We stopped at a Buddhist temple, or Wat as I suppose they are called, on the way home from a meeting yesterday. The newer temples are quite impressive in their outlandishness. A mix of cheap Vegas-motel and revered religious institution, the places give of a less-than-serious vibe. Most favor small colored mirrors, this particular temple went with green mirrors. They are, well, interesting. The place was surrounded by giant statues of Buddha, of Ginesh, or some smiling Chinese man, and scary black Buddha that looked like Golam. A very eclectic place. But perhaps the best statue ever stood to the right of the temple. A giant white tiger lay with a slim Buddha at its side sitting with his legs crossed. He wore a focused look. He had a golden sash across his chest. At the bottom of the sash…was an iPod. A concrete statue with a concrete iPod and he was wearing headphones. How progressive, I thought. Surely must be one of the world´s first religious representations of the Buddha with an iPod. I bet no Catholic has carved such a serious statue of Christ rocking out to his tunes. That was cool.

I am even less qualified to speak on Bangkok, as that same bacteria infection followed me south to Thailand. Most of the four days I spent in Bangkok were in bed, moaning and sweating, nightmares of little dogs chasing me through the streets--how I love fever dreams.

I once spent an entire week without he flu and overtime I shut my eyes a real-time battle with commentary commenced. Only the battle consisted of green and red dots on a black screen. The screams, the tanks, the bombs, all the sound was there and I was always sure it was a real war. Every time I´d wake, I was sure the green dots were being destroyed, so I´d try to go back to bed for more horror. Strange.

So of Bangkok, a lot of traffic, but a very cool sky train. A lot of ladyboys, but also some very nice ladies. That seemed to be the name of the game. For every action, there is an equal reaction, or something like that shit. Dragged my self to Kao San Road to revel in the Farong heaven.

In the past few months, I´ve gone from being a Gringo, to a white boy (Belize), back to Gringo, to Recovering Peace Corp Volunteer (or whatever RPCV stands for) and now to Farong, foreigner in Thai. But the word means so much more. A typical Farong might be rocking fake dreadlocks (yes, very popular here. I wish I could be that cool.), wearing no shirt in the middle of Bangkok, lovely third degree sunburns on his body, drinking some beach bucket-sized pink or yellow concoction of sugar and alcohol. Oh yeah, he´s probably from Australia. Thailand appears to be something akin to a Gringo´s Cancun for the Ozzie.

Anyway, Kao San Road, where everybody wants to sell you everything, english is widely spoken, and there are a lot of people being ¨original,¨ all at the same time. That description doesn´t really narrow it down much to anything different than any other place, and I´m realizing that I was half delirious and really upset at this stupid woman who started screaming at me when I questioned her on the price of our bus tickets for that night.

¨He call me stupid, I not stupid,¨ she screamed to Mertxe.

Too hot for this shit, I went back to the hotel.

Now I´m in Mae Sot, eight hours to the north. I´ll let you know.

a city that looked like a mix of New York and some European city on steroids. Even little pharmacies had gigantic neon signs. Nanjing street is like a long Times Square. Kind of gives you a headache. The drivers drive as they please. The motorcycles drive on either side of the road, the sidewalk, wherever is most convenient. Everybody smokes cigarettes. Flying in over the water, the ocean was the color of the Mississippi River. Giant wind mills slowly turned in the chocolate water. In fact, all the water I saw during the brief stay there was of the same milky brown color. In the morning we walked to the river where there is a nice promenade and Chinese are walking around, flying kites, but mostly just smoking cigarettes. As the smaller cargo ships went out to unload the bigger ships offshore, it looked as though a battle had begun. There were barges and ships three across that seemed to come off a conveyor belt. Some stupid thought about China taking over the world came into my head, but wow, I have never seen that much activity at any port.

I had read an article about a smoking ban in China a few weeks earlier, but the reporter had said that it wasn´t really working and that most Chinese simply ignored the ban, that the Chinese have a long history of ignoring many rules. I thought this a bit condescending. Anyway, on the plane from L.A. to Shanghai, in a way, I saw this too. No, nobody was smoking a cigarette on the plane--although they were smoking the moment we stepped into the airport where it clearly said ¨no smoking¨ on every wall--rather they were up at takeoff and landing and when the seatbelt sign was on. When they were thirsty they didn't ask the flight attendant. Mertxe asked me if I wanted an orange juice.

Why, I asked her, are they giving it out back there?

¨Look at everybody else coming back with it.¨

At the back of the plane, the flight attendants´ area had been taken over. Drinks (only non-alcoholic, luckily) were being served at will. Others were stretching out on the food prep counters. All in all, a refusal to be bothered by conventions. And I loved it. I expected the flight attendants to be furious but this was China Eastern Airlines. These flight attendants seemed to care less. Even when some man appeared to snap off a large piece of metal attempting to open the garbage can, one barely reacted.

From the airport to the city, we got a little taste of Chinese engineering wonders. Riding on a magnetic train at 260 mph, we were in Shanghai in about the time it took us to unfold the stupid city map we´d grabbed at the airport.

Our complete lack of any Chinese language training wasn´t too much of a hindrance. The Chinese certainly are not bothered. At a famous dumpling joint, we pointed to two plates and the cashier happily punched some keys on the register. We paid, sat down, and moments later received two plates that were not even remotely similar to what we had pointed to. Oh well. Later we were reduced to using animal sounds, is it cow or beef? Well, moo? They thought that was pretty good. And hell, it was easy to understand for anybody.

My 19 hours in China was affected by a terrible bacteria infection that reasserted itself somewhere over the Pacific Ocean during that 14-hour flight. Not quite sure why. But China was a mix of huge downs and mild ups. Mostly just a delirious fever. Five days later, almost completely missing Bangkok, I´ve just about recovered. I´m convinced it is something I picked up in El Salvador. I don´t really trust Peace Corps enough to really think that they really tested for everything. Only things they could be held liable for. Such is life.

In Israel, a Palestinian man, Sabbar Kashur, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for “rape.” He had consensual sex with a Jewish woman who believed that he was also Jewish. When she found out he was not Jewish, she filed a criminal complaint for rape. And the court agreed, calling it “rape by deception.”

What the hell? Lying to get into bed with a girl. Who would commit such a heinous act? Come on, Israel.

I wanted to take the opportunity to pay my tribute to Jose Saramago and Manute Bol.

Manute Bol was famous for being ridiculously tall (7'6"), but according to the New York Times obituary, "when he was a young man in Sudan, he told The New York Times in a 1985 interview, his size was not so remarkable.

'My mother was 6 feet 10, my father 6 feet 8 and my sister is 6 feet 8,” he said. “And my great-grandfather was even taller — 7 feet 10.'"

Wow.

I heard on “Democracy Now” the other day that two teachers in Massachusetts had been suspended for holding up a sign that said “No More Wars.” Apparently people in the community are outraged that these teachers would have the nerve to do such a thing. It was sort of puzzling to me. That is considered controversial? Is that not a perfectly reasonable desire by any sane person? Apparently it was at some ROTC event, which the teachers said was serving as a military recruitment event. These teachers could very well lose their jobs. The message being sent is: get them out, they are obviously unfit to teach our children because they might teach them that war is bad, and we know that can’t be true. Otherwise how the hell could we justify spending about a trillion dollars on it each year?

The Peace Corps sent us an email detailing all security issues for the past year, meaning all the stupid incidents that gringos have reported to the office. I’d publish the list here but most likely a CIA agent would show up at my door tomorrow for publishing classified government emails. Hell, it might happen anyway. Already, I’ve been all but banned from publishing articles in the El Salvador Peace Corps quarterly newsletter. Anyway, I am proud to say that even in a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world, almost every incident involved a gringo who was too cheap to give a gangster a dollar or two and was subsequently threatened by the refusal. One particularly idiotic incident came about when a gangbanger approached a Peace Corp volunteer and asked for a dollar at a town fair. The volunteer, apparently really hurting from his $300 a month salary, refused. He went to a police man and explained. The policeman shrugged his shoulders. Outraged, the volunteer went to the mayor who also shrugged. He then began pointing at the gangster and shouting that he had asked him for a dollar. I mean, that gangster has some gall to ask for a dollar. Nevermind the fact that Salvadorans are subjected to the same thing and in some places they ask for as much as (gasp) three dollars. Locals will tell you the same thing: pay up you cheap bastard. Is your life really worth so little? I sent an email back to the security officer saying how sad it was that these volunteers would raise such a little request into a confrontation. I also said that Salvadorans have to pay too, so what’s the big deal. I don’t think he understood me because he responded immediately saying, yes it is sad that our country is like that. That wasn’t what I meant.

Although I wrote the other day that the Afghanistan war is now the longest in United States history, repeating what the media has said, it takes a selective viewing of history to come up with that. If you agree that the Vietnam war started in 1966 than we are okay. But Kennedy started sending advisors over there in 1961. That looks more like a 14-year war to me. But I’m not a military historian. But John Keegan is. And he wrote the coolest book I’ve read in years, A History of Warfare. Maybe it’s because I didn’t pay attention in Western Civ class freshman year of high school (but then again, my teacher was Sister Jeane, an angry nun who once told me I was going to hell for lying to her), but learning about the Assyrians, who were the first to really domesticate the horse for warfare, to the nomads of the central Asian steppe who Keegan calls “the toughest people in creation,” makes me feel dumb that I didn’t know this in the first place. The book starts with the premise that Carl von Clausewitz, the most famous of military strategist, was wrong. “War is not the continuation of policy by other means,” Keegan writes. “The world would be a simpler place to understand if this dictum of Clausewitz’s were true.” In the modern world, maybe. But throughout history, war was waged for reasons as far-ranging as women (most of the time), sacrificial victims, religion, a tern’s egg (yes, that is what the warring tribes on Easter Island were after) and yes, resources. And even today, can wars of conquest—of people, or land, or of what the land holds—even be considered political?

Russel Weigley, another military historian argues that war shows itself not as “an effective extension of policy by other means…but the bankruptcy of policy.” I am more inclined to agree with that line of reasoning.

What ever happened to that other war that we were waging against that other Muslim country? You’d be forgiven for letting it slip your mind. According to Harper’s, the networks have devoted a whopping 14 minutes of airtime (combined) for the Iraq war in all of 2010. Anyway, the murder rate is down (nevermind the fact that the killing is down because there is not too many left to be killed), and we have our embassy in place—remember that larger-than-the-Vatican monstrosity that we built in the heart of Baghdad?—so who cares? Maybe a million people died, but we’re not really sure because as Colin Powell pointed out from the beginning, we don’t care about, I mean, we don’t count the Iraqi dead. We didn’t count the dead under sanctions either. The UN said those killed half a million Iraqis. But who believes that stupid organization anyway?

Tomorrow I am going to San Miguel on a top-secret mission. The local NGO we were working with was trying to fuck us out of money so we got rid of them. The only problem was they still have two grand of our money. After trying to chase the guy down and threatening his secretary with an international lawsuit (yes, I actually said that, some real bullshit I know), it has come to my attention that he plans on visiting our funding source tomorrow. Luckily, I have a mole in his office who informed me of the meeting. His plan is to tell the president of Rotary Club that there is no money left and that we (the engineer and myself) are trying to take over the project. Today, the local NGO guy told me he was going to meet next week and he’d let me know. Imagine his face when he shows up and I’m sitting there waiting. Salvadorans don’t do well with confrontation so it will be interesting.

Yesterday, Melvito, the one-year-old son of my neighbor Melvin was trying to herd those little annoying birds. When one of the ducklings wouldn’t stop quacking at him, he did what I’d like to do most of the time: he wacked it on the head with a stick. The little yellow, fluffy duck keeled over dead. Melvito started to cry. His grandma picked up the bird and yelled at him. “You killed him Melvito. Are you happy?” Melvito was not happy. But the grandma handed him the bird and he grabbed it by the neck and carried it around with him the rest of the day.

Every afternoon, I open my door and an orphan family of ducklings, chicks, and poults (google tells me baby turkeys are referred to as that) follows me into my house. I suppose I do bare indirect responsibility for the death of their mother—a turkey who was raising all three species as her own. Marti, my dog, tends to get overly excited whenever I come home—he starts crying, uncontrollably pissing himself and usually starts leaping at me. When I brush him off, he continues prancing around the yard and in his excitement usually attacks a nearby chicken or turkey. The other day he managed to land on top of a poor turkey who was only trying to get between him and her motley crew of baby fowl. I didn’t notice anything, but when I left my house an hour later, noticed a mangled turkey laying in the pathway. The bird’s wing had snapped when Marti bounded at her. The story is not so sad. We bound the wing up and the turkey is okay only she stopped caring for her young. So as she wonders around aimlessly, the little ones endlessly peep and screech, begging for food. I chase them out with a broom, but they instinctively follow me anywhere I go. At first, it was cute. But 20 birds that are incessantly peeping (that is the only way to describe it) tends to get on your nerves after about 30 seconds. And they shit all over my house. Marti just sits there and watches them and when I yell at him to “get em boy” he just looks at me, tilts his head, and goes back to doing what he does: scratching and gnawing at his fleas in between his naps, which take up somewhere between 18 and 20 hours of his eventful day.

After a few computer mishaps—my hard drive crashed and then my “ moterboard” (as the guy in Usulutan informed me) stopped working—I am back. It was probably a good thing. I read a lot more and watched a lot less garbage movies. I think I gained about three hours of my life back each day. Sad to say, writing by hand is not my forte. For someone who tries to be such a luddite, anything on paper feels like it lacks any gravity.

