The First Time

I just gave a politician money for the first time in my life.

I don't believe in politics. Like most people from my generation, I am trying to make a difference doing other things... politics doesn't notice me, doesn't listen.

I am so excited about THIS president, though. Finally, a president is running for president. Not only am I excited about him, I am just soo excited that I'm excited. I feel hope in places inside me I didn't even know could hope.

So I gave him $20. which as a percentage of my net wealth, is quite high.

I don't really know why they need money or what they will do with it. But something I HAVE always believed in is capitalism. I have always felt that I can put my money where my mouth is and then the money makes a difference even if the mouth doesn't. So one more person gave Barack Obama money.

Here's a link if you want to do the same:
https://pol.moveon.org/give/obama2.html?id=12777-6950240-fhLmlq&t=3

Where is the Realness?

I worry about us living in these fast, global, virtual, anything-you-want-tomorrow days- I feel it especially when I'm in a large group, like stuck in traffic.

I heard this song on the public radio while sitting in traffic, and I felt it was further evidence that we re losing touch and that we like it.

Runaway Train
lyrics and music Eliza Gilkyson

Everyone knew she was gonna be fast
Everyone said they could build her to last
10,000 tons of hurtlin steel
Screamin round the curves nobody at the wheel
Everyone said don’t pay it any mind
There’s a pot of gold waitin at the end of the line
Just move with the eye of the hurricane
You’ll never get off this runaway train
Nobody cared when they piled on board
and the doors snapped shut and the engines roared
They pushed to the front
Some fell to the back
Buyin and sellin every inch of the track
Deep in the engines fire in the hole
Dark skinned workers shovelin coal
all singin their sad refrain
We’ll never get off this runaway train
Up in the diner everybody decked out in their finery
Can’t see the wreck comin up ahead
with their bellies full of wine
It’s the last thing going through their minds
So proud of the engine proud of the speed
Call for the porter give them everything they need
Stare through the glass feel no pain
Don’t even know they’re on a runaway train
Long after midnight a pitiful few sound the alarm
Don’t know what else to do
Bangin on the doors of the cabin and crew
Hey we gotta slow down or we won’t make it through
Sleepy riders don’t want to wake
or suffer the shock when they put on the brake
Don’t want to question , don’t want to complain
rather keep ridin on this runaway train

I thought, why is this song so obscure, when Lil' Wayne's Lollipop is #1 on the charts.


Ow…
Uh Huh No Homo…
Young Mula Baby
I say he so sweet
Make her wanna lick the rapper
So I let her lick the rapper


She she lick me
Like a lollipop
She she lick me
Like a lollipop
She she lick
Like a lollipop
She lick
Me Like a lollipop


Shawty wanna thug
Bottles in the club
Shawty wanna hump
You know I'd like to touch
Ya lovely lady lumps

.... and it repeats.

The first song offers enlightenment. The second song offers escape. We'd rather escape. And truthfully, after listening to Eliza sing about how we'd all rather escape, I felt like escaping too.
When my country started an evil war for no reason, I studied marketing when I should have had my body in front of their planes. The world is dependent on oil and the climate is changing, and I reuse my plastic bags but I still drive my car and take airplanes. When will I stop? Even me, the save-the-world, buy organic, live with what you need person. What will it take for me to stop driving my car? I have so many ideas of how the world should be and I influence things within my small sphere. But I let politicians do what they want without even watching or researching because I don't think I can do anything. I'd rather escape. And so would you. That is why Eliza will sing the truth to an empty auditorium while the world is out bumpin' to lil' Wayne.

The Guys Behind me in the Library

“How do you spell ‘squalor’?”

“‘squalor’ ? I don’t even know what that means.”

“Neither do I. But I think it’s the word I’m looking for.”

“Well, dictionary.com. “

“I’m on it. (pause)” “Sordid, dirtiness. I think that’s what I’m lookin’ for.”

