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.