In the past month or so there has been no lack of things to comment on. The oil spill in the gulf of course: with my sporadic news updates, it seems like the amount leaking doubles or triples every time I check. I can tell you what Cuba thinks, because of Radio Havana (which is the only news outlet I pick up on my shortwave radio), and I know the oil is affecting them too. BP, formerly British Petroleum, formerly the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, has a history of causing trouble, so it should come as no surprise. And oil companies…well enough said. I just watched a documentary about Texaco (now owned by Chevron) and drilling in the Ecuadoran rain forest. There, the spill was about ten times the size of the gulf spill. It spanned more than 30 years so it is a little different, but it left the indigenous communities destroyed, literally. Of the Cofan tribe, in an area where 15,000 people used to live, now only about 100 have managed to survive and maintain a semblance of their traditional lives. Oh, glorious oil.

There was the Israel flotilla and the massacre of the nine Turkish activists. Has terrorist as the catchall for anybody that is against U.S. and Western interests not become cliché. In the beginning, Israel claimed that the activists were al-Qaeda terrorists, before further scrutiny forced them to retract the statement. I liked Uri Avnery’s tongue-in-cheek conspiracy theory: Israel is ruled by a bunch of anti-Semites who are bent on the destruction of Israel. His evidence? Everything that Israel has done lately, from Operation Cast Lead to the blockade on Gaza, the forged passports to the attack on the flotilla. There are only two explanations to such behavior. Either Israeli politicians are so out of touch and stupid or they are bent on doing Israel harm. Avnery rights for Israel’s Hareetz and has recently been threatened is Israel for his “ pro-terrorist” views on Palestine and Israel. He is, of course, an 86-year-old Jewish Israeli.

In other news, $1 trillion in mineral deposits was “ discovered” in Afghanistan. I would say recently, but apparently they’ve known about it for years, but the New York Times decided to publish the story last week. A lot of people were wondering why they held off on the story so long and only now let the information come to light when the popularity of the war hits all-time lows, and we near the nine-year anniversary of the war (yes, now the longest war in United States history). Well, we wanted an explanation for why the U.S. was still involved knew, why withdrawal has not even been discussed. That might be a good start. I heard a BBC podcast that sold itself as breaking insight into the Taliban. They informed us that much of the Taliban’s appeal has to do with economics and class rather than purely fundamental Islam. And I swore it was our freedoms that they hated. This came as breaking news?

Closer to home, a border patrol agent shot and killed a 14-year-old Mexican boy who was throwing rocks from the Mexico side of the border. Can you blame the cop? After all, if he watched the news in the U.S., he’d think Genghis Khan was riding down from the steppes to attack Washington. Of course, the news didn’t want to report on the various studies that showed that crime actually decreases when immigrants move in. (the reasoning, in short, being that they move into many low-income, oftentimes abandoned neighborhoods and rejuvenate them). Arizona passed draconian anti-immigration laws. The state is bankrupt and should be taken over by the federal government. As Harper's Ken Silverstein reports, "the [Arizona] legislature is composed almost entirely of dimwits, racists, and cranks. State lawmakers turned racial profiling into official policy, through a law that requires police to stop suspected illegal immigrants and demand to see their papers. The Senate passed a bill to ban the funding of any ethnic-studies programs at state universities, as well as one to prohibit 'intentionally or knowingly creating a human-animal hybrid.' And as the state’s economy teetered on the brink of collapse earlier this year, lawmakers took time out from their primary pastime — slashing social spending — to reduce what Eagle Scouts paid for fishing license fees, declared a Boy Scout holiday, and granted a constitutional right to vote."

Now Arizona is proposing a law that would deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents. There is a little issue in that it violates the 14th amendment of the constitution, but the Supreme Court has showed its willingness to overlook that piece of paper recently (they recently ruled that Canadien Maher Arar could not sue the U.S. government after he was a victim of extraordinary rendition and torture in Syria, although no evidence has ever been found that even remotely links him to terrorism). Hell, we’ve even gotten to the point where we are charging car-bombers and would-be (read set up by the FBI) synagogue bombers with using “ weapons of mass destruction.” Next, they’ll be charging drive-by shooters who use automatics with the same crime.

Erik Prince, president of Blackwater (now Xe) has put the company up for sale. It is also confirmed that he plans to move to United Arab Emirates. According to inside sources, Prince hopes to sell the company within the next month. So after a half dozen of the top players in Blackwater are indicted and Prince gets off for the time being, he decides to quickly ditch his company and move to a country that prohibits extradition to the U.S.? Sounds a bit sketchy, but of course, nobody’s talking about it.

In other news, the World Cup. It is difficult to even enter into subject of the corruption, the injustices, and the utter avarice of FIFA, so I won’t try. All I can say is, like the Olympics but on a larger scale, South Africans are getting fucked. But it is a hard choice to renounce the tournament because it such a great diversion from daily life. I mean, I get to watch two games every morning before I go to work and another when I’m eating lunch. But I swear if I here the Spanish version of that fucking K’naan song twenty or thirty more times, I might very well lose it. And it sucks because that guy was pretty cool. Was. Okay, everybody enjoy the soccer. I’ll be watching the U.S. with Salvadorans from this point on. It was embarrassing to watch the opener with about one hundred gringos. About four people actually watched the game. And by the fourth minute most people hadn’t yet figured out we were blue and England was white (as evidenced by the fifteen or so people that started cheering when England scored—they thought it was the U.S.) And if there is any reason to cheer for Argentina, well that photo is it. How can you root against a team led by this guy?

And on a closing note, the Tea Party took over U.S. politics. Or so it would seem from afar. I hope I am wrong.

This is my effort at making a movie. I am sort of a luddite though, so don´t laugh.

I am reading Robert Fisk’s monster The Great War for Civilisation, a history of the Middle East in the past half century. He has lived in Beirut for over three decades and is the Middle East correspondent for The Independent.

It is unfortunate that no newspaper carries his reports and columns which are full of so much more knowledge than anything written by other reporters in the Middle East. The man was the first Western journalist to interview Osama bin Laden, which he’s done a few times, speaks fluent Arabic (something that a shocking few Western journalists can do), and has spent the past decades reporting from the overthrow of the Shah, to Desert Storm to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The title is in reference to World War I, which Fisk’s father fought in as a British soldier, and played a huge part in his upbringing. His father used to take him around the battlefields in England and France and Germany when Fisk was a child. In his adulthood he has spent his days reporting from Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and the Middle East. All the trouble in these regions derives heavily from his father’s war and the Balfour Declaration (the support of a Jewish state in Palestine) and the treaty of Versailles, which divided up and created the all three of the regions where Fisk has worked, and especially the Middle East.

In light of VP Biden’s visit to Israel and the “untimely” announcement of another settlement, I find Fisk’s words about Benjamin Netanyahu particularly interesting. Here, Clinton was trying to salvage what was left with his “peace” deal (the Wye agreement) part of the utter failure of Oslo in the late 90s.

At an autumn 1998 private dinner party in the White House with junior members of the Jordanian royal family, President Clinton unburdened himself of a few thoughts on Benjamin Netanyahu [who was Prime Minister then too]… “I am the most pro-Israeli president since Truman,” he announced to his guests. “But the problem with Bibi [Netanyahu] is that he cannot recognize the humanity of the Palestinians.” Stripped of its false humility—Clinton was surely more pro-Israel than ruman—the president had put his finger on Netanyahu’s most damaging flaw: his failure to regard the Palestinians as fellow humans, his conviction that they are no more than a subject people. This characteristic comes across equally clearly in his book A Place Among the Nations, which might have been written by a colonial governor. Clinton got it right. He understood the psychological defect that lay at the heart not just of Netanyahu’s policies but of the whole Netanyahu government. (436). Of course, coverage of the announcement and subsequent reaction from the Obama administration has barely reached infantile levels. Hillary Clinton tries to talk tough to the press while giving a speech to AIPAC reassuring Israel that our security interests are one in the same. Netanyahu was in Washington this week where he was expected to apologize (for the untimely announcement of the settlements, not for the fact that the settlements are illegal and in violation of UN Resolutions 194, 242, 338 among others as well as the 4th Geneva Conventions which calls any colonization in an occupied territory an illegal act and a war crime.) He was apparently going to use the opportunity to pressure Obama for bunker-busting missiles, which Israel lacks, in order to attack Iran. Bush was said to have denied all Israeli pressure for these missiles. While Obama is calling for tougher sanctions on Iran (after all, it worked so well for Iraq, where the UN estimated that it lead to the deaths of upward of 500,000 people. Remember Madelaine Albright talking about the tough decision between the sanctions and the dead kids, and how it was worth it?), we can only hope they don’t make such a reckless move by giving Israel the exact tools for a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Hillary Clinton was upset that Israel wasn’t cooperating with the U.S. There was not even a reference to the Palestinians, instead Clinton made the Obama administration out to be the victim. God forbid they talk about the way Israel treats the Palestinians.

Fisk rights about settlements: “I have sought in vain to discover the origin of our journalistic use of the word ‘settlements.’ By its nature, the expression is almost comforting. It has a permanence about it, a notion of legality. Every human wants to ‘settle,’ to have a home. The far more disturbing—and far more accurate—word for Israel’s land-grabbing in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 is colonizing. Settlers are colonists. Almost all the Israelis in the West Bank are living on someone else’s land. They may say that God gave them the land, but those Palestinians who legally owned that land—who had property deeds to prove it, since the British Mandate, since the Ottoman empire—are not allowed to appeal to God” (425).

The peace agreement formed at Wye was just like the rest: a slickly-worded seizure of more Palestinian land. “The Wye agreement even dropped the “land for peace” logo. It was now biled as the “Land for Security” agreement, “peace” being a least temporarily unobtainable. Peace menas respect, mutual trust, cooperation. Security means no violence—but it also means prison, hatred and, as we already knew torture” And the Israeli withdrawal? The “3 per cent of the Palestinian land from which Israel would now withdraw was to become—perhaps the most farcical of Oslo’s many manifestations—a “nature reserve” upon which Palestinians could not build homes” (437).

Anyway this is nothing new, from Begin-Sadat, to Arafat-Sharon, but it is interesting to keep in mind the infinite failures of the so-called “peace” agreements and the lack of leverage the U.S. has over its no. one ally in the world. At one point, Jimmy Carter even tried to claim that there was only so much pressure he could put on “a sovereign nation.” Tell that to the endless U.S. client states throughout the past two centuries.

If I go too much further, they´ll start calling me an anti-semite and all that. Funny how they call all the Arab regimes anti-Semitic. After all, as Fisk points out, they are semites too.

Written in June 1976 from Buenos Aires, where Eduardo Galeano was fleeing to Spain after being first chased out of his native Uruguay, only to be persecuted in Argentina too:

One writes out of a need to communicate and to commune with others, to denounce that which gives pain and to share that which gives happiness. One writes against one’s solitude and against the solitude of others. One assumes that literature transmits knowledge and affects the behavior and language of those who read, thus helping us to know ourselves better and to save ourselves collectively. But “others” is too vague; and in times of crisis, times of definition, ambiguities may too closely resemble lies. One writes, in reality, for the people whose luck or misfortune one identifies with—the hungry, the sleepless, the rebels, and the wretched of the earth—and the majority of them are illiterate. Among the literate minority, how many can afford to buy books? Is this contradiction resolved by proclaiming that one writes for that facile abstraction known as “the masses”?

One writes in order to deflect death and strangle the specters that haunt us; but what one writes can be historically useful only when in some way it coincides with the need of the collectivity to achieve its identity.

“And U.S. intervention is also an obstacle, disguised as Peace Corps and religious missions parallel to U.S. military activities.” -Galeano

The Development Set

Excuse me, friends, I must catch my jet--

I'm off to join the Development Set;

My bags are packed, and I've had all my shots,

I have travellers' cheques and pills for the trots.

The Development Set is bright and noble,

Our thoughts are deep and our vision global;

Although we move with the better classes,

Our thoughts are always with the masses.

In Sheraton hotels in scattered nations,

We damn multinational corporations;

Injustice seems so easy to protest,

In such seething hotbeds of social rest.

We discuss malnutrition over steaks

And plan hunger talks during coffee breaks.

Whether Asian floods or African drought,

We face each issue with an open mouth.

We bring in consultants whose circumlocution

Raises difficulties for every solution--

Thus guaranteeing continued good eating

By showing the need for another meeting.

The language of the Development Set,

Stretches the English alphabet;

We use swell words like 'epigenetic',

'Micro', 'Macro', and 'logarithmetic'.

Development Set homes are extremely chic,

Full of carvings, curios and draped with batik.

Eye-level photographs subtly assure

That your host is at home with the rich and the poor.

Enough of these verses--on with the mission!

Our task is as broad as the human condition!

Just pray to God the biblical promise is true:

The poor ye shall always have with you.

-Ross Coggins

-So fucking true.

From George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London, where he recounts his life as a vagrant in London and as a wage-slave in Paris, where he mostly worked in restaurants. Anyway, parts of this passage remind me of many co-workers I had in the restaurant industry, only that it was written almost eighty years ago.

“The moral is, never be sorry for a waiter. Sometimes when you sit in a restaurant, still stuffing yourself half an hour after closing time, you feel that the tired waiter at your side must surely be despising you. But he is not. He is not thinking as he looks at you, ‘What an overfed lout’; he is thinking, ‘One day, when I have saved enough money, I shall be able to imitate that man.’ He is ministering to a kind of pleasure he thoroughly understands and admires. And that is why waiters are seldom Socialists, have no effective trade union, and will work twelve hours a day—they work fifteen hours, seven days a week, in many cafes. They are snobs, and they find the servile nature of their work rather congenial.”

