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August 31, 2006
I think sometimes I will like to share what I'm reading. Today it's Patas Arriba, or "Upside-down," by the Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano.
Galeano writes about an upside-down world where the biggest criminals never go to jail because they hold the keys, the world's peacekeepers manufacture the most weapons, the rich steal from the poor and
the most successful industries are the most poisonous for the planet. He writes, of course, about our world.
"In Latin America," says Galeano, "children and adolescents make up nearly half the population. Half of that half lives in misery."
Read excerpts
These children washing windshields, sleeping with foreigners for food, dying of hunger and diarrhea – they're here. Excuse my earnest naïveté as I go love as fiercely and fight at their side as tenderly as I possibly can.
August 29, 2006
On Sunday Carlos and I went out to Los Botao of Boca Chica. You might wonder why most of my stories begin with Carlos.
Besides the fact that we work closely together in the community spaces of Justicia Global, and besides the fact that he has a little genius of a daughter, life with Carlos is just generally a great time.
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Carlos with Lucía, his 3-year-old daughter. One night at the Justicia Global house Lucía wanted to play.
"Papi," she said, "let's play doctor. I'll be the doctor and you be the patient."
She began to examine him, and Carlos asked, "Doctora, what is it that I have?"
"You have..." she paused, continuing her examination, "you have un terrible chocolate!"
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Los Botao is an area about 45 minutes east of Santo Domingo near the tourist beach of Boca Chica. Officially "Los Botados," the community's name means those who have been thrown out or left out. There's no running water, the roads are mud holes or dust bowls, and somehow it's always extremely, oppressively hot.
Justicia Global started a group for girls and boys out here in June on the initiative of a couple of committed women in that community. We promote the organization's values of justice, cooperation, respect, trust and love through cooperative games, art and other creative projects.
Our experience is that work with kids is a great way to begin community organizing. Our goal is to open spaces for adolescents and adults as well, addressing collective problems that people can't resolve on their own.
On Sunday we took puppets so the kids could develop their own mini theater. Performing were:
- A tree with two eyes and half a nose,
- A pig,
- A lion with "León" aptly embroidered on its chest,
- A fuzzy green dinosaur,
- An animal I could've sworn was a fox but was informed was definitely a bat, and
- A creature yet to be classified by the International Body of Biologists, sporting a snake-like body and what appeared to be a giant strawberry around its middle.
The two short puppet theater productions were strikingly similar. There was first a period of introductions, where the characters peeped over the curtain and got acquainted by shaking paws or branches or whatever they had instead of hands.
The second scene was the action-packed scene. It became clear the characters were going to have a hard time getting along.
The fox/bat grabbed a hold of the pig's leg, the pig began letting out a morse code-like series of screams and squeals, the lion entered the fray by bopping Fox/Bat on the head with its head, and Yet-To-Be-Classified alternated between bopping Fox/Bat and bopping Lion.
This went on for long enough that I began to understand why all the puppets were in such scruffy condition. At some point things calmed down, but not before Fox/Bat had gotten his jaws around the neck of every other character at least twice.
The audience of twenty kids and a few more of us taller kids applauded. Then we settled in for a reflection.
Collectively the youngsters recapped the plots of the skits amidst great laughter. The reflection, then, started with the ways we entertain ourselves.
"What made us laugh about the skits? Violence? Do we want people to laugh when we're getting bitten on the leg?"
"Nooooo!"
"Well, this is what the TV teaches us, right? The cat chases the mouse around everywhere, trying to eat it, but instead the mouse bombards the cad with increasingly hilarious pain-inflicting strategies. They tell us this is entertainment. But what it really does is teaches us that violence is funny, that violence is the only way for us to relate to each other. Is it possible to have fun without violence?"
"Sííííííí !!"
"Can you remember a time when everyone had fun without making anyone feel bad?"
"Síííííí !!! Heeere! In Justicia Global!"
"Do you want to play some games now?"
"Sííííííí !!"
We played El Arbol y el Viento, the Tree and the Wind. It's a trust game where one person stands in the middle of the circle and everyone crowds around. The one in the middle, the Tree, closes its eyes, stands up straight, and starts to fall backward. Dozens of small hands shoot out to support the swaying Tree, passing it slowly around the circle, back and forth, side to side, not letting it fall.
The kids all take turns being the Tree. They love it, and instead of playfighting and putting each other down, they learn to have fun by trusting one another and working together.
This may seem like a no-brainer. But for a lot of these kids, growing up in Los Botao – a name that in itself assigns a certain worthlessness to its inhabitants – it means the beginnings of new kinds of relationships and new hope in what we can accomplish if we stand together.
August 20, 2006
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José Miguel: A legend. A man among boys. A Homo sapien sapien among Homo erectuses. |
José Miguel: May your name be written across the sky in jet smoke by skilled airplane pilots. May it be painted in subway stations and on the sides of boxcars by expert graffiti artists. May it grace the lips of beautiful maidens lounging along riverbanks.
José Miguel: May your name be praised above most other names. May your memory live on in mystical grandeur long after your human form has passed from this earth. May giant stone likenesses of your head and torso be placed in plazas in great cities. You, my friend, are the Miracle Worker.