The End of the Panama Experience

On a stormy humid day, Peep and I balanced frantic packing with luxurious, last chance sight seeing until the sun finally set and we said goodbye from the window of a plane. As always, the feeling of packing up belongings that have stayed in one place for 8 months and leaving the cozy home an empty shell, gives me a sense of chaos like I am pulling up my own roots.

These were good roots: made from prevalent tropical rains, plentiful exotic fruits, a new kind of coffee each week, people from all over the world who lived in that small place and cared about us, and spectacular natural beauty.

It's difficult to reflect on such a grand scope experience after only a few days of distance. I will need to let it slowly unravel for about 6 months probably. What I can see now is that it was a time and place for the growth of me. It wasn't that interacting with Panama "taught me things about myself" or anything expected, things I've already experienced. This time wasn't about learning, it was about trying. It was about doing. Perhaps this is a milestone in the growth of all humans: at some point, the focus of your energy shifts from learning to doing. I may have made that shift in Panama - not because it was Panama, but because it was a place where no one was watching me. I wasn't judged because I was "outside the system." No matter what I did, I was a weird foreigner.

This gave me freedom to take unexplainable risks. I have started 3 projects and taught myself new skills in my time in Panama. My projects are still in their stages of infancy and therefore it still takes courage to explain "what I do" in my own cultural social context. But in Panama, I was extremely well educated and experienced. I realized there for the first time that people 3 decades older than me often don't know what I know, and would be lucky to get to pay for my brain.

My journey into Panama and back out again was not a hero's journey: it was not the intense experience that I went through in order to return home transformed. I did that already in high school. It is as if I've traveled too much: too many "incredible experiences" in a row, that I can never return to normal life, and I will permanently have a wider definition of home. So Panama was not an interruption that gave new life to the regular flow, rather it was part of the regular flow of an irregular path.

It is a path that will wander the world without it being "a big deal", without fear to overcome, a path that makes itself a few hours before I walk it.

I will miss looking out of car windows to see orchids and bromeliads clutching tall sprawling tree limbs. There will be weekends in Austin when I will wish I could pile some friends in a car, drive for 2 hours and get to a paradise Caribbean beach. I will miss my small privileged piece of one of the prettiest colonial mansions in Panama. I will miss casual meetings and barbecues on my terrace with a view to the Panama Canal and the causeway. When I procure my next "nest" here in Austin, I will shop for tropical plants and be aghast at their prices.

Here in Austin, I catch a glimpse of a sign in Spanish and it makes me feel so different than it did before. I just realized it today, but I used to see such signs and think "those are for 'other' people to read". Without knowing it today, I felt like they were talking to me.

I also notice here how grocery stores have free samples of food and they stay there for hours - wouldn't happen in Panama. I feel comforted by the lack of poverty. In a poor place, even if you yourself have enough, seeing the poverty of others affects you. It made me feel like we were all poor. And here I feel that we all have enough.

I bought morningstar veggie corn dogs as a first american treat. Then my brother in law explained how he'd read "Omnivore's Dilemma" and they are so bad for the environment because they are so processed and therefore energy consuming. I thought about my days in Soloy where lunch was the nearest chicken walking around, served a few hours after it's head was chopped off alongside yucca that was just pulled out of the ground. Books like that are written for spoiled Americans.

My cup is so full here from all the family. I have so much family: there are so many people, so much love, so much good food. It is so opposite to my previous quiet two person haven-from-the-world.

In fact some of those people just ordered pizza and tipped the driver and are waiting for me. I'll go to them.

Project Update

A few months ago, I wrote about my experience volunteering in the jungle community of Soloy and how I wanted to start a project selling the bags they make and paying them livable prices. The project has been slowly developing and I decided it needs its own blog. See how the project develops here: www.bagsmakeadifference.com

Ouch

Last night, I finally headed the nagging of a friend and watched a movie called Zeitgeist. I cried like I haven't cried in a while. I stayed up until 3 am talking with Peep about the world and what can be done.

You should watch it.

It might hurt your feelings, it will definitely disturb you, but I recommend it anyway. I began watching with skepticism, but when I heard some of the information, it was an eerie experience of just hearing someone say what I already knew way in the back of my mind. It felt good to see someone validating and connecting things.