Another prescient observation: “Dirt is a great respecter of persons; it lets you alone when you are well dressed, but as soon as your collar is gone it flies toward you from all directions.”

Here, I can’t seem to stay clean for ten minutes. I rub my fingers together, and little balls of dirt and gunk appear between my fingertips. My feet are perpetually black, and even when I try to be careful, my pants are covered in a fine, brown dust. Is it because I’m living poor now?

Water is a human right. Even as defined by the United Nations, water is something that all people are entitled too. But what does that mean in reality? Not much, apparently. The national water service ANDA here in El Salvador rarely finances rural water systems. In fact, many of the water systems that they manage were paid for my foreign donors, such as the Japanese, Spanish, or Germans, as well as international organizations like Rotary Club.

In many parts of the world, people are already talking about water as the next issue after oil. We will run out of water at this rate. The people here were passed by. They missed the stage of running water. Now we are being told that the world will run out of water. It certainly is through no fault of theirs.

I will always remember a poster I saw in Morocco: “A golf course in Arizona uses more water in a day than the city of Fes [with a population of over a million people] uses in a month.” And keep in mind that Fes gets quite warm in the summer months, with highs well above 90 degrees.

The media has been demonizing Chávez in Venezuela for rationing water throughout the country because of a severe draught. He has limited households to 40 cubic meters of water a month. Here in El Salvador, ANDA limits water per household to 12-15 cubic meters a month. Less than half the water that Venezuelans are allowed, but I didn’t see any articles condemning El Salvador as a tyrannical government for rationing water.

The privatization of water is another issue. The famous Cochabamba water wars began in the mid-90s when the World Bank, writes Greg Grandin in Empire’s Workshop, “informed Bolivia that future debt relief was dependent on unloading its water company as well, which it duly did to Bechtel. Nearly overnight, families getting by on barely sixty dollars a month were told that their water bill would average fifteen dollars a month, a 200 percent hike. Bolivians were even outlawed from capturing rainwater for their personal use.” The company of course said the pricing was based on the market value. Eventually, through protest and struggle, the citizens of Cochabamba managed to reverse the privatization—but not before martial law was declared and many people arrested and injured by tear gas. The World Bank spoke out against the decision to reverse the privatization, saying that without a proper system of payment, waste is encouraged. To this, protest leader Oscar Olivera responded, “In Mr. Wolfensohn's [then Director of the World Bank] view, requiring families who earn $100 per month to pay $20 for water may be ‘a proper system of charging,’ but the thousands of people who filled the streets and shut down Cochabamba last week apparently felt otherwise.”

I attended a conference against the privatization of water and for the promotion of water as a human right last week in San Salvador. All of the diputados (congressmen) from the national government had been invited. Unfortunately, only one came and another sent an aide. It is not a pressing issue. After all, what issue that effects only poor people really is pressing for politicians?

I write this while in the midst of working on a water project for the people here in rural El Salvador. There are wells here, it is not that the people are dying of thirst. But babies and children do die from easily treatable water-borne diseases. People are not as healthy, drinking untreated water from wells that are drawn from underwater aquifers that are largely contaminated by the latrines and runoff here in the town. Hauling water out of a well is not easy work. For most people, getting water for the day takes between one and four hours, depending on the depth of the well and the amount of water required. It is hard work. But hopefully, we will get this system running soon.

Listening to Bob Dylan. I just downloaded a 103 songs off the genuine bootleg series. I am getting to discover old Dylan songs that I have never heard. A major event. Remembering when I was discovering Dylan heavily my senior year of high school. I would listen to the my dad’s old Dylan records in the basement, sometimes while drinking warm Seagram’s Seven out of a plastic half-gallon jug, but other times just laying on that dirty, cream-colored couch. This, obviously isn’t as earth-shattering as when I listened to “With God on our Side,” or “The Times They are A Changin” or when I later discovered the bootleg series, with songs like “She’s your lover now”; to this day a favorite of mine, or “Santa Fe.” I can see why the songs weren’t released. Whereas on the released bootleg series (1-3, and later 7), there were some songs that were as good as anything Dylan ever released—“Let me die in my footsteps” (Dylan’s first song, he said in Chronicles, Vol. 1), “Suze (the cough song),” an instrumental that Dylan claimed was too beautiful for words, etc.

I downloaded this set looking for “Rock me Mama,” a song I liked and performed before knowing that it was Dylan. I knew a different version. I wasn’t surprised when I found out it was Dylan. I am listening to a Dylan version of “People Get Ready,” a traditional folk song I knew because Springsteen plays it. “People get ready/ there’s a train a comin/ you don’t need no baggage/you just get on board.” Dylan’s version is entirely different, with a catchy acoustic guitar plucking a major scale throughout and Dylan banging a piano. There is someone harmonizing in a higher key; it doesn’t sound like anything I’ve heard of Dylan in that period (I’m guessing 1965).

A friend of mine here in Peace Corps likes Dylan too. I told him I was happy because I hadn’t known anybody that was really into him since high school. Of course everybody likes him, but that is not the same. Anyway, I fell out of him for almost two years, listening to some okay Spanish music and later a lot of shit Latino music (in comparison). I’m sorry for ever abandoning you, Mr. Dylan.

Argentina is taking Britain to court over the Malvinas (Falklands). The British press recently reported that the surrounding seabed may contain as much as 60 billion barrels of oil. Oil exploration is apparently set to begin, if it hasn’t already. Chávez has chimed in on it: "Look, England, how long are you going to be in Las Malvinas? Queen of England, I'm talking to you. The time for empires is over, haven't you noticed? Return the Malvinas to the Argentine people."

Gordon Brown, who apparently has a bad temper and treats his colleagues like shit (according to some new, hyped book), says that this is legal, while Argentina is taking them to court for the exploitation of Argentina resources, and a breach of sovereignty. The war in 1982, which the Argentina junta used to shore up support for its repressive regime, famously treated its soldiers like prisoners, chaining them up for disciplinary reasons, where they were left to starve to death. As one British man told me, it was a war that the Argentine people wanted to lose. There is a little truth in that statement, albeit a little.

Chávez was the first president to comment on it, but the 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are expected to back Argentina in the dispute. Argentina also plans on proposing a resolution in the UN. Argentina will take the complaint to the Rio Group summit in Mexico beginning this Sunday.

Britain, which has a long and bloodied history with Latin America, had abandoned most of its outposts—mainly along Central America’s Caribbean coast and among the Southern Cone countries—by the 1820s as the U.S. moved to take control of the hemisphere (the Monroe Doctrine). But their influence goes back to the very beginnings of the “discovery” of the Americas. Although it was Spain and then Portugal who went to work subjugating the native population and colonizing the Americas, it was the English bankers that really benefited the most from the riches of Latin America. The Spanish crown was heavily indebt to these bankers, and as Eduardo Galeano writes, Spain ended up with little in the form of riches that came from the new world. Spain did end up with a vast colony, stretching from the South pole all the way up to the southern parts of the US. The money in the slave trade also largely went to the British. These vast fortunes that the conquistadors sent back to Europe contributed to the Industrial Revolution in England.

To this day, most of Central America’s Caribbean coast is populated with blacks, descendants of slaves, that speak English more than Spanish, and have more similarities to Jamaicans than to the native and ladino populations of Central America. This is all, of course, the sphere of the British empire.

There are some good ways to keep up with the world, even when access to television and the internet is not a constant. I have a computer at home and I get to the internet a few times a week. It isn’t easy, and many times, not desirable, to keep up with all the affairs in the world when you feel like you are in the middle of nowhere. I own a portable Sony shortwave radio with an extended antenna. I had high hopes. Central America is an isthmus, which does not lend itself to good shortwave reception. I listen to Radio Havana, which is good for news most of the day. The only other consistent channels are southern evangelical stations and Radio Martí, the anti-Castro radio station that has been broadcasting out of Miami for the past fifty years. I usually listen to the radio when I am eating breakfast, anyhow. Then there is the internet. You can get a lot of information quickly that you can store for viewing at home (if you have a computer). I usually download podcasts to start. “Democracy Now” with Amy Goodman is a start. It is a daily news program that keeps you up on most news, from an independent, intelligent voice. If you want hard news, there are a number of BBC, NPR, and PRI (Public Radio International) programs such as PRI’s “The World” (for foreign affairs). I try to stay up on the international news, which I get from NPR’s “Foreign Dispatch,” and PRI’s “America Abroad.” Bill Moyer’s Journal, the weekly PBS program, always takes an intelligent look at current issues in the world and is some of the best journalism on television (and podcast, in this case). There are a number of other podcasts I download, but those are the essential—and at an hour per show, will be plenty to start with. Signing up for a few newsletters helps me skip sorting through a bunch of different websites and allows me to get the news from a few days ago more than searching a news website. For international news, an extensive daily email is put out by Just Foreign Policy (send an email titled “subscription to JFP news” to naiman@justforeignpolicy.org). The newsletter is drawn almost exclusively from the New York Times and the Washington Post. Not the radical newsletter you might expect me to be subscribing to, but a very good review of most major events in the world. For Latin America I subscribe to CEPR (Center for Economic Policy Research) puts out an excellent huge daily news round-up—it usually runs about 40 pages. Although it doesn’t sound like much, CEPR is a Washington think tank that explicitly fights against the Washington Consensus as well as World Bank and IMF policy towards Latin America. The newsletter draws from both mainstream news sources (New York Times, CNN), and alternative (Upside Down World, Colombia Reports). Anyway, with these two newsletters running about 60-70 pages of type, you have enough reading for a few days if you save the emails on a flash drive and read them at home (the cyber isn’t exactly conducive to doing anything productive. With those few things, I find myself very well-informed while managing to miss out on most of the celebratory and political gossip that they show on CNN all day. My two favorite sites to visit are ZNet, which is good for a daily group of 5-10 left-leaning opinion pieces about a huge variety of topics; and CounterPunch, another site that offers a similar group of great investigative pieces and op-eds. TruthDig’s Chris Hedges weekly column comes out on Mondays, which is always worth checking out. Harper’s Magazine also keeps up an entertaining, well written blog at their website. Slate.com’s good writing keeps me coming back, despite the mostly shallow subject matter. For economic news, I listen to NPR’s “Planet Money,” and read Mark Baker’s, a founder of CEPR, economic blog, which comes via a newsletter from CEPR that you can sign up for along with the Latin American news round-up at their website. The other mission of CEPR is to inform citizens of the truth behind much of the jargon that is passed as economic policy in the U.S. by politicians and the mainstream press alike. If you want to go further in to a specific subject, I’ve recently discovered openculture.com, a website with links to college courses and fiction and non-fiction audio books. I downloaded a course on Marx’s Capital, taught by Professor David Harvey, a British Marxist. I have listened to three out of ten of the two-hour lectures, which is the much the same, if not better, than if I’d taken it when I was in college. There are many language courses as well. I have downloaded two courses that I found under the Portuguese section of openculture.com, which links to iTunes for the podcasts. If I have time, I download a few other podcasts that I like to listen to before I go to bed. NPR’s classic “This American Life,” HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher, NPR’s “Fresh Air,” a program on the lighter side. It is easy to resign yourself to ignorance while in the Peace Corps, and as I said before, it might be healthier that way, but there are ways that you can stay up to date with the world around you. After all, two years is a long time to be in the dark. It won’t be easy to catch up when you are done. And after all, you are supposed to be learning about the world while you are here, so why not?

I’m reading a lot more than I am writing and I feel guilty. But I am going to start posting some of the things I’ve been reading.

Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski: An interesting glimpse into postwar Poland, and some descriptions of Kapuscinski’s youth. Interesting.

“We were children of war. High schools were closed during the war years, and although in the larger cities clandestine classes were occasionally convened, here, in this lecture hall, sat mostly girls and boys from remote villages and small towns, ill read, undereducated. It was 1951. University admissions were granted without entrance examinations, family provenance mattering most—in the communist state the children of workers and peasants had the best chances of getting in.” (4)

Favoring workers and peasants, I like that.

“One can speculate about the delay in the publication of The Histories. It coincides with the period preceding the death of Stalin and the time immediately following it. The Herodotus manuscript arrived at the press just as Western radio stations began speaking of Stalin’s serious illness. The details were murky, but people were afraid of a new wave of terror and preferred to lie low, to risk nothing, to give no one any pretext, to wait things out. The atmosphere was tense. The censors redoubled their vigilance.” (5-6)

The Polish journalist grew up in Pinsk (modern day Belarus) along the eastern border of the Second Polish Republic under the threat and invasion of Hitler’s Germany from the west and Stalin’s Soviets from the east. He understood what totalitarian government and tyranny looked like.

“But the very idea of sprawling comfortably in a rickshaw pulled by a hungry, weak waif of a man with one foot already in the grave filled me with the utmost revulsion, outrage, horror. To be an exploiter? A bloodsucker? To oppress another human being in this way! Never! I had been brought up in a precisely opposite spirit, taught that even living skeletons such as these were my brothers, kindred souls, near ones, flesh of my flesh.” (19)

It was revealed after his death that Kapuscinski collaborated for the Polish communist secret police and he has been criticized for being lenient with the facts. But his understanding of humans a power was like no other. He had seen it all before. Traveling the so-called Third World in the sixties and seventies, he saw a lot.

