Hello Beautiful

I fell in love with politics this week. Granted, it took a divine sequence of events, in the only successful revolutionary Central American country, but it has convinced me that law is the answer. (I was questioning law; I want to practice human rights law, but would prefer to skip the American Law-school experience)

In the last four days, The Center for Global Education has allowed my Furman study abroad group the opportunities to: visit a factory in a Free Trade Zone (maquila, or ¨sweat shop¨), meet the most famous female guerrilla at the UCA, Dora Maria Tellez, meet a Contra Leader, the PLC, stay in a Sandinista neighborhood for three days that suffered a massacre under the Somoza dictatorship, visit La Chureca, the Managua Trash Dump where people live and work, and then have the privilege to meet with Fernando Cardenal, a priest who was involved in the revolution and directed the National Literacy Campaign (reduced illiteracy from 51% to 17%). When then came back to the hotel and CGE neighborhood, which has been militarized because we happen to share it with the President, Daniel Ortega. In effect, we are reading and witnessing politics constantly. On Saturday, a critical journalist´s office in Nicaragua was illegally searched and documents and computers stolen. To quote the Contra leader, ¨this kid doesn´t know what to do with power.¨ Ortega, the President, is so fearful of US intervention, he and his party have corrupted a true revolution. To prove the US involvement, besides training death squads in Georgia on methods of torture, Nicaragua won 18 billion dollars against the US in an World Court Case.

Context! I am doing my homework or having philosophy class in either a militarized neighborhood or Sandinista neighborhood, and then leaving daily for meetings with key historical leaders.

This leaves me addicted. Addicted to experiential learning. To read about the revolution, the politcal parties, but then meet these people face-to-face. I literally read about both Dora Maria Tellez and Fernando Cardinal and was sitting with them two days later. In Mexico, we studied the effects of NAFTA and then walked in the corn field of farmers fighting NAFTA. As if that was not enough, we got to hear from the Union of Farm Workers, who were very honest. Saying that the chemicals in their food were making them sick. And, that they exported their corn to have it taken to the border, labeled, and then imported back to be sold to the same Mexican people who produced it. In effect, this is true. Thanks to the trade agreement between Candada, the US, and Mexico (NAFTA) all three countries are competing at the same level. This is ridiculous given the production power of the US compared to Mexico. Especially if the US corn is being subsidized by 50% and all labor is mechanized.

Fernando Cardenal said tonight that ¨politics is the most effective exercise of charity.¨ I am choosing to believe this and thus structure my career around this belief. It is clear structural change is needed, that neutrality only helps the oppressor. A time comes when the ¨band-aid can no longer cover a bullet hole¨and a differentiation must be made between justice and compassion. Compassion is handing out food, but justice is "asking why the poor have no food" (Camara). Even with the threat of being called a communist.

Soft Lit

I realized today that I have to stop kidding myself that the New York Times suffices for a person trying desperately not to become a member of the status quo. Beyond human rights, we have to think about who makes our clothes and how our food is prepared. If the migrant worker is being paid a fair wage or protected against pesticides, but also did he flee his country because of a war we helped to fund with blood money?
The catalyst to this realization was the quality literature I just encountered in the Center for Global Education house in Managua (on the corner is Daniel Ortega’s house, the president who is part of the FSLN, the party of the revolution and the only revolution to succeed in Central America).

Drawing from their extensive library of CIA and other government declassified documents, movies, documentaries, books, magazines and newspapers. Here are some suggestions:

Of course, start with the New York Times and work from there.
If you want to buy any books, please use Betterworld.com. ¨Better World Books collects and sells books online to fund literacy initiatives worldwide. With more than two million new and used titles in stock, we’re a self-sustaining, triple-bottom-line company that creates social, economic and environmental value for all our stakeholders. It funds third worl d literacy, is environmentally safe, and has free shipping for new and used books. It is the ideal Amazon.


