Throw back Thursday, No hay mal que cien años dure (ni cuerpo que lo resista)

 

I found this on a Thursday, so that counts, right? It´s been about a year since I hacked off my hair in the middle of the night, and thank God my bangs no longer resemble this Yanomamo (?) woman´s!!! (Found in Guns, Germs and Steel)

It´s rainy season!!!!!!!!!

In honor of the start of rainy season....Here´s a jazz chant, aka nerd English teaching rap.

I adapted the Beatles' song "Rain" to make a Jazz Chant to teach the "0 Conditional" to my Saturday students last year.

The rhythm is a slow 4 beats, begin on the downbeat, and stretch out the word rain or sun to make the rhythm work. Work with 2 groups (A and B)

A: If the rain comes,

B: We run and hide our heads

A: If the rain comes,

B: If the rain comes.

A: When the sun shines,

B: We go into the shade

A: And drink our lemonade

B: When the sun shines

A: When the sun shines.

B: Rain, I don't mind

A: Sun, the world is fine.

Ghosts of Economic Models Past: A Poem

An  amateur attempt at poetry.

                                            One of several rusting hulks that inspired this...

Ghosts of Economic Models Past

"How many people prosper in times of prosperity? How many people find their lives developed by development?"

Eduardo Galeano, "Those Little Numbers and People"

Rusting in the mud of the jungle

And in the depths of the Rio San Juan

Lie steamboat wrecks

Nowadays this is nowhere

People live with palm rooves, questionable electricity and laughable medical care

But back in the day

The river was hopping

As Vanderbuilt's shipping line sent workers to California for the gold rush

Undoubtedly as well as some important packages

Sure, it wasn't the Silk Road

But they passed on through alright

Until history passed the steamship by.

But hey, all the jungle creatures ain't complaining,

Hear them roar.

If you start to look for them,

There are more jungle wrecks with stories to tell

Like in mi pueblo

Once a busy port for rubber and precious wood

Now just the marketplace of nostalgia

Just outside town

The iron skeleton of a rice storage plant sulks pathetically

Somoza's cronies owned a plantation

And then the Sandinistas nationalized it

And then that damned widow sold it off

Doña Violeta!

Who also sold off the railroads, and Lord knows what else

To sate the appetites of the gods of structural adjustment

So what remains?

Fishermen netting a few catches for other mouths

Cattle ranchers grinding down what remains of the forest

Cacao cooperatives growing for the Germans

Talk about modern day gold!

Orange pickers working 16 hour days for laughable wages

A few painters capturing the delicate balance

But now, the great arrivals!

Tourism trickles in

And...much awaited and lauded

Other people's infrastructure!

A bridge to link us with the Ticos

With their light skin and low wages

But don't you forget it, the biggest attraction is still to come!

Prophesied for over a century, will it finally come to pass?

A Chinese interoceanic canal to cleave the landscape

Shrouded in mystery and ambiguity

But development! And jobs! Poverty will be a thing of the past!

Ah, yes. The obligatory script. 

I've got a feeling Mother Nature's got something to say about this

As she trembles and shakes

Refuses to ripen the mangoes properly

Sends the rains just a bit to early

In good time we'll see who wins this great game

Magical Places

What makes a place magical as opposed to just out of the way?  

I was left with that thought as I got back from an immensely relaxing Holy Week trip to Solentiname, an archipelago in the lower part of Lake Nicaragua, with 2 fellow TEFLeras, Natalie and Isabel and Natalie's boyfriend, Rob. 

Solentiname is one of my favorite places in Rio San Juan, and certainly in Nicaragua. It's just so unexpected: a bunch of islands (36 to be exact) that rise out of blue lake and horizon, so seemingly random that they were explained in indigenous mythology as the body of a fleeing lover in a Romeo and Juliet-esque suicide pact. There's a certain weirdness to it, all of a sudden, a few houses, fields, and wooden docks rise out of the trees until it goes back to the realm of the trees and birds. People are scarcely visible, except occasionally at the docks or in fishing boats in the channels between the islands. 

Despite being fairly isolated and sparsely populated (population 1000 across 3 or so islands), they're linked to so much history: of the war against Somoza, of Liberation Theology, thanks to poet/priest Ernesto Cardenal, to art and culture, albeit in a very artificial way, as pointed out by a fellow PCV who had also visited. 

Even though the dry season had robbed the islands of the green crowns that they enjoyed the last time I visited in rainy June, they were bursting more than ever with birds: small colorful song birds, parakeets, oropendolas, which make crazy noises and build distinctive long hanging nests. We hung out a lot on Mancarron, the largest island, where we were staying, visiting artists and taking walks around to various places, like the museum which improbably is home to a flock(?) of peacocks, and wandering through people's fields, past some beautiful views out to other islands, until we chanced across the most random and isolated baseball field I've ever seen in my life. Talk about soft power. 

We also took the boat over to nearby San Fernando one day and wandered around, watching gigantic flocks of migrating ducks from the porch of the museum and going for an impromptu dip in a swimming hole off a very random and poorly marked trail. All very chill. 

And magical as it were. I was thinking about it though: what is it that makes travelers use the word "magical" in response to places in the developing world, and so reticent to use it in our own context? Is there something about nature in developed places and spaces that makes it less exciting to us? Can magical only be used to exoticize? Or are we just so jaded that we have to be taken out of our element to recognize the magicalness in places?

Home Bound, with Complications

Coming back from Solentiname, I had this feeling of anxiousness when I got to San Carlos. It's  not a big town by any means, but people were paying enough attention to me that I felt jittery and out of place in a way that I don't usually feel to the same extent when I'm in San Miguelito. 

It's this feeling of being hyper visible, like being naked, but far more vulnerable somehow, as if everyone is trying to look into your mind and impugn intentions onto you. Or more realistically, in the case of dirty old man types, is actually imagining the contours of your naked curves. I thought that feeling would fade over time, but it doesn't. If anything I've become hypersensitive to it and over-reactive. I feel the staring eyes a little bit more each time, as if they were starting to carve marks into my skin.  

But when I finally got back to San Miguelito that night and found myself walking on the cobblestones and then on the dirt road up to my house, I had this moment of clarity, of lightness, as if all that had been lifted, and that now I could be invisible again, my skin against the cool of the night. It was beautiful.

And then I got home, put my bag down, and had an sad thought. or several. 

i've got no right to feel this sense of belonging.

this isn't my home. 

the feeling of home that i have here is an artificiality, a white priviledge of being accepted hasta cierto punto automatically because I have things that people want. Money. Education. English. White Skin. Colored Eyes. Cat woman. Because we are taught to be hospitable, aunque sea la Maldicion de la Malinche. 

and in my own country, so many people don't get to walk with that feeling of safety and security, even in their own damn country. They too get watched extra, questioned (silently or aloud), stopped and frisked, harrassed, attacked. For being brown, or black, or "illegal," or Muslim or Jewish or gay or trans or poor or somehow else incompatible with the ugly truths that underlie our bonito myths about melting pots and salads and tolerance. 

i only have to deal with this for a few more months before I slip back into the crowd and stop being of interest to prying eyes. I can stand it. But to live your whole life that way, so exposed to scouring eyes? Shit.