When I get tired of reading nonfiction, I sometimes have time for something fun. That is how I came to read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. It might have had something to do with Galeano’s Upside Down, which borrows its title from Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. Sub-comandante Marcos is also prone to quote Carroll: I assume he gets it from Galeano, who has had a public correspondence with Marcos since the Zapatista uprising. Or perhaps it is because I sometimes feel as frustrated as Alice talking to the Mad Hatter here in El Salvador.

“For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible” (7).

And that sums up my attitude here on many days. And it usually proceeds into something like:

“How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” (13).

It began do occur to me that Alice and I had a lot more in common than I realized. In the following, just replace Alice with Sean and the Cat with Don Santiago:

‘Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?’

‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.

‘I don’t much care where—‘ said Alice.

‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.

‘---so long as I get somewhere,’ Alice added as an explanation.

‘Oh, you’re sure to do that,’ said the Cat, ‘if you only walk long enough’ (59)

It will make your head hurt.

‘Then you should say what you mean,’ the March Hare went on.

‘I do,’ Alice hastily replied; ‘at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.’

‘Not the same thing a bit!’ said the Hatter. ‘You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!’

‘You might just as well say,’ added the March Hare, ‘that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!’

‘You might just as well say,’ added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, ‘that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!’ (65).

Goodnight.

I just talked to another Peace Corps volunteer who began his conversation telling me he wanted to go home. He was hungry, he said. I had no dinner—beans and Salvadoran cheese just wasn’t appealing to me—so I knew what he meant. I had just thrown the rest of my moldy beef jerky to the dogs. My mom had demanded that the Ukrainian butcher in Minneapolis give her two pounds of his famous jerky. He got it to me the day before I left. Tonight, I ate a few pickles from a ten-dollar-jar that a friend gave me in Minnesota. I reminded my Peace Corps friend that even though he was hungry, he wouldn’t be able to eat American food if he was back home. Back in Minneapolis, I practically cried over burgers, wings, and steak that I couldn’t eat. Our stomachs are fucked, I told him. Salmonella, parasites, amoebas, bacteria: I’d been sick a lot in El Salador. We can’t eat that food anymore. My mother, worried, had finally insisted that we go eat pupusas while I was home for the holidays.

Pupusas are the national pride of El Salvador. Although as recent as forty years ago, pupusas were restricted to a certain city in the country (Olocuilta), they have spread to the point that even the smallest pueblo has a pupusería, or just a woman with portable stove on the corner making pupusas. A pupusa is the Salvadoran answer to an empanada (like a hot pocket). It is made with the same corn masa (mashed, cooked corn) as the tortillas, and is filled with cheese; beans and cheese; or chicarrón—pork—beans, and cheese. They are normally cooked on a gas stovetop, but the best are cooked on a charcoal-burning stove. From afar, a pupusa looks like a greasy, Salvadoran tortilla—about a quarter-inch-thick, corn disc.

My mother figured if I couldn’t handle American food, she should try the food my stomach had adjusted to. Unfortunately, the three-dollar-pupusas tasted like an American version. In El Salvador, the corn tortilla is made with masa—fresh boiled and mashed corn—as opposed to the corn flower they used in Minneapolis. The Salvadoran cheese, something I constantly complain about, works in a pupusa. It is similar to a soft feta in texture and tastes of fresh goat’s milk (i.e. like a barnyard in your mouth). In Minneapolis, unable to find fresh unpasteurized goat’s milk, the pupusas are made with mozzarella. I talked to the lady working in the the Rincón Salvadoreño (Salvadoran Corner), a small restaurant inside East Minneapolis’ Mercado Central. She was from San Salvador and acted defensive when I kept asking her questions. Finally I told her that I worked in Usulután, El Salvador, and that I was just back home for Christmas. She looked at me like I was crazy and then I tried to explain. My typical description of Peace Corps in Spanish is that I am haciendo un trabajo social (that I am doing social work). She understood. I told her that in El Salvador, if a pupusa costs more than a quarter, everybody I know would complain about the cost.

“But this is the U.S.,” she said. It was December in Minneapolis and the temperature was around negative five with wind-chill. I asked her if she missed the weather in El Salvador.

“No San Salvador is too hot,” she said. I thought about all the times I’ve been cold in the 65-degree nights in the capital. My blood thinned out quickly living in San Miguel (the temperature is about 90-95 degrees every day of the year).

“I like the cold,” she said. I told her I didn’t.

If nothing else, Minneapolis was conducive to quitting smoking. I hardly wanted a cigarette knowing I’d have to endure the two-minutes in the freezing cold for a little nicotine. The dry cold is not good for a smoker.

I am getting a quick education in civil engineering and more specifically, building a water system. My training consists of hours pondering over cost estimates, staring at distribution maps, and answering questions that I wasn’t quite sure about.

Through Peace Corps, I met an engineer from the capital who took the time to sit me down and break down the entire process of building a water system. We drank beers from three in the afternoon until one in the morning one Sunday in November, all the while talking about water systems.

“People are going to ask you questions, and you need to have an idea,” he suggested. He took the idea seriously, talking about everything from the quality of bricks throughout the country, to the way to compact the dirt, to the organization of a water committee. I left feeling a little more prepared. As I’ve bullshitted my way through meetings with the Rotary Club of San Miguel, pretending I know what I’m talking about, and talked to local NGOs acting as if I was an engineer, I have learned a lot. This week with four young, professional engineers in the community, they joked that I was more up on the project, and much more informed about Salvadoran construction techniques, and general water system design in a developing country than any of them.

Have public relations finally reached a point where they can sell a certain candidate so successfully as a product, completely devoid of any real ideology, and shielded from the ups and downs of his party? Two cases in Latin America today show some evidence. In Chile, despite the fact that its president (Michelle Bachelet) has a sky-high 81% approval rating, her party, the Christian Democratic, along with the Concertación Coalition, which has held the presidency since Chile’s return to democracy in 1990, is in danger of losing the runoff election this Sunday to the right, pro-business candidate, Piñera. How can voters see such a disconnect between the party’s leader (Bachelet) and the party? In Brazil, although much earlier in the election cycle, the same thing happens. Lula, who has often been called the most popular president in the world, has popularity rates that hover around 70%. But his Workers’ Party is in strong competition with a right-of-center party. In the United States, it has long been understood that presidents and candidates are nothing more than talking heads, successful PR men. But at the same time, the popularity of the president in the past 20 years has usually been tied to his party. We have slick campaigns that avoid talking about any real issues like the war, the economy, corporations, globalization, or climate change. But when Clinton’s health reform, and as a result, popularity, took a hit, the Democrats lost in the midterm elections. The same holds for the Bush II presidency. With 9/11 and the “war on terrorism,” Bush won seats in the beginning for his party, and later lost them both the presidency and Congress. Obama has been far from immune from falling with the shortcomings of his party so far. But the great compromiser (read: enslaved by corporate interests) has also avoided being reviled as much as the Democratic party, who has turned off even some of its staunchest supporters, appearing as nothing more than Republican lite to most. As Eduardo Galeano said in Upside Down, the best presidential candidate in Latin America is an ex-TV newscaster. People like the talking-head. I am writing this from El Salvador, where a CNN anchor is the FMLN’s President. He is as disconnected from his party as possible, and about as radical as Barack Obama. His approval ratings are currently 87.9%, according to a Diario de Hoy survey published yesterday, but in the papers and on the streets, the rightwing has managed to hijack the agenda, promoting fear of a communist takeover by the FMLN. In other news, Bolivia’s President, Evo Morales liked Avatar. He liked the film’s “profound show of resistance to capitalism and the struggle for the defense of nature,” he said, shortly after seeing the movie—his third trip to a cinema in his life.

A few photos, in no particular order. Will be redone soon. With more and better photos.

As news of U.S. president Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize reached the hinterlands of El Salvador this afternoon, some people were visibly upset.

“Wow, surprised they didn’t give Reagan that prize too,” said Victór Amate. “He liked to bomb third world countries too.”

In Cantón Santa Clara, a small farming town in central El Salvador, some people took to the soccer field to protest these actions.

“First Teddy Roosevelt, that war-monger, now Obama,” exclaimed Angél Chávez. He added that only two other active presidents had won the prize, T.R. (his wording) and Woodrow Wilson. “One was a completely-mad macho idiot, and the other a racist, ivy-league WASP,” Chávez said.

A giant banner was hung up outside the school. It was unclear how they had painted it so quickly, but it read: “We say no to the Nobel Prize. President Obama, the person who started a new war in Pakistan, upped the war in Afghanistan, and continues to threaten Iran with attack unless Iran does what the US government demands and relinquishes its rights as a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty.” Although rather wordy, many people stopped to comment.

“Well, it’s not too surprising. They damn near gave the prize to Hitler in 1938,” said Doña Rosa, walking with a paila full of corn-flour on her head.

This reporter was surprised by the reaction. This summer, when searching for a quote about the Honduran coup, all that could be found was a few old-timers reminiscing (is that the right word?) about the old-days, the government overthrows, and the U.S. invasions. Another woman asked if it was true that they killed all Catholics in Venezuela.

Towards the end of the day, the man who calls himself “El Jefe” but is actually just a town wino, broke down the situation: “Look, Alfred Nobel, he was a dynamite-dealer, a merchant of death, the man sold weapons. His brother, Ludwig Nobel, an early oil-tycoon in Russia, had a heart attack, died, and some of the newspapers confused the brothers. The obituary written about Alfred (who was still alive) was less than flattering. He rewrote his will, leaving his money for the establishment of these bogus prizes. So if you think about it, yeah, Obama just won some award paid for by the old-fashioned version of Viktor Bout.”

After a bit of fact checking and verification (who the hell was Viktor Bout, this reporter wondered) it all checked out. Viktor Bout is a notorious Russian arms dealer. He was the inspiration to Nicolas Cage in Lord of War. And he is nicknamed “The merchant of death.” So apparently El Jefe knew what he was talking about.

Who knew that this prize might cause so much anger and outrage in such a small town so far away.

*****While all facts stated in this article are true, none of these people actually said them. But somebody did. Don't sue me.

Part I of III

Agustín Farabundo Martí is not only the namesake of the FMLN (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacionál), the former guerrilla group turned political party that holds the presidency here in El Salvador. He was a political activist/revolutionary determined to free the peasants of El Salvador from the slavery that was the coffee finca.

The man was true to himself and his ideology (hard-left) almost to a fault. He fought with Sandino in Nicaragua, but Martí’s communist preaching became a sore-spot during Sandino’s war to kick the U.S. occupiers out of his country. After a year of fighting together, Martí left, after possibly suffering a nervous breakdown, according to some sources, but more likely because of his incessant attempts to turn Sandino’s movement into a social revolution, not merely a war for national independence.

At Martí wrote to a friend in 1931 he explained: “My break with Sandino was not, as is sometimes said, for divergence of moral principles or opposing norms of conduct….He would not embrace my communist program.” As to assure that the break was not personal, he added, “I solemnly declare that General Sandino is the greatest patriot in the world.”

In these last few years before the peasant revolt of 1932, Martí was all over the place, organizing, protesting, preparing for what he hoped would be a genuine socialist revolution. For those unfamiliar with the story, at the end of 1932, the Salvadoran peasants, mostly coffee farmers, and only in the Western part of the country, rose up against the state in a badly organized, anarchic mayhem that ended in the slaughtering of up to 30,000 people. Organized by Martí and the Communists, the men in the revolt had little more than machetes and sticks, which proved no match for the U.S.-supplied machine guns of the army. In the days and weeks following the uprising, the army went from town to town searching for suspects. In Matanza, Thomas Anderson explains the process:

As most of the rebels, except the leaders, were difficult to identify, arbitrary classifications were set up. All those who were found carrying machetes were guilty. All those of a strongly Indian cast of features, or who dressed in a scruffy, campesino costume, were considered guilty. To facilitate the roundup, all those who had not taken part in the uprising were invited to present themselves at the comandancia to receive clearance papers. When they arrived they were examined and those with the above-mentioned attributes seized. Tied by the thumbs to those before and behind them, in the customary Salvadoran manner, groups of fifty were led to the back wall of the church of Asunción in Izalco and against that massive wall were cut down by firing squads.

And that was the end of the indigenous culture of El Salvador. Many tourists who visit El Salvador are surprised to find so few traces of any native culture here, compared to the surrounding areas. The 1932 uprising is the answer. Afterwards, it became a crime to wear indigenous dress, to speak Nahuat, the indigenous language that has almost been completely lost, or to continue any of the indigenous traditions.

Now Martí, returning to El Salvador in 1930 from his fling with Sandino, was quite popular among the left for his participation in the national liberation of Nicaragua. All this, despite the fact that Martí was now denouncing Sandino as a petty bourgeoisie and a false prophet. In the country only a few months, Martí was back in action and was soon arrested. He was released shortly after, but in November he was arrested before the elections, and the government wanted to make sure Martí wouldn’t cause any trouble for them during this crucial moment. After refusing to leave the country voluntarily, he was locked down below on the freighter Venezuela headed to California. Although he was kept locked up in Central America, by the time the ship reached Mexico, he had convinced the captain to let him off. However, the Mexican authorities had been forewarned by the Salvadoran government, and refused him entry. “Unlike Trotsky, who later received asylum there, Martí was not a fallen and discredited leader, but an active political force whose intended revolution would be a little too close to home,” Anderson writes.