The Guardian Weekly newspaper ¨gives a global view on the week's international events by combining comment and analysis from the daily Guardian newspaper with features from the Observer, the Washington Post and Le Monde. It is read in over 100 countries around the world by an interesting and diverse group of people. The blue section of the site features articles written or commissioned by our site editor, as well as Guardian foreign correspondents and Guardian Weekly subscribers around the world. All articles are linked by the common theme of reporting the experiences of individual people. If you yourself know of an experience worthy of inclusion, you can submit an article to the site editor for consideration.¨

Finally, The New Internationalist is an independent magazine that is ¨the people, the ideas, the action in the fight for global justice. the New Internationalist is renowned for its radical, campaigning stance on a range of world issues, from the cynical marketing of baby milk in the Majority World to human rights in Burma. ¨



I have to go now. I have 31 minutes before our tour of Managua, and have to read the Human Rights issue of The NI and ¨From the Maquila to the Mall.¨

Trash Dump ... Happy Birthday

Before breakfast I received a package from friends at Furman. Before lunch we were in the Guatemala City trash dump. Before dinner we visited the office of the Detained and Disappeared. I changed my major to Urban Studies in the van ride leaving the dump. At dinner, we discussed a trip to Moldova and Eastern Europe. This was my perfect twentieth birthday.

We met with a state run organization for children who live in the trash dump, kids riding on their last chance. The school is run for kids who have been kicked out of school - their last shot out of poverty. Who knew behavioral problems would arise while living and working in trash? I couldn’t help compare the Guatemalan dump to the Nicaraguan one - it was organized. The trash was in neat piles and the trucks drove down legit roads. Managua’s dump can only be described as hell on earth. Trash everywhere - neat boundaries are non existent.

FAMDEGUA is an organization for the relatives of the detained and disappeared. They work to find missing relatives, to uncover human rights abuses, like some of the 626 massacres of Mayan villages, and continue to fight for human rights. The day before we arrived a man watched their office all day. They workers have been kidnapped and some killed. Yet, they continue to fight.

I keep wondering why my perfect childhood even allows me to click with this side of life. The messy, dirty part of the third world. When the foreigners have their pictures of dirty kids with swollen bellies, when the food has been given out, and the clothes are being worn, I want to stay.

I desperately needed an intellectual connection to the third world, and I finally have it. The Center for Global Education maintains an experiential learning technique. I asked why the teachers were protesting in Cuernavaca, and I was told to ask them, they would take me. I can give stories of kids living in dirt floor shacks, but I really want to give you an intellectual framework. Those stories are private, not to be used to raise money or garner sympathy.
Why prostitution is used. Why people choose to live in a trash dump. Why the kids sniff glue.

Let me explain. Analyze. Echo their voice, not speak for them. I take these ideas seriously, with extreme sensitivity. The university students kidnapped were not trying to be cool by quoting Che, the lived and died for what they believed. The priests believed the kingdom was now, not to come.

Even the Graffiti Protests

In a country saturated with thirty six years of violence, even the graffiti protests. It yells back at the people, what about the three thousand woman that have been murdered in the last few years, completely separate from the war? Forget just warfare, this is messy, grey. Death squads and paramilitary groups killed and tortured 200,000 people, the majority being a-political. Killed in the most brutal violent way - sledge hammers to the head, fetuses cut out of swollen bellies, burning people alive.

Surprise, Surprise. The United States funded the military which committed 97% of these massacres and killings, to fight communism. Congress realized they were committing human rights abuses in a third Central American country, and cut funding, but Reagan wanted to continue. He called Montt, a man of ¨great personal integrity,” a day before another peasant massacre. Funding started up again shortly after. Rigoberta Menchu, presidential candidate and Indigenous rights defender, explains, ¨these people were not communist, they were hungry.¨ How could illiterate peasants even know who Karl Marx was?

This is the country I was introduced to. The civil war is over, but violence is tangible. Fifteen people are killed a day.

I am writing this from my comfort zone, Managua, but I can’t let go. There is a very real chance I could work in Guatemala City, they are killing street children to ¨clean it up.¨ This is also being done in Brazil, countries in Africa, and Russia. I could combine my eventual legal skills with my passion for human rights in the global south.

Someone asked me if I do this as a way to serve others. That is a nice effect. But, to be honest, I do this out of self preservation. I learned early on that I would get bored with the Volvo and three kids.

