses out at me! a snake? no. something snake like... and military uniformed has called to me from his camafloughed perch. Today they were on their best beviour. i wanted to walk around the town in search of the peninsula. about five or six of them started sweetly shouting gringa! hey gringa! and mami! at me. and whistling loudly. such nice boys. and then i do not know who to attribute this next act of flattery to, but as i was walking back to my hotel a car drove by and someone reached out and grabbed ahold of my arm. scared the shit out of me. Such nice boys....
i am getting the fuck out of here tomorrow.

reading

more tidbits: I am ploughing through my history textbook in spanish, but it is slow going. So i finally cave in and checked out some books from the library in english. An interesting comparison of numbers: Chilean dirty war - 17 yrs. 3,000 political killings. Argentina 8 years- 9,000 politically motivated killings. Colombia, 1986-1994, 28,500 politically motivated killings.... it was much easier to hide under "drug war" and the government often portrayed itself as a victim cocaine and guerrila warfare. However, the violence of the state commited more atrocites than all the other dictatorships in Latin America combined. And this was just in a period of 8 years. The writer of this new book discusses the tactics taught by U.S manuals of the "climate of fear" that to combat internal conflict the government must use violence in a manner so as to terrify the community into subjugation and silence. Killing is used not only to rid the city of "problematic" people, but to intimitate through use of torture. some of the examples given are absolutely horrific. The one i can`t get out of my mind is the story of a woman coming home to find her entire family decapitated. each body was sitting in a chair with its head on the table in front of it. The hands of the body were placed where their heads should have been. The baby`s hands were too little and were nailed to its body. guesomly horrific. As i began reading this book my roommate came in and we began a discussion of media violations. For example, two weeks ago a high up leader of one of the farc factions was killed by the police. His face was plastered all over the newspapers. His dead bloody face. And let us not forget the hanging of Saddam Hussein. Shown on international television and newspapers everywhere. I need look no farther than popular culture to begin comtemplating how it is possible to decapitate a baby and make a joke out of it.
to be continued....

we wear the mask

WE wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

Paul Laurence Dunbar

teaching

more on the saga of teaching...
the bane of my existence. Today went very well. It helps a lot to prepare lessons i have decided. But can be somewhat hindered when i am not given a book untill five minutes before class. But i had brought in a poem from Paul Lawrence Dunbar. We wear the mask... its one of my favorites. analyzed vocab, then pronunciation excercise. Say it faster and faster! get a rhythm going. I did it for two classes. It is good practice to do it twice. Then discuss its meaning. Then in my second class a game: i wash my ass ... in order that.... i am in paradise. kids are so creative. Games are fun. And a good help. Sometimes i forget learning a language can also be fun.
Saturday, went volunteering in Galan again. and once again the building was occupied by police. They were using our classroom so we didn`t have a white board, or markers, or ... nada. At least all the police were locked up in the room rather than wandering around brandishing their weapons like last time. I was supposed to give an english lessons, but for lack of materials and too large a class just sat with different groups to present the basics.
Elections were yesterday. Samuel Moreno won for mayor of Bogota. (partido del Polo) This was a great success for polo party. (some view polo as communist) with more people voting than ever before and a landslide victory even though the other candidate had support and money from the president.
Problems encountered. In this "democracy" usually not even half the eligible voters vote. Threats from the government, paramilitaries, Farc, are a large factor. Disinterest is probably the biggest. Corruption, lack of real visible changes, etc. create a disallusionment very widespread. But if democracy is winning 23% of the populations consent that you are not quite as bad as the other rich,(white) male... then hey, join the world. Some changes are positive. The mayor of Bogota previously was also part of the Polo party. Bogota spends a lot of money on its public schools now, has been adopting measures to disarm, more freedom of the press, soup kitchens, etc. But at the same time - allocating a few million dollars to improve public schools by the mayor is displaced by congress taking away 35 million dollars from education to go to the military. (these stats are not exact. ballpark are guess - it is actually a larger percentage that has been taken from education to fund the war, but i`ll have to look it up later)
Conclusion: the mayor of bogota is doing good things for the city. relatively powerful compared to a mayor in the estados unidos. Its a long road though for "the oldest democracy in latin america" to be truly representative of its people.