Finally, in California, Martí landed ashore. But like many a fugitive, he was immediately picked up by immigration and thrown in jail where he spent the next two weeks waiting for the Venezuela to head back out to sea. The boat headed south and to his surprise, the captain let him off at La Libertad (El Salvador). His instructions were to keep Martí out of El Salvador until the elections. The elections were over so Martí was released. Again, his stay would be short. Government agents awaited his arrival, and put him back aboard. In this game of cat and mouse, Martí jumped ship in Costa Rica, only to be detained by the Salvadoran agents and put on another steamer. Finally, one step ahead of the authorities, Martí landed in Nicaragua, where he laid low for a few weeks before he quietly made his way back to El Salvador, ready to return to his leadership position of the Socorro Rojo Internacionál (International Red Aid). A SRI pamphlet described itself as follows:

The SRI is a vast organization, without party affiliation, which accepts the idea of class struggle. It proposes to defend all the workers who are persecuted by imperialism, capitalist governments, and all other agencies of oppression,…proportioning its legal aid and material and moral support to those workers and their families by means of agitation and publicity and organized demonstrations….

From the moment he returned in February, 1931, until his capture and execution in February, 1932, Martí worked at a feverish pace to prepare the masses for the uprising. He acted as a man who had an unwavering faith in his mission. At his show-trial, he told the judges, “I do not wish to defend myself because my work and that of my comrades will be justified.”

Part one of a three-part series on the 1932 uprising.

Part two will finish the story of Martí and the uprising while part three will tell the story of General Martínez, the man in charge of the massacre

Stumbling up the cobblestone street yesterday—more like a boulder-strewn path—I heard a few kids yelling above me. The street is really just a deep trench through the land, with mud walls climbing fifteen feet on each side, just enough room for the 1980s Blue Bird school bus to pass through town each day. Along the sides, chickens prowl for bugs and worms in the dirt.

I heard a stone shoot through the trees and looked up to see a two-foot-long fluorescent green lizard drop from a cluster of branches. The kids spend their days, Dennis-the-Menace-style, trying to shoot lizards with their slingshots. Almost everybody has one. Fashioned out of a branch about the width of a baseball bat, they are formed with a machete to leave just a small V in the wood. From there, usually about ten or twenty rubber bands are fastened to the wood, making a decent device to sling rocks around the neighborhood.

It wasn’t a direct hit so the lizard (iguana, I might say, but are iguanas such a bright green?) fell from the tree and took off. A shoeless eight-year-old stood waiting below. Knowing how hard—impossible, I thought—it is to catch one of these lizards, as I saw it run off, I yelled to his friend above that the lizard escaped. I was underestimating the speed, or determination, of the eight-year-old.

He ran down the street, his calloused feet slapping the rocks, at full speed. (I have trouble even walking along this road without twisting an ankle.) After about 20 yards, the lizard made a break for it to the other side of the street. The boy, we’ll call him Juan for privacy concerns, was on him. He dove into the bushes, and after some thrashing, emerged triumphantly, lizard in hand, and ran past me to show his friend (or more likely, his brother).

I sit here eating lizard meat with diced potatoes, onions, and green peppers, and find myself with a newfound respect for Carlitos, the eleven-year-old son that delivers my food. He also spends his days hunting lizards with a slingshot.

When filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim man in Amsterdam 2004, it was not that surprising. He repeatedly attacked Islam as being a threat to the West and had just released a 10-minute movie about the abuse of women inherent in Islam. Some said he was asking for it.

Journalists and filmmakers make sacrifices for their work. Some go looking for danger, like the Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski who is said to have survived 27 coups and revolutions and four death sentences while reporting in Africa and Latin America throughout the 1960s and 70s. When Daniel Pearl was decapitated by Al Qaeda in Pakistan, while outraged, many people knew the huge risks that reporters were taking in getting the story.

But with Christian Poveda, who was killed on September 2nd outside of San Salvador it felt different. Yes, he was reporting on a dangerous, violent subject—the pandillas in El Salvador—but he was doing his story with them, not about them.

Poveda, a Hispanic-French journalist, spent 16 months hanging out in La Campanera in Soyapango with a cliqua from Mara 18, focusing on a group of pandilleros that was working to open up a bakery. Poveda’s intention was to show the everyday life of the mara, not just the sensational side that gets reported daily. He accompanied young men to court hearings, chronicled a girl’s quest to get a glass eye, and showed another girl’s struggles to get a DUI. The film was not without the other elements: mass arrests, tattoos, drugs, women, violence; but throughout, Poveda let the movie do that talking. There is no outside narration, just the voices and actions of his subjects.

Of course, working with mareros can be dangerous. But when asked in April if he was ever afraid during the filming, Poveda said no. He had come to believe in their word: “When the gang decides how it’s going to be, the whole gang follows,” he said, referring to the fact that they had allowed him access. Unfortunately, this seemed to work both ways, as police now say Poveda’s murder was ordered by a higher-up who is already in prison, Nelson Lazo Rivera.

Poveda’s body was found a few meters from his car with four bullets to the head. At the time of this writing, the police had arrested six suspects, one a police officer.

Poveda’s documentary La Vida Loca had been gaining popularity and might understandably have made some pandilleros uncomfortable. According to La Prensa, Poveda was a witness to seven killings—three of the dead were main characters in the movie. The scenes, in which a gunshot sounds and the next scene shows a naked body being readied for the funeral, is startling. Poveda first gained entry into the gangs through old acquaintances. He worked as a photojournalist during the civil war in the 80s, and upon returning he somehow was able to make his way to the top brass of the 18 gang. His plan was to film for at least a year, following more than one person, because as he said (rightfully so), it was very likely that his subject could go to jail or be killed during the filming (which happened to a handful in the movie).

Some have drawn comparisons to Poveda’s documentary and the fictional Sin Nombre, a film about two immigrants traveling to the U.S. through Mexico—one of whom is from the Mara Salvatrucha. After watching both, I can only say that Poveda’s documentary is not out to glorify the life of the pandilleros. He even shows the famed gang initiation—where a leader counts to 13 (or 18) while you are gang-beaten—for what it is: a stupid fight between fourteen year-old kids. In Sin Nombre, you will see a lot more blood and a lot more pride. La Vida Loca shows people living their life, trying to get by, having some fun, and mostly making stupid decisions.

And the most stupid decision of all was taking the life of the one man who was trying to tell their story. A man who did not deserve it.

So this warm humid air-condition-less environment is getting hard on me. I look like a junky looking for his fix, scratching the inside of my forearms and elbow all the time. My stomach itches too. Between my fingers, I can just pull the skin off. It is as if my whole body were suffering from some sort of trench-foot, finally giving away to the effects of being wet at all times, either from sweat, rain, or that bucket bath that I never quite dry-off from.

Last month I was sitting in my hammock, shivering in 95-degree heat. This worried me. I called a doctor. He said to go take some tests and call him with the results. Turns out I had Salmonella and some sort of strep throat, hence the fever of 104. Ever since then, I’ve been swearing I’ll build an outhouse because it is not fun running to the use the neighbor’s three times in the middle of the night, getting chased by the dogs and waking up everybody in the area, who inevitably know now that the gringo has diarrhea.

I stood there waving my hands no behind Ramón’s back. We were having the monthly town meeting—the one where we talk about our general failings in the water project—and he was addressing the crowd of about a hundred people.

“I propose that we all pitch in a dollar and buy Sean a new bike,” he said, unprompted.

I was against the idea knowing that it was my fault and all.

On Monday morning I woke up, walked outside, sat in my hammock and started throwing corn at the chickens on the patio: the same thing I do every morning. About four hours later, still in the process of waking up (it is about 8:30 by this time), I looked around the patio. No bike. Somebody stole my bike. All I can think to do is curse the stupid dogs, the dogs that bark at me every time I so much as open my front door. Where the hell were the dogs when somebody came in at midnight, opened first the fence, then the patio gate, took my bike, and walked out?

I got dressed quickly and I walked down to the school to tell Don Angel, the president of the town council. We call the police. They arrive two hours later. I go through the formalities when they arrive, giving them the description of the bike and the chassis number, which was on the receipt that I had miraculously saved. They tell me they’ll look for the bike. One of the three even stops me as I am walking out. “Don’t worry. We’ll be looking for it,” he says. Not to reassure me that he’d find it, just that they would be looking for it. I thank him.

For about the first ten seconds I was feeling self-righteous, complaining to myself: “I come here to help, and they steal my bike.” But I quickly reminded myself that (a) I’m not doing that much, and (b) that is a really stupid way to look at it. But it seemed that my self-righteousness—which I had kept to myself—had rubbed off on everybody else in town. Don Angel was beside himself, reeling off the same things I had said: “you come here to help, and these people disrespect you.” I told him not to take it personally. People steal bikes everywhere, especially unlocked, new bikes.

Everywhere I went, people would greet me, then motion me closer. “Somebody stole your bike,” they would say. Or “is it true your bike was stolen?”

In town yesterday, a drunk came up to me motioning with his two fingers to his lips, meaning he wanted a cigarette. Drunks and bums get pretty excited when I come around since it is known that I buy packs of cigarettes, and not just one at a time like everybody else. So anyway, after lighting his cigarette, this guy, drenched in a drunken sweat, tells me he heard my bike was stolen. Yeah, yeah, I answer, it is a shame.

“I know who did it,” he lets slip. I look at him again. He realizes he has said too much. “Well, I am not 100 per cent sure, so I can’t say.”

“Thanks,” I tell him, and walk off.

When I get back to town I tell Don Angel the story. He nods. His son-in-law also knows who did it. But he won’t say. At first I am mad. What is this like some Sicilian town here, nobody talks? And I find out, sort of. But it is not out of protection. Milton, Don Angel’s son-in-law, won’t talk because he says the thieves saw him too. He is not going to risk that for some stupid gringo and his bike. I wouldn’t either.

So as the town meeting was ending, Don Angel informs the people that unfortunately, he is going to have to leave the people with some bad news. As I hadn’t been paying attention through most of the meeting, I tune back in for this. “Sean’s bike was stolen,” he tells the crowd of one hundred people. I put my head down because I want to laugh and tell the people that it really is not a big deal. Also, they are all looking at me. Okay, so now they know, I think, no big deal. But then, Don Ramon, who is standing to my side, chimes in. After reiterating the main points of Angel’s speech, which are that the whole town should be embarrassed, ashamed, humiliated, angry for this outrage committed upon me, he makes the suggestion.

After the meeting, everyone takes it as a sign of my humility, and tells me that they can’t wait to buy me a new bike. I try to tell a few that it is not humility, that I don’t feel that the community should have to pay for a bike that I left outside—against more than a few warnings—and then was stolen.

Last night it rained for the first time in fourteen days. It was only the second time in July. This is a problem. We are in the middle of the “rainy” season. The corn should be towering overhead by now. Instead, it stands withering at my shoulders. Already my neighbors have lost their harvest for the season. Others will be left with stunted half-developed corn. This is a problem. Here people plant twice a year. The corn is stored for the rest of the year for food—for tortillas, specifically. In a town where almost everybody is a farmer, earning the only income of the year off the extra corn, people are nervous. Remittances are not quite so free-flowing as they once were with the economic woes everyone is experiencing in the states. These two things, corn and remittances, are the only two things that keep this town, this country, and probably most of this region from starving. From here to San Salvador, the corn is dying. The younger people say they don´t remember a July this dry. The older people shake their heads. It has been a long time, they say.

As the coup in Honduras enters its third week, the United States involvement is becoming more and more clear (maybe not Obama specifically, but certainly many, many key players in both the government and corporate world). As Nikolas Kozloff has showed in his daily articles on his blog senorchichero.blogspot.com and on counterpunch.org, the ties—ranging from Clinton’s lobbyist Lanny Davis, who happens to be strongly lobbying Washington for recognition of the coup government, to longtime Latin American destabilizers John Negroponte (former ambassador to Honduras in the 80s) and Chiquita Banana—run deep.

It shouldn’t be surprising. This is the United States’ backyard, as Washington has liked to remind us since the Monroe Doctrine, the Roosevelt Corollary and everything since. As Greg Gandin tells it in his book Empire’s Workshop: “By 1930, Washington had sent gunboats into Latin American ports over six thousand times, invaded Cuba, Mexico (again), Guatemala, and Honduras, fought protracted guerrilla wars in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Haiti, annexed Puerto Rico, and taken a piece of Colombia to create both the Panamanian nation and the Panama Canal.”

And that pattern hasn’t changed a whole lot in the past 80 years. Hell, Mel can’t even claim to be the first Zelaya to be overthrown in Central America. That distinction goes to Nicaragua’s José Santos Zelaya, a member of the Liberal party who took power in 1893. According to Costa Rican Hector Perez-Brignoli (who is not necessarily a great historian) in his A Brief History of Central American, Zelaya “was a tough nut to crack for the U.S. interests trying to negotiate a canal treaty.” Sounds familiar, only replace the ¨U.S. interests¨ with the U.S. textile industry, or Chiquita, or reactionaries in the U.S. who were not told that the Cold War ended almost twenty years ago. Apparently Nicaragua’s Zelaya refused to give the U.S. extraterritorial rights. What a selfish guy. Anyway, he was overthrown in 1909 “by a Conservative plot while he was in the middle of a diplomatic struggle with the United States,” according to Perez. This Zelaya was an authoritarian dictator, so don’t confuse my statements with any sort of support for the guy who justified repeated invasions of Honduras and El Salvador as an attempt at unification. But the reason for his overthrow, according to the book, “included cancellations of concessions granted to U.S. companies.” Again, sound familiar? Coupled with his “efforts…to interest other world powers in the construction of a canal through Nicaragua, thereby introducing competition (and a threat) to the United States’s Panamanian enterprise,” (the modern day Zelaya even went so far as to strike deals with the United States´ sworn enemy, Venezuela: unforgivable.) So of course, this José Zelaya guy was overthrown.