Fleas and Chains

I have officially made my first hospital run in Mexico. It was not for me, I just was going to help. Out of 17 people, only 3 have not gotten sick. Two have been hospitalized with bacterial infections, one stayed over night. Others have felt bad and had to stay back some days. Then, some of the ones who could walk then got fleas, yes fleas.

Our quiz on agriculture and presentations got moved. So, I will be taking my second biology quiz in an airport or on a plane.

I have learned a lot today, I desperately need to improve my vocabulary sets in spanish. I couldn´t understand when my homestay mother was talking about¨chaining herself to a tree¨ (for a protest of course, let me remind you, she is 72) or instructions for medicine today. We never learned ¨chained¨ in spanish 21.

341 / 30,000 Political Aslyum

¨La tierra es de quien la trabaja¨ Emiliana Zapata

I spent the weekend in the community of Amatlan, with indigenous people that can trace their history back four thousand years. We did a home stay , so everyone divided into groups based on Spanish and desired intensity level (running water, etc). I was with Becca and Anne and we had no running water. In fact, we never saw water for anything. It was like camping, only with the strongest 72 year old woman I have ever met/secretly hope to be.

She is a single woman who knows what she believes in. We had a lot of different questions for her because Anne spent time in Africa by herself and Becca traveled/lived in South America. Anne asked about the Zapatistas, a now un-armed revolutionary movement currently being fought in Southern Mexico- more on this later - and she told us her opinion and how she protests. She chained herself to a tree once with other woman to protest a development. They also successfully fought off a golf course development with other communities because it would destroy the ecosystem and aquifer - water is life here.


Amatlan has a messy history of resistance. The community is in the base of a mountain chain like nothing I have ever seen before, I can only describe it as cliffs that form mountains. This community believes that everything has a soul, especially the mountains. So, you have to ask permission to take a picture and be aware of how many you take, and what you will use it for, such as deleting them. You are taking a pìece of that object each time you snap the lens.

During the revolution and the civil war, guerrillas used the mountains to hide in and fight from. We hiked Saturday morning, and were shown all the medicinal plants (the town is famous for them) and told how Amatlan has felt the affects of the revolution. They took back their land during the revolution, because it was stolen from them. Not only that, it was land that had been in their family for four thousand years! Their land is literally their life, it supplies food and water for them, without it they starve.

We ate our meals with the family, had biology class, and visited a medicinal clinic, the fertility stone, and a farmers union this weekend.

I personally enjoyed hearing how immigration, out-migration, has affected even this small indigenous community. Clemente, a guide on the tour, told us how he worked a year in Arizona. Yes, illegally.

I believe we cannot have an open border, we cannot let just anyone in, we need to try and stop the drugs and crime. But, allow me to give you some things to think about.

From 1980 to 1986, only 341 applicants out of THIRTY THOUSAND have gotten political asylum. And these people were seeking political asylum, not economic relief, because during this time they were fleeing wars fueled with blood money. Not a cut and dry war, but messy ones that blurred the lines between the military and civilians. One that left death squads to decide who was who.

I find it ironic that these people come here seeking basic human rights, life. Away from death squads, a violence that is saturating even the smallest of communitites. Completing a sick cycle - we help to push them out of their homes, and then fight back when the come to us seeking life.
Even the human rights workers are threatened, no one is safe: ¨while I was typing this testimony, an explosion went off in front of the building. One side of the office collapsed and several persons were wounded. I was frightened, confused, and hardly able to speak. There was rubble everywhere. Three unidentified dead bodies, covered with acid, had been thrown on top of the rubble. One top of the bodies, a note signed by the death squad stated, ¨this is going to happen to you all.¨That day I had to decide whether I was going to continue working in that office or not.¨Pedro, page 8 of Sanctuary: The New Underground Railroad

So, I was able to learn about why people like Clemente leave and then left to think about how we treat them. Americans think they are dirty and stupid, but of course not lazy, because we see how many of the jobs they do for us. I wonder how many stories we leave untold by simply reducing these people down to a simple quest for money. It is so much more. Who knew that the worker in Arizona was an indigenous Mexican, who can heal with medicinal treatments, that have been handed down for thousands of years. When did we allow his wetback to blind us from his life, his struggle?