teaching

Reconciling differences. How to work in an environment where I am forced to cover certain things in the book. To discuss issues such as intolerance and stereotypes, what i wear.. of filling out paperwork. (paperwork? bleh)
I still don´t dress very formal. i have been sneaking in with jeans, and occaisonally have come from the gym in a t-shirt and waiting for my boss to harass me. But i give classes on the third floor, the bosses are on the second.. muahawaw.
the difficulty i have had lately is sharing a class with other teachers. who need me to cover certain things in the book because they will be doing part two. In classes i do on my own it allows for more creativity. To use the book as a guide and bring in supplemental materials. But to have to do every single excercise from the book or risk the other teachers being rude to me? (which just happened last friday... she claimed it took her two hours to do a ten minute grammar excercise...)
yeah yeah...
My classes: i have tended to have a lot more discussions than me talking. Right now i lack being able to teach grammar in a creative way. I will have to work on that. I like our discussions though. I sometimes wonder if they are learning anything though. With beginners it is much easier to show their improvement. With advanced? Or perhaps i am just projecting my own frustrations with learning lanugages onto my students. Is my spanish even improving? I have almost given up. Perhaps switch to chinese. i think it would be easier.

Thoughts on "Kite Runner" (If you are planning to read the book, don´t read this) When i started this book i was very impressed. It is about the childhood of a young afghan, along with his sevant Hassan, and the Russian invasion, and later he moves to America with his father. It brought up many issues about the clashes of poverty vs. wealth. as Hassan is more courageus, often smarter even though he can´t read, a better person overall than Amir. Hassan is raped and Amir watches with out intervening. Later in the book he is able to rescue Hassan´s son Sohrab. I think this shoudn´t have happened. I think it would have been more powerfull to not have a chance to undo the wrongs. also he gets beat up very badly by the Taliban. And through this mutilation of his body he is healed at last from his wounds. Why is the cycle of violence used as a symbol of healing. "of getting what you deservered" as if an eye for an eye is the only way to peace. America was never criticized in this book. I view this as disgusting. It was written for an American audience and fails to ask the question... those who were moved by the horrible violence and terrors of the book not need look to their country´s policies and wonder how they are responsible. But America was the land of the free, of opportunities.... who did not apparently plant land mines that killed Hassans father.... more later.

remembering christian

On our way to Galan, where they have sarturday school for the kids of the trabajadores. Gabriel tells me there is a change of plans. A kid just died so we will go to his funeral. Christian was 16 years old. He drowned in a pool, yet the details are unknown. did he dive in and hit his head? was he too drunk and just passed out? but he is dead now, just a 16 year old boy. He was part of the group of jóvenes that taught after school to help the younger kids in school. The caskett was brought out and a proccession of people began following behind it as it circled around to the church. This is when it hit me - that there was a dead boy there. Not just some idea, but a real body. A drowned body.
We marched on to the cemetery. I tried to write a poem about the event today. But i cannot put it into words. How can i describe a mother`s grief as i feel chills through my body when she falls to the ground and begins sobbing and screaming. His sixteen year old body being lowered into the ground. What kind of event is this for me to practice my writing skills? They have been buried with the boy.
My grief has never been uncontrolable. But the grief of others affects me almost more than my own.


This event has made me think about death a lot. Being an atheist I am completley at peace for when I die. I have no concerns about being burned to death in hell. I do not fear god, or hell, or fell compelled any longer to kneal or make the sign of the cross in church. I have many questions unanswered. But these questions to not bother me because it doesn`t affect how i act on earth. But what about another person who holds different beliefs? perhaps a different view on death would be easiar for a community to handle. It was one of the most heartwrenching funerals i have ever been to. The celebration of life is long forgotten in the feelings of pain and loss of death. He was just sixteen... jaime`s age.
I do not want to be buried in the ground. i prefer cremation, and spread to the wind. I feel my soul would be trapped and cold to be covered with earth.