Admittedly, it is not like overthrowing two guys named Kissinger—the name of the neighborhood next to mine in El Salvador is Zelaya. But maybe it shows how often the U.S. meddles in Latin America, and specifically, in Central America. Or maybe it doesn’t even show that. Just thought you’d like to know.

War correspondents. I don’t even think they exist anymore, unless you count the cheerleaders that are “imbedded” with the military in Afghanistan and Iraq. I mean, you still get some of the newsreaders that get to go to anything big, the Anderson Coopers or Brian Williams of the world, but do they ever see any action—other than Cooper’s famous post-Katrina role as hero?

I just re-read Chris Hedges book War is a Force that Gives us Meaning. The first time I read it was in 2005 over winter break during my freshman year at college (no, I don’t remember, but I found a ticket stub/bookmark in the pages). I vaguely remembered that it was a good book, and I knew Chris Hedges was a pretty philosophical guy for a journalist because I’d been reading his columns on truthdig for a while now. I think the first time I read it I probably thought, wow, this guy is nuts. And probably also, wow, he is smart too. This time around, I’ll admit, I looked at it different. What has changed? Nothing. Only now instead of being a freshman pothead idiot, I am an unemployed pretend journalist idiot.

Hedges has had a particularly war-filled career. “War and conflict have marked most of my adult life,” he writes. “I began covering insurgencies in El Salvador, where I spent five years, then went on to Guatemala and Nicaragua and Colombia, through the first intifada in the West Bank and Gaza, the civil war in the Sudan and Yemen, the uprisings in Algeria and the Punjab, the fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the Gulf War, the Kurdish rebellion in southeast Turkey and northern Iraq, the war in Bosnia, and finally to Kosova.” It sounds glorious, but as Hedges recounts it, it, well fucked him up pretty good.

The book meditates on the lies of war. “The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent….And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble.” Hedges, obviously, is not going to glorify war, but he does understand its allure.

In the book, Hedges writes that there have only been twenty-nine years in all of human history when there was not a war underway somewhere. Not a bright prospect. “Look just at the 1990s,” Hedges writes, a decade not remembered in the West for its slaughters but rather for its prosperity, “2 million dead in Afghanistan; 1.5 million dead in the Sudan; some 800,000 butchered in ninety days in Rwanda; a half-million dead in Angola; a quarter of a million dead in Bosnia; 200,000 dead in Guatemala; 150,000 dead in Liberia; a quarter of a million dead in Burundi; 75,000 dead in Algeria; and untold tens of thousands lost in the border conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the fighting in Colombia, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, southeastern Turkey, Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland, Kosova, and the Persian Gulf War (where perhaps as many as 35,000 Iraqi citizens were killed).”

Anyway, this got me to thinking about some other war junkies. Ryszard Kapuscinski, the man who famously witnessed 27 coups and revolutions, thrown in jail 40 times and sentenced to death four times—as recounted on the back of each of his books—was another who saw too much war. Unlike Hedges however, who probably lived a more or less normal life (all I know is that his father was a preacher and he grew up in Vermont), Kapuscinski was born in Pinsk, modern day Belarus, then part of Poland, in 1932. The man suffered and saw suffering from the moment he was born. He innately understood war better than probably any journalist has in recent times because he lived through it his entire life. Kapuscinski would file his dispatches each day, straightforward news, but in the meantime he would keep notebooks of his own observations. These were what turned into books like Soccer Wars, a collection of stories that draws its title from the war between El Salvador and Honduras that erupted over a World Cup qualifying match in Tegucigalpa and resulted in 1000 dead in a few days, and Another Day of Life, a surreal account of the Angolan civil war.

Jon Lee Anderson was another that came to mind. He writes for the New Yorker, and last wrote an article about Iran and Ahmadinejad about two months before the elections. He tends to get a head start on things. In his book Guerillas, where he spends time with different rebel groups throughout the world in the late 1980s, from El Salvador’s FMLN to the Western Sahara’s Polisario. At the end book, while in Afghanistan, his friends quickly hustle him out, warning him that Osama bin Laden is looking for him. The book was written in the early 90s. He wrote a long piece about Hugo Chavez in the New Yorker a few months before the 2002 coup. He seems to have no problem gaining the trust and interviews of guerillas, presidents, outlaws, or murderers. He did a profile on Pinochet and asked him about Allende, something I don’t think many would do. He calls bullshit on Charles Taylor. Hell, he can even take credit for finding Che’s previously unknown grave in Bolivia. He is another guy that you say, well maybe it is because of how he grew up. On the backs of his first books, it would say Anderson grew up in: The U.S., South Korea, Colombia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Liberia, and England. Apparently his dad worked for USAID and Peace Corps, which can explain this exaggerated worldly upbringing. But there is no arguing, the guy can write.

So that brings me back to Hedges, who coincidentally, also can write. War is Force is mostly about breaking down any myth of national struggle, or the “good war.” The book was published in June 2003, meaning it was being written as we geared up for the Iraq war, which started in March of that year. Hedges had seen war, and he had seen the same lies spewed out in many languages all over the world. “Patriotism, often a thinly veiled form of collective self-worship, celebrates our goodness, our ideals, our mercy and bemoans the perfidiousness of those who hate us,” he writes.

So while we can grieve for the death of the war correspondent in U.S. wars, as half of them now probably work for the State Department, secretly of course, we can still hope to see some uncensored reporting from other parts of the world, and in the meantime rely on the Jeremy Scahills of the world to uncover the cover-ups of the military.

There was a coup in Honduras on Sunday, June 28. It has taken up most of my time in terms of reading and listening to the radio. By this time, almost everybody (minus the U.S.) has rejected the coup and is calling for the immediate return of Mel Zelaya. Yes Obama has issued statements that have become increasingly critical of the coup, but the U.S. has not recalled its ambassador, it has not officially called it a coup (because that would mean a cut-off of aid under U.S. law which prohibits funding of any government that has come to power under a coup). Hillary Clinton has said that maybe they should move the elections up from November, which would in effect legitimize the coup because Zelaya cannot run for re-election. Meanwhile every country in Latin America and many in the European Union have condemned the coup and recalled their ambassadors. The neighboring countries shut down commercial relations with Honduras but cannot afford to cut off business permanently without outside assistance (something the U.S. could easily swing). Venezuela is cutting off its oil that it was supplying through PetroCaribe, which allows Central American and Caribbean countries to buy oil with very low interest rates.

As Noam Chomsky pointed out, almost everybody is calling this a return to the “bad old days” of coups in Latin America. While you could say that is true in Central America, which used to be so overrun by coups, it was said that if Washington so much as frowned in the direction of a government, it would be overthrown. But there was a coup in Venezuela in 2002 and another coup in Haiti in 2004. So while the frequency might not be as high, there are plenty of incidents in the recent past to draw comparisons.Of course, the U.S. immediately backed both coups, something they have not explicitly done in Honduras today. In Venezuela, over a million people reportedly protested outside the Presidential Palace and Chavez was reinstated in two days.

As this coup drags on, it gets harder to see a peaceful resolution in Honduras. The illegal government led by Roberto Micheletti promises to arrest Zelaya if he enters the country. Zelaya, after trying to return last Sunday (where the army opened fire on protesters at the Tegucigalpa airport killing a nineteen-year-old), rightfully says he will not negotiate with this illegal government. This illegal government has now turned its attention on internal suppression, showing its true cards, enforcing a curfew, cutting off many media outlets, arresting dissidents, organizing new (and old) death squads, all while claiming the coup was done in the name of the Honduran people. This might not be a lie, they just need to specify which people they have done this for. Certainly not the majority of the people. Not the 60% of the population that lives in poverty. They mean to say those “ten families that own everything in Honduras,” as Zelaya told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! earlier this week.

Of course, Washington looks like it might use this opportunity to at least keep Zelaya from holding the referendum. So why did the coup happen? Was Zelaya trying to become the next Chavez as so many in the Western media have reported? No. He was planning on holding a “popular consultation” (basically a survey) that would ask voters whether they would be open to having a referendum during the elections in November to re-write the constitution. Of course, Zelaya would not be running in the November elections (there is no re-election allowed in the Honduran Constitution), so any new constitution—if the referendum passed, which is probable—would be written long after Zelaya was gone.

Sidenote: When the coup occurred Obama was meeting in Washington with President Uribe of Colombia. Coincidentally, Uribe, who the media adores in the U.S., also re-wrote his constitution….twice to allow for re-election. But of course, as a free-market, free-trade president, regardless of his abysmal human rights record or corruption scandals or spying mishaps or paramilitary ties or insider trading or the “false positives” ordeal, he can do no wrong.

Much of this is just recycled information. Most of you know this already. I could mention how the Honduran army is highly-trained and very experienced in internal repression. They had a lot of practice during the Reagan years. Or the fact that Otto Reich, “the old Iran-Contra hand and Central American crusader,” as NYU Latin American expert Greg Gandin said, who also led the charge in the 2002 Venezuela coup might have had a hand in this one through some international republican organization. I could talk about how I tried to get a scoop and took the first bus I could on Monday morning after listening on Radio Havana Sunday night as Zelaya’s plane redirected to San Salvador after it was unable to land in Tegucigalpa (“If I had a parachute, I’d jump,” he told a reporter from the plane.) He was gone by the time I made it to the bus station in Usulután. I just watched Telesur at a hostel in the capital and drank beers, telling myself that this is what a reporter does. But you don’t need to know all that.

The bigger issue seems to be that the U.S. did nothing to stop the coup and they are not doing anything to bring Zelaya back. Senior State Department officials say they were in close contact with the Honduran military before the coup and tried to dissuade them from taking any illegal action against the president. But isn’t it naïve to believe that Honduras would disobey the U.S.? I am not talking as somebody who believe in some almighty power of the U.S. government, but rather as somebody who realizes that the U.S.S. Honduras (as some have said the country is referred to as down here) is under complete military and economic control by its big brother in the North. So will the U.S. wait and see as Oscar Arias, Costa Rica’s president, steps in to try to solve the problem? Or will they actually do something, filling all that empty rhetoric of democracy and freedom with some action? Doubtful.

1. The pampered youth of the American bourgeois classes came to believe that their mere attendance at rallies and the symbolic choices they made between factions in the election booths constituted a movement—even a sort of revolution. Sincere though their intentions were, they lacked the historical knowledge of the sustained sacrifice that revolutionary struggle entails. They could not see that their efforts had brought “change” without any real political movement behind it, and therefore no true change at all.

2. The sad reality is that while the United States has at least some civil society organizations that can present an independent view to the public on domestic issues, on foreign policy issues we are much more like Russia. The vast majority of expert opinion on foreign policy that is allowed access to major media in the United States consists of government officials, former government officials, or people who or are otherwise influenced by the government. This is one reason why it was so easy to invade Iraq, and so difficult to get out of there or out of Afghanistan - in spite of the American public's long-standing lack of enthusiasm for sending combat troops overseas.

3. China's official military budget jumped to $60 billion, an 18 percent increase over last year, but US officials warned that the actual figure is somewhere between $105 and $150 billion annually.

Without a hint of irony, the report expresses concern about, "the purposes to which China's current and future military power will be applied," and suggests that Beijing could even use its armed forces "to ensure access to resources or enforce claims to disputed territories."

In February, the Obama administration requested a mind-boggling $664 billion for the US military over the next fiscal year - more than 10 times China's official budget. In fact, the US spends roughly the same amount on "defense" each year as every other country in the world combined, according to the authoritative data of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

And much like China, Washington's accounting for such things is notoriously lacking in transparency. Many expenses that the average person would consider defense-related - such as funding for the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Energy's maintenance of the nuclear stockpile, military aid to allies, and the share of interest payments on the national debt that can be attributed to the past military spending - are hidden in other parts of the federal budget. When all of these costly extras are added up, the United States' unofficial military budget tops out at more than $1 trillion.

4. In fact, if you look today, it's quite striking to see the advice that the Western powers are following, the programs that they're following, and compare them to the instructions given to the third world.

So, say, take Indonesia again. Indonesia had a huge financial crisis about ten years ago, and the instructions were the standard ones: "Here is what you have to do. First, pay off your debts to us. Second, privatize, so that we can then pick up your assets on the cheap. Third, raise interest rates to slow down the economy and force the population to suffer, you know, to pay us back." Those are the regular instructions the IMF is still giving them.

What do we [in the United States Government during the Crisis] do? Exactly the opposite. We forget about the debt, let it explode. We reduce interest rates to zero to stimulate the economy. We pour money into the economy to get even bigger debts. We don't privatize; we nationalize, except we don't call it nationalization. We give it some other name, like "bailout" or something. It's essentially nationalization without control. So we pour money into the institutions. We lectured the third world that they must accept free trade, though we accept protectionism.

1. Baker, Kevin- “Change without Movement” From Harper’s June 2009- Forum- My Great Depression- Ten Dispatches from the near future-

2. Weisbrot, Mark “Hillary Clinton Recognizes Multi-Polar World, Failures of U.S. Latin America Policy, from The Guardian Unlimited on May 6, 2009.

3. Stoner, Eric- “The Pentagon’s Monster in the Mirror- U.S. Military Spending Dwarfs China’s” from ZNet, April 15, 2009

4. Chomsky, Noam- “Global Economic Crisis, Healthcare, US Foreign Policy and Resistance to American Empire” from Democracy Now!, April 14, 2009

Yesterday, I was in San Salvador with two friends from Peace Corps. After eating a huge breakfast, I suggested we walk over to the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, a small museum about the revolution. The director of the museum was the man behind Radio Venceremos, the guerilla radio that broadcast throughout the war, and played a huge part in informing citizens about the true events happening at the time. It is well understood in Latin America that one of the biggest obstacles of any revolution is not just the army, but the media campaign waged against any group that is attacking that status quo. Fidel coached many leaders about this problem.