Let me start from the beginning. Sometimes I am a big stupid. This is why I try not to own expensive things.
Last year the most expensive thing I owned was a car. Even though it didn't work, it got towed and I had to pay great deal of money. Not too much later I borrowed another car and smashed it into a curb. Again I had to pay a great deal of money.
The other day I knocked my current most expensive thing, my laptop, off my bed and onto the floor. After that the lights next to the On switch still worked, but not much else.
Fast-forward past many painful memories, including Official Dell Technician Kelvin telling me I would need a new motherboard and hard drive for which I would have to pay – you guessed it – a great deal of money.
Enter the Man, José Miguel. He merely nodded when I told him Kelvin's prognosis. Then he sat down at the kitchen table and opened his toolbox.
I watched while he stripped my computer down to its green and silver undergarments, detaching first the CD drive and battery, then the keyboard, then the screen, then the Pentium processor chip. Thirty-eight tiny screws of differing lengths went into a pile.
There was one small square piece that had come un-soldered during the fall. It was rattling around loose in the guts of the machine.
José Miguel mumbled something, went out the front door, and came back five minutes later with a can of superglue. He plugged in his soldering gun and set to work on the piece for which Kelvin said I'd need basically a whole new computer.
While simultaneously balancing his young daughter on his knee, rescuing a newborn baby rabbit from the jaws of a rabid dog, and composing a string concierto in D minor, José Miguel glued and soldered that tiny piece back into the place God intended for it.
Half an hour later, the thirty-eight screws had all found the holes they'd come out of, and we were ready to rock 'n roll. After one false start and one emergency cleaning, the rest, as they say, is history.
The whooping and back-clapping was abundant.
As I shouldered my backpack to be on my way, José Miguel pulled me aside. "The next time you talk to Kelvin," he said, "ask him if he needs any new technicians."
I imagine myself as a reference:
Me: "Do I know him? José Miguel is a surgeon, a shaman, a saint. He is the one for whom the sun rises in the East. For him all of Nature swells with a single voice in joy and jubilation."
Kelvin: "Okay then. So I should offer him the job?"
Me: "It would bring a blessing upon you, your children and your children's children for seven generations."
August 15, 2006
The other day I had a disconcerting realization as I sat in the basement doing terrible things to my dog with a fork.*
*Note: This introduction is more or less plagarized from the stand-up comedian Steven Wright. It is not actually true. In my house in the Dominican Republic I do not have a basement, and if I did, I would not sit down there doing terrible things to my dog, which I also do not have. In the very unlikely case that I acquired both a basement and a dog, and in the even more unlikely case that I would want to do terrible things to it, I would be hard pressed to use as precious a resource as a fork to do it. In the Justicia Global house there are, strangely, very few forks. It's similar to Alanis Morissette's problem, which she laments in her hit song "Ironic": "It's ten thousand spoons/ when all you need is a knife..." In our case, we too have approximately ten thousand spoons, yet only five forks. It's difficult to comprehend, and even more difficult to host a large spaghetti dinner. So if you ever feel motivated to send a gift that will be really really appreciated, send forks. I'm serious. That would be amazing.
Well. I had to get that off my chest before I could get back to my disconcerting realization, which was this: How many months have I lived here, and how many of my neighbors do I know?
I know Doña Lourdes, who sits on her second floor balcony and talks to me while I work in the garden. I know La Insoportable, the can't-stand-able one, who gripes at us for playing our music too loud but allows creepy Frenchmen to rent rooms in her house and bring young girls back there at night. I sort of know the guys at the corner colmado, but actually not really.
When I lived in Rancho Arriba, in the mountains, a couple of years ago, it wasn't two weeks before I knew all of my neighbors within walking distance. I made maps to remember whose house was whose:
See more maps. I wrote down names with short descriptions of people so I could remember them:
Chelo -- gordito, hermanito de Francisco
Francisco -- gorra San Diego
Diego -- gorra San Francisco
Deivi -- huele a vaca
And so it went. I probably had 200 names and descriptions scribbled into my notebooks after a month. So what gives? Now I actually speak Spanish.
Yesterday, then, I made my first foray into the neighborhood with the express goal of getting to know people. I met Manuel, my next-door neighbor, who runs a repair shop for medical equipment. He invited me to bring over any medical equipment I might need to have repaired.
I met Jacqueline in the herbal medicine store. One bottle was labeled Uña de gato [Cat's claw]. I immediately imagined people in their basements doing terrible things to their cats with toenail clippers. Jacqueline assured me cat's claw was a kind of plant.
I was approached by a homeless guy on the street, the same guy I had told several months ago that I was from Scotland. This is something I do. I tell people I'm from Scotland, or Finland, or Krygystan. Anyway, the dear guy remembered me and started talking to me in English about how much he likes the pubs in Glasgow.
All in all it was a smashing success. I've now started a new map and new list of contacts.
It's incredible how many resources a community has when you just open your eyes and walk around. There's got to be a fork vendor around here somewhere. |