¨La tierra es de quien la trabaja/ the land belongs to those who work it¨Emiliano Zapata

Dear Skeptics

Dear skeptics, here is the data and formulas we used for the Market Basket Survey:

1. Item purchased and price
2. Price in pesos (MN$)
3. Price in US dollars
- price of pesos divided by MN 10.11 (approximate average current exchange rate) = USD $
4. Time cost, number of hours needed to work
- MN $ divided by MN$ 5.5 (hourly wage of minimum wage worker who earns MN$ 49.5/day) = hours
5. US cost equivilant
- hours worked mulitplied by USD $ 6.55 (US min. wage) = USD


Our conlcusions:

1 kilo oranges = 5 pesos/ .49 US cents/ .9 hours / $ 5.89 US equivilant
Deoderant = 25 pesos/ 2.47 USD / 4.5 hours work/ $29.50 US equivilant in dollars

12 Dollar Tortillas

Furman is traveling with the Center for Global Education at Augsburg College and our professors.

The mission of CGE is to provide cross-cultural educational opportunities in order to foster critical evaluation of local and global conditions so that personal, organizational and systematic chance takes place leading to a more just and sustainable world. Through a liberating and transformative experiential education individuals are encouraged to live as active agents in history, and hence, foster social transformation rather than the maintenance of the status quo.

One of the exercises they had us do was Market Basket Survey to give us a genuine look at life in the Third World, especially now as food prices and basic stables continue to rise. You may have seen the NY Times article about Haitians eating mud pies and the food riots resulting.

We divided up into groups of three and were given 100 pesos, ten dollars, and two hours to do a market survey and buy Mexican staples with our money. We did this exact same exercise in Greenville before leaving Furman, to be able to draw accurate conclusions.

I had just read two days before in a mail I received that Nicaraguan staples had soared to 400% and I was told the price of tortillas in Mexico jumped to 380% in the last year. They are in the third world, so it must be cheaper there.

Most of us automatically convert prices and then compare it to dollars. Coming to the satisfying conclusion that its okay, its cheaper in dollars. But, when you put the American minimum wage on a level playing field as the Mexican one, and then look at hours needed to work you come to shocking conclusions.

When we bought tortillas on Monday, September 14, they were equivalent to $11.80 US dollars! The poor are barely surviving on minimum wage in the US. Imagine what people do here, forget talks about a living wage, they are struggling to receive enough calories.

This allows us to understand a poverty mentality. Why people choose to live in a trash dump. They need the dependable income that results from sorting trash and selling it back to the recycling companies.

Living Abroad

¨If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. But, if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.¨ Aboriginal Activists

I am on the trip I came to Furman for, the fall Latin America study abroad. It is a four class, four country sequence. Environmental Science in Mexico, Latin American politics in Guatemala, Latin American philosophy in Nicaragua, and Latin American history focused on comparative revolutionary movements in El Salvador, why El Salvador failed and Nicaragua succeeded.

To all the people thinking I am doing no school work, let me assure you, I am literally working twice as hard as a college student. I literally took double the hours of a regular student and was in class until 7 pm on Fridays. Now, I have class and quizzes along with meetings and lectures. The crucial difference being I get to learn about a subject and then go see it in person. For example, we took a quiz on our flight to Mexico City and thanks to Dr. Thompson we were all able to identify urban sprawl and ribbon development.

Yesterday we learned about the different types of air pollution and waste management. We then took two field trips that day to visit a community dealing directly with these issues. They are fighting the government trying to install a landfill in their community. They are resisting open sewage in their water while practicing cutting edge technology, such as dry toilets and the first biofilter toilet in Latin America in the community school.

We started in Mexico City and now are in Cuernavaca. Our hotel was a block from the zocolo. Mexico´s independence day was the 16th so we were able to enjoy the celebration for a week. I got sick the morning I left and was literally told they could only do one test because I was flying to Mexico in three hours. So, I sat the second day out, sick a mile and a half up and the third most polluted city in the world. The thousands of people celebrating and the protests helped cheer me up.