“The first thing that a revolutionary has to understand is that the ruling classes have organized the state in such a way as to maintain themselves in power by all possible means. And they use not only arms, but all possible instruments to influence, deceive and confuse,” he told a group of Latin American leftists in 1967. When some would-be-revolutionaries complained about this he asked them, “What did you expect? That they would put TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, printing shops, everything at your disposal? Are you unaware that those are precisely the instruments the ruling class uses to crush revolutions?”

In El Salvador, the government didn’t realize its power. Instead of countering the truth with propaganda on a large-scale, they simply shut down almost all sources of information, breaking all international freedom-of-press agreements. In this way, even foreign journalists relied on Radio Venceremos, FMLN’s radio, for information.

Carlos Henriquez Consalvi, or Santiago, as he was known on the radio, was a Venezuelan journalist who came to the country in 1981 with this idea in mind. He was going to start a radio to inform and discuss the events. Throughout the decade, the enterprise grew to include everything from literacy programs on-air, to cultural studies about the areas controlled by the guerillas, and interviews with the campesinos most affected. And it worked. It kept the people informed and despite the horrible violence and atrocities suffered by the population, many continued to support the guerillas right through the end of the war.

In Greg Grandin’s book, Empire’s Workshop, he talks about the cohesiveness of the guerillas in El Salvador. “After eleven years of war, a 1991 report commissioned by the undersecretary of defense for policy concluded that the ‘FMLN’s infrastructure [remains] so dense,’ that ‘only a massacre could uproot it.’”

At the museum, while paging through a book, a man in his mid to late thirties pointed out a chapter to me. “This one is about me,” he said. His name was Chiyo and his story had been told in a few books I had read. He met Santiago in Morazán after his parents had been killed by the army. He was an eight-year-old kid who lost his entire family in the war at the time. Now he worked in the museum. As we talked, Carlos (Santiago) came into the room and asked where we worked. He was familiar with the organization and even pulled out a small pamphlet that a former Peace Corp volunteer had written with help from the museum about women in El Salvador. We talked for about 15 minutes and he invited us to return that evening for a book opening.

When we arrived, Chiyo was playing the guitar, singing about Morazán (the northeastern department that was controlled by the FMLN throughout the war and where Radio Venceremos broadcast from). Commenting on the small crowd of about 20 people he made an analogy that only an ex-guerilla would make.

“You know, during the war, I learned that any meeting, one with 400 people or one with three people is just as important because from those 400 people or those three people the idea spreads,” he said. “And I also know that it doesn’t matter how many people you have. When we’d sit there waiting to attack an army base with 200 guerillas and the army had 2000, we knew it was the power of our conviction that would help us win,” he added.

Of course, we were just talking about an education project that gave scholarships to go to high school, but in a room filled with ex-guerillas, the analogy seemed appropriate.

The night proved inspiring. Many of the ex-guerillas still work in the areas most affected by the war. They are in effect doing the same thing, struggling for change, only now they work with NGOs rather than guns.

Next month, Che’s daughter will be speaking at the University of El Salvador and thousands of people are expected to crowd the university to see her. But the 30th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution falls around the same time. So many choices. So many causes to support.

As I waited in the check-in-line at the San Salvador airport, I felt like I was missing something. Everybody had at least three big bags to check and stacks of random carryon—a huge stack of old newspapers, empty Salva-Cola (imitation Coke) bottles, and plastic bags filled with fried chicken, Pollo Campero to be exact. I only had a little backpack, stuffed with all the books I was bringing back to exchange for new ones. I thought it was a joke when I read a description of this same event; a woman had mentioned the same thing, tons of Pollo Campero, only her story was told twenty years ago. Today, you can find Pollo Campero in more than a few states and besides, it is just fried chicken. (For those of you who don’t have it around you, it is the Central American version of KFC).

On the way back to El Salvador the story was the same. This time I had one big bag, but it was still less than half of what most people had packed: plasma TVs, rocking chairs, toaster ovens, giant moving boxes wrapped in about three rolls of packing tape. I was carrying a large backpack, filled with books, trying to keep my checked-luggage under 50 pounds by carrying about 100 pounds on my back. I was seated in the fourteenth row, so I was boarding the plane with the last third of the people. By the time I was in the jet way, a flight attendant was walking down the row, taking everybody’s carryon. All the overhead space was full, we were told. So I gave her my backpack and didn’t really think about it again. Obviously I should have because when I saw my bag coming around the carousel in San Salvador, I could see the side pocket was half-open. In a rush I didn’t even check it out until I got to my hotel. Needless to say, my camera was gone, an easily pocketable gadget, along with my cell-phone charger (I still am confused about that one). I had spent the last ten days taking pictures of family and friends and was pretty bummed out. I was sitting at home a few days earlier debating whether to put copy the photos onto my mom’s computer. I didn’t. Reading over that, I’m not really sure why I wrote this. Probably just because I wanted to say, fuck, I lost my camera.

Two days before I left, in the late afternoon, while I was swinging in my hammock, making bets with myself about when it might rain next, Don Angel walked through the fence with a slightly bothered look on his face. He is the leader in Santa Clara, the president of the town council, the unofficial spiritual leader, and the owner of the snack shop at school. He is also the person who I work with most.

“Sean, we have to go to the office,” he tells me. “A bull has fallen in the latrine.”

I knew what he was talking about. I had passed by the office earlier in the afternoon and practically fell into the newly dug hole myself. The hole, about five meters deep and no wider then a manhole cover, was for the new outhouse that we were building, and it was uncovered.

“Somebody forgot to cover it,” he said.

I felt a bit responsible, knowing that I had seen this problem and done nothing about it, but Don Angel didn’t think so. Whoever dug the hole should have covered it.

When we arrived there were about 10 people with shovels working on digging the bull out.

The bull had been in the hole for a few hours. While walking around the office that afternoon, where his cows graze, Juan, an eighteen-year-old kid from town was killing time, waiting for the animals when he decided to take a look at the new latrine being built, he said.

“I saw a black head at the bottom, and I wondered why somebody had thrown a cow’s head into the toilet,” he said. “And then it moved.”

The bull had passed the hole with its front legs only to fall down hind-legs-first, evidently. The size of the hole—about the exact size as the bull—kept the bull from crashing down to the bottom. He probably just slid down it.

I looked at the bull down there and thought, maybe we will get to eat hamburgers. (Then again, this thought crosses my mind almost anytime I see a fat cow around here). They didn’t see it that way, and for good reason. The bull cost over 200 dollars.

After digging for about three hours, they had created a ramp down to the level of the bull. It wasn’t easy to get it moving, and this thousand-pound animal was scared. Finally, after much coaxing and poking and pulling, the bull was persuaded to kick free and make its way up the ramp. Three minutes later, the rains came, and as everyone sat underneath roof outside the office, examining their wounds—a kick to the stomach, blistered hands—everyone cursed the workers who had left the hole uncovered.

The next morning I went with Don Angel to fill in the hole. That was our punishment. Shoveling dirt back into the hole for the next two hours, I was thinking about the next day, when I’d be back in the states. When I arrived, my back and shoulders hurt so bad I couldn’t help but explain: “Had to dig a bull out of an outhouse yesterday.”

Back in Santa Clara, the heat is still suffocating. Everything is greener, the corn stands about two feet tall in the fields, and nightly rain keeps everything slightly damp. I will have to get used to the heat all over again. As I walked from San Rafael Oriente to Santa Clara with my 30-pound backpack, my sweat-soaked shirt felt heavy and my feet, grinding against the pebbles and dirt that instantly fills my shoes on these roads, hurt. It is good to be back, I tell myself. And I try to believe it.

I was in my hammock reading a book on Sunday when an old guy, gold-toothed (as most are) with a mustache (as most are) and a cowboy hat (ibid) came walking up to my patio. I had been talking to him earlier in the week about iguanas while we hauled water from his well. I told him I’d never eaten one. He promised me he’d find me one. So here he was with my meal, or pet, as he called it. The prehistoric-looking lizard was only a two or three-pounder, a small guy, but he was still very much alive and not too happy about his present situation, arms and legs tied behind his back and a leash around his neck. I thanked my gold-toothed friend and told him I looked forward to eating it. I was holding it, with my thumb and forefinger around its neck, trying to be nonchalant about the situation. When he left, I put the iguana on a chair (did I think the floor would be too degrading?) and sat back into my hammock to read. I dozed off and when I woke up, the lizard had managed to wiggle off the chair and was laying there underneath the chair. I got up and as soon as I went to grab it, the thing went crazy, breaking its arms loose from the strings, dragging its hind legs across the floor, flitting across the patio. I hoped it would escape and I could tell my neighbors (who were all very aware that this man had just brought me an iguana, a delicacy) that the thing was gone when I woke up from my nap. But the stupid thing just kept trying to crawl under a door that was too small for his big belly. The book I was reading was Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, and after reading it I can’t help but feel sort of smug, at least about my food here. All you suckers in the States stuck with that horrible industrialized food chain. Pollan asks readers when was the last time you actually saw a pig, or looked into the eyes of an animal. When he is describing the specific ways that turkeys, chickens, and cows eat, I just set the book down on my chest, pick my head up from the hammock and look in the yard. I thought he should be asking something like “When was the last time you tried to catch a chicken?” Because I’ve been struggling. They are fast. He describes the ridiculous dependence we have on corn, a dependence largely induced due to foolish policies and planning in the government and industry (“The typical Iowa farmer is selling corn for a dollar less than it costs him to grow it,” Pollan tells us…hence the foolish policy part). This obsession with corn affects virtually every part of our system, from the corn-fed beef to the corn-syrup in all things sweet, to the endless manipulated ingredients that scientists have figured out to extract from the plant. Pollan sums up this new industrial system. “Folly in the getting of our food is nothing new. And yet the new follies we are perpetrating in our industrial food chain today are of a different order. By replacing solar energy with fossil fuel, by raising millions of food animals in close confinement, by feeding those animals foods they never evolved to eat, and by feeding ourselves foods far more novel than we even realize, we are taking risks with our health and the health of the natural world that are unprecedented.” One farmer refers to modern farming as a direct result of the military-industrial complex. It sounded a bit paranoid at first, but Pollan explains the reasoning. “The chemical fertilizer industry (along with that of pesticides, which are based on poison gases developed for the war) is the product of the government’s effort to convert its war machine to peacetime purposes.” And all these fertilizers and pesticides have led directly to our one-crop obsession, our heavily medicated feed farms; in short, everything bad about the modern food industry. Admittedly, I have been a perfect American of my generation, growing up in the height of this industrialized, fast-food nation, embracing it all (I microwave everything, even my eggs.) I will also admit that when I used to visit other countries, I would complain about the meat. When somebody pointed out that it was the difference of a grass-fed animal, I probably couldn’t have told you what cows eat in the U.S., but knew that this meat didn’t taste like the hamburger I knew. Here in El Salvador, an American friend complained: “These chickens are too tough. I think it’s because they let them walk around too much,” he said, without irony. And I agreed. For us, chickens come in the form of nuggets, and that taste of any chicken that was more than two months old was probably entirely unknown to us, let alone a chicken that had actually run around a bit (and that free range bullshit does not count, as Pollan points out when he visits one such “farm,” which is no different from the other slaughterhouses, except there is a small piece of untouched grass outside, allowing an inspector to label these chicken, “free-range”). Here, without the benefit (or detriment) of modern medicine, chickens take about four months to reach eatable age. As a result, the taste is much stronger, and the meat is a bit tougher. Anyway, it is the way a chicken should taste, not some mushy, white piece of chicken-flavored mystery meat. Everything in Pollan’s book seemed to redeem my eating here. Local, free of pesticides, and direct from the source. Every morning when I show up at the health clinic I go and knock a few mangos off the tree—by throwing other mangos at the bunches—go pick a lemon from another tree and have a nice breakfast. The closest I get to fruit back home is a grape soda and a Jolly Rancher. “To eat corn directly (as Mexicans and many Africans do) is to consume all the energy in that corn,“ Pollan writes. And El Salvador, I would add. “But when you feed that corn to a steer or a chicken, 90 percent of its energy is lost.” While reading the book I asked my neighbors what the cows ate. Grass was the answer. I told them that in the U.S. the cows ate corn. They thought that was interesting. They also thought it was foolish. “Why grow the corn if you’re not going to eat it?” one man asked me. I tried to explain about the misguided policies and the fact that there was too much corn and the government was trying to figure out ways to get rid of it. Alas, it sounded as foolish coming out of my mouth as it looks on paper. He was right: what was a cow eating that food for? After all, cows are ruminants, meaning their stomachs are specially evolved to break down the nutrients in grass, they are supposed to eat grass, not corn. Maybe that’s why, as Pollan reports, “this corn-fed meat is demonstrably less healthy for us, since it contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids than the meat of animals fed grass.” And that is ignoring the rest of the ingredients that are put into cattle feed in the U.S. Until recently, much of the protein in the corn feed came from cow fat. This was what led to Mad Cow disease. Cannibalism is not healthy in nature. Pollan visits a farm in the book that practices sustainable farming, which is increasingly rare in the monoculture-dominant farming in the U.S. these days. At the beginning of the last century, one in four Americans lived on a farm, according to Pollan. Now, there are less than two million farmers in the country, and very few of them raise more than one thing, whether it is corn, soybeans, cattle, or chicken. Although the farm Pollan visits is much more scientific about the technique. (When killing the chickens they take huge precautions to avoid getting blood on themselves. “If you feel something on your lip, don’t lick it,” a farmhand sheepishly tells Pollan. I thought back to the cockfights here. When the chicken is covered in blood, the men stick the entire head in their mouth and suck the blood off, popping the head out of their mouths like a lollipop. One man is even fond of kissing his wife after each fight, chicken blood and all.) Anyway, I couldn’t help but see all the similarities in the farming that people practice here in El Salvador or anywhere else in the non-industrialized world: The chickens running around cleaning things up, the cows promoting grass growth with their grazing, hooves and manure, the pigs digging in shit acting as a compost-mixer. This is what Pollan is saying. Maybe all these things that have been done in the past in farming (and eating) were actually done for a reason. Maybe these methods that were developed over thousands of years might be on to something. We have been tinkering with these methods only in the last one hundred years, and have only become completely estranged from it after the 1970s. Every time food scientists have thought they’d figured out the puzzle to nutrition, they have discovered another underlying part. And so, Pollan writes, we have been messing with something that we haven’t even begun to understand in its complexities. “A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef,” he reports. So, thinking about all that shit I’d been reading about knowing what you are eating and being in touch with your food, I reluctantly grabbed the iguana by the leash and dragged it to my neighbor’s house, to ask Rosa to cook it for me. The meat was a little tough, but I figured it probably had enjoyed a wonderful life eating mango and jacotes before a gold-toothed monster (in the lizard’s eyes, not mine) had shot him with a sling-shot (that is how they stun them enough to catch them) and then tied him up and handed him over to an inept gringo for dinner. At least I knew where my meal came from. Better than you can say.

(Written Saturday, May Second)

Today it rained. It was a pretty big deal. In the last week, rain was the only thing that people talked about. Some cows were dying because there was nothing for them to eat—here, they eat grass, as cows are supposed to, unlike the corn-fed cows in the States. The dust, the fine copper powder that infiltrates everything, was starting to suffocate the town. Even for me, the landscape was beginning to look overwhelmingly dull and dead—every Salvadoran had been saying this since I arrived, but I had always said it looked kind of green. Each day, on my way back home for lunch, I stop and talk to the woman who sells chips and flavored ice near the school. “Looks like rain,” I usually say. “Not today,” she would tell me. Finally, yesterday, she told me. Look, she said, when you see the rain clouds in the East, you know it is going to rain. When I woke up today, it was cloudy. I usually check to make sure it is actually from the clouds and not just smoke drifting from my neighbor’s yard. Whether it is intentional or not, he burns huge quantities of leaves and plastic very close to my fence, and the smoke inevitably drifts into my house—a choking, plastic-burning sort of smoke. Looking out at the San Miguel Volcano, the top half was hidden by dark clouds, due East. People were excited about the rain. And because the rain promised to bring a bit cooler temperatures and a quick end to the dust, I was excited too. I had just finished my lunch of hot potato soup, which I eat every day. (It is believed that because it is so hot out, when you eat the soup, although it will be difficult, once you’ve finished, you will feel cooler. It works, in a perverse way: i.e., making yourself hotter on a 95 degree day, to “cool off” afterwards.) It rained for a half hour. There was no more dust, it turned into a dark, hardened clay, not the mud I had expected. Everybody looked relieved. I went down to see how the animals were doing. The cows were standing there as always, expressionless, staring at me. I couldn’t tell, but one of them seemed a bit happier, munching on the dried corn stalks. My neighbor’s piglet house was running around from one end of his three foot leash to the other, grunting with his nose buried in the ground. Same old. Yesterday, I was talking to the pig about swine flu or whatever it is called. He looked up just once, as if to tell me, hey, you’re talking to a pig, so I stopped trying. I tried to get Rebelde, the only nice dog I know to stop jumping on my leg and play with the pig but he wouldn’t. And the baby goat is hopeless. Every time I put my hand on his head, he jerks back, trying to impale me with his three-inch horns. The kids like to feed him paper towels and plastic bags. The goat doesn’t mind. Anyway, rain. Yes, it rained today.

I am starting to settle in. I went to the market and bought a few necessities for my bare-bones setup: a bandana, an ashtray, a shortwave radio, a half-liter of hot sauce, an extra hammock, and some used 5-gallon paint bucket.

The bandana is necessary for both removing dust and sweat. And, needless to say, there is no shortage of either. I sweat completely through my clothes at least twice a day. I’ve stopped wearing my khaki pants because they turn a different color when I sweat. After walking anywhere, I show up with odd streaks running down my pants. It is not pretty. As for dust, it would be futile to pay it any mind because it is overwhelming. Never forget that most of you live in a paved world. In the non-cement world, where floors are dirt, streets are dirt, yards are dirt, dust is everywhere.

The ashtray, well, is self-explanatory. Before that, I had just been letting the ash fall on the floor in my house. It wasn’t a big deal because with all the dust, I have to sweep every morning anyway. But the ashtray, I thought was a nice touch. I just don’t know what I’ll do when it’s full. (Actually, I do know. I’ll burn my trash, like everyone else does. I just am not ready to burn all this plastic and these cigarette butts. Maybe I’ll bury it.)

The shortwave radio seemed like a good idea. I imagined myself as some shipwrecked survivor, huddling over my radio at night, trying to make contact with civilization. Unfortunately, even squinting my eyes, trying to turn my SqNY radio into a genuine SONY doesn’t change anything. The radio can pick up about two channels. One, an anti-Cuba/Castro station that broadcasts from Miami and consists of two men bitching about Obama and his “soft” stance on Cuba, comes in clearly, but is a waste of time. Another, which is a news station that comes in starting at eight o’clock each night, sounds like it would be good. The only problem is that by the time I’ve actually positioned it right (which usually means me with my hand on the knob, extension cord stretched to the max, holding the radio out the front door), a different station overpowers it. That station is in English and the first time I heard it coming in I was really excited. It must be the BBC or something, I thought. Instead, it is some bible-belt-broadcast that is blocking the signal to the legit news station. Alas, thwarted by God once again. My only consolation is that it only cost me five dollars and I can pick up some great Ranchero (Latin country) stations on the FM dial.

The hot sauce, the second bottle actually, keeps me sane. The food here is, well, bland. It probably isn’t entirely healthy that I am dumping a liter of hot sauce on my food each month, but it tastes good. There is only so many times I can eat corn tortillas and refried beans before I’ll go crazy…this at least delays it.

The extra hammock, I hung on the porch, so it wasn’t necessary to hang out inside so much. People already think I spend too much time alone (there’s that damn gringo culture popping up again), so at least this allows me to wave to people. When I say I hung the hammock, I should say, I tried but was laughed at, and somebody else insisted on hanging it for me. They use short little sticks to hang the hammock to keep it from twisting…it works really well.

The final item(s) serve as my dresser, drawers, and any other storage. I saw a crappy plastic dresser in the market. I asked the woman how much. Sixty dollars, she said. No wonder most people just used a broom stick hanging from the ceiling as a closet. The paint buckets, at a dollar each, were a better option. They were pretty dirty so I’ve lined them with trash bags. I have one for clean clothes, one for dirty clothes, and one for toiletries and condiments.

I’d say I’m getting on pretty good right now. If only I could figure out how to put my mosquito net up (my ceiling is covered with a plastic tarp, which I assume keeps the rain out—anyway, I’ll find out soon when the rains start next month, but it makes it difficult to hang a net up). There are no mosquitoes right now, which I am thrilled about (I hear they come in swarms when the rain starts). The only problem is the flying beetles. They are extremely clumsy—and I don’t know if they are attracted to my light or are just stupid—they basically fly from wall to wall until they fall, and more often than not, they wind up on top of me, or in my hair, or crawling up my leg. They don’t do anything. And I’d almost be all right with it if I hadn’t been warned so many times about Chagas (I don’t know what it’s called in English, or if it exists). Chagas is one of those weird diseases. When I heard about it, it reminded me of that fish in the Amazon that swims up your dick, or the parasite that paralyzes half of your body, or the mosquito that gives you the “bone-break fever” (dengue). You get Chagas after a certain beetle bites you and then shits on you. When you scratch the bite, you inadvertently rub the shit into the bite, wherein the parasites enter your blood. There are no real symptoms but it basically leads to the enlargement of your heart. In five to ten years, if untreated, your heart explodes. So with that in my mind, I no longer find any of these beetles—which to me all look like the Chagas beetle, which has a yellow stripe running down its back—so cute and comforting.

My next purchase, and its big, will be a bike. Although the terrain of dust, sand, and rocks is not ideal, the possibility of a little mobility is too much to pass up. I have visions of biking to get the newspaper each morning, meaning I won’t have to pay the stupid motortaxi two dollars to bring me it. The Peace Corps ridiculously requires that you wear a helmet…no comment.

Maybe it is because I speak Spanish decently, or because people here have a (completely unjustified, and misdirected) inferiority complex towards Gringos—we’ll call it an effect of 500 years of imperialism—but I’ve been entrusted with quite a few responsibilities in the first few weeks here. It is assumed that I am both an engineer and a certified doctor because I am working on a huge water project (inherited from the previous Peace Corps volunteer) and supposedly running the health clinic. I haven’t really told anybody that I don’t know anything about how you get water out of the ground and into somebody’s house and that my only real experience with medicine is my endless trips to the doctor as a kid who was always sick with something. I don’t think they would believe me, even if I did tell them. In fact, I’ve tried to tell the three health promoters (something like resident nurses in the town) that I am not their boss, but only want to work with them, yet they still ask me for permission for the smallest things. They held a private meeting when I asked one of them, a guy about my age, to use “vos” (a Latin American version of tú) rather than the formal usted. When I showed up at the health clinic the following day, they informed me that it would not be possible to call me “vos.” “Why?” I asked them. “You call your friends vos, you call your brothers and sisters vos; what’s the problem?” “It is very bad to call your boss vos,” David, the health promoter tells me. I thought it was clear that I was not their boss. I even insisted that I was simply a colleague, collaborating with them. They would nod, as if it was understood. Three seconds later, one would ask me for permission to leave for ten minutes to pick up some papers. Yesterday, I stood outside the water office, a four-room brick building, being built in town as part of the water project, where the water commission will work. While two men who are part of the town council talked with the guy in charge of putting the roof in, I was continually deferred to. “Sean, do you think the 26 centimeter laminate is okay, or we should buy the 24 centimeter?” Ignoring the fact that I know nothing about roofing, laminate, or just about anything related to construction, I am being asked this by a guy who has built literally dozens of houses in his life. Today, I picked out the color of the doors and windows. I guess I felt qualified to do that. Of the two choices, “bone white,” or “sky blue,” I went with the blue. I could pretend to be good at that. I mean, I picked the color when I painted my room in college. At the hardware store I asked them if there was any cheap paint they wanted to get rid of, and the clerk showed me a bucket of institutional green, the color of a 1950s nurse’s uniform. I took it. If I ever need reminding of that beautiful color, I need only look at anything that I owned at the time. My guitar still has that light puke color splattered all over it. Shoes, hats, picture frames. No matter how many copies of the Boston Phoenix I threw down, paint got everywhere. I digress. During another meeting about a youth soccer tournament, I was asked to be a referee. Last week, people had threatened to kill the ref because of bad calls. They said he was biased to the home team. As an outsider, they figured, I would be seen as a non-biased judge. Nevermind that I don’t know anything about soccer. When I insisted that it was a bad idea, all the coaches seemed disappointed. Later, the format of the tournament was being decided. Should it be one or two rounds? They looked at me. I was hardly listening. “We’ll vote,” I said. Somehow that seemed like a great idea, and I left with some dignity, maintaining the façade. Of course, I have no choice but to laugh about all this, because if I think too hard about it, I’d cry. Everyone I meet is infinitely more capable than I am, but because I am a gringo, I am assumed to know. It is not a coincidence. The idea of US supremacy and superiority has been projected, or blasted, into these peoples’ minds for their entire lives. Blame it on ARENA, the ruling party, who export all the countries rich resources to the United States and pocket the profits; or the elite class, who (just as in most countries in Central America) buy their furniture in Miami and their clothes in Paris. It is no accident; the U.S. has claimed to know what’s best for this hemisphere with devastating effects for the past 150 years. Before that, the Spanish did it. And as far as I can see, it worked. Add to this the massive effect that immigration has had on El Salvador (there are about six million people in this country; there are two million Salvadorans in the States) and you’ve got the perfect combination of a people who are convinced that the gringo knows best. And you are probably asking yourself if I am that dumb, that blind, as to just gloss over the horrific crimes of war that the U.S. government perpetrated against this country—100,000 dead, billions of dollars funneled to a military bent on using Death Squads as its counterinsurgency plan against the population. Well, I am not. Most people have simply reconciled this difference as a choice of the government not the people of the U.S. (thankfully. This is something that people from more developed countries have never seemed to do well). It is ironic, because this is the exact attitude I worried about in the Peace Corps. ¨Have no fear, the gringo is here to save the day,¨ is what I understood the Peace Corps as. Of course, the Peace Corps is what you make of it. But it is surprising to hear so many people in the organization talk of this attitude with no hint of irony, telling everyone how much easier it makes the job. Seems like the exact opposite of what you should be doing. So what can I say? I guess I’ll just continue deferring questions to a Salvadoran. Or maybe I should just show them that gringos aren’t really very smart at all. Anyway, here come the censors knocking. That is all for now.