At the very least, watch it so we can talk about it together:

www.zeitgeistmovie.com

It's free.

Cuba: The Other World

Yesterday, I returned to Panama from Cuba. I've been around the world and I've seen a lot of places that shocked and moved me... but I could never have been prepared for Cuba.

When we arrived in the Havana airport, I was seriously interviewed twice. They pulled Peep and I aside, mumbling, "Quien es de los Estados?" So that's what it must be like when foreigners get hassled by US immigration. It's scary.

Into the taxi, down the road surrounded by palm trees and flowers and blue sky... ready to see historic habana, try some cigars and mojitos... and then... the Welcome to Cuba billboards:




I had never seen anything like that before. I am used to hearing how the world hates Bush, but this kind of shook me. I felt unsafe. But the taxi driver continued driving and eventually talked cheerfully about the sites we were driving by, as if unperturbed that he was harboring his worst imperialistic enemy. The hotel let me in, gave me a place to sleep. We walked around and a restaurant let me in and cheerfully gave me a meal. The first days, I felt like Hansel and Gretel in the witches house: the signs were everywhere that this place was out to get me, but they were so nice and kept taking care of me.

I was helped a lot because I was traveling with Peep. He grew up in the Soviet Union and had real experience to share with me about regime propaganda. He assured me that even though the signs are everywhere, it doesn't necessarily mean that the people feel that way. He said everyone knows they are being told lies. And even the ones that are thoroughly "brainwashed" would not hate you: they would feel sorry for you that you had to live under those oppressive terrorists (the American government).

Apparently, Venezuela is also part of the Communist Boy's Club.

So shaken, but determined, I continued to explore Havana. This is what I learned and saw:
Havana is breathtakingly, awesomely gorgeous. It compares to the grandest cities in Europe: there is nothing else like it (that I have seen) in Latin America, nor in the United States. All of this grandeur, of course, was built by the Spanish, not the communists. But as if a metaphor for the communist ideology, the carved marble mansions are now cracking slums inhabited by poor Cubans: no rich people here - everyone is equally poor as it should be.

So I continued to oscillate between two Cuban experiences: one of the old, romantic Cuba of Ernest Hemingway, wide-brimmed hats, the finest cigars and music; and the new, concrete block military communist place that said I was evil.


Tourists exist in a Parallel Universe.
There is a separate currency for tourists (CUC). Restaurants, hotels, nice stores only accept this currency. Foreigners can come eat steak and lobster (inexpertly cooked), watch CNN and use the internet (in the most expensive hotels), and pay very high prices for everything. Cubans are not allowed to use the internet, have only4 channels on their TV (as one Cuban described to us: "Fidel 1, Fidel 2, Fidel 3 and Fidel 4". Even if they save their money to stay at the $200 a night hotel just to access the world for a day, they will be asked for their passports first and then turned away.


They are not allowed to eat beef. Cuban farmers grow Cuban cows on Cuban soil and only the foreigners are allowed to eat it. Even if the Cuban can afford to buy it, if a policeman catches him, it's 5 years in prison. When I heard this, I thought, "Where is the communist sentiment? This sounds like Feudalism."

There are special airlines, bus lines and rent a car companies that are only for tourists. They are expensive and all require passports. Cubans are not allowed to leave their district without special documents. Essentially, they have to apply for a visa to go to the beach that's an hour away.

Us below the tree where the document was signed that gave Cuba to the communists. It is an old and beautiful tree.

It was weird, walking around in the happening old downtown with great music, drinks, restaurants, everything - but its not the real Cuba. The Cubans are standing around: some employed wearing black ties, some trying to sell illegal cigars, some at the doorway of the restaurants they're not allowed to enter, swaying their hips to the music. It's like if the non-resident line in the US immigration emptied out into Disneyland and said "Welcome to the United States"

Peep at the Museum of the Revolution. A museum about the glory of the revolutionaries and the martyrs who triumph in spite of the atrocities of imperialism.

Cigars are Expensive and treacherous
Of course, when in Cuba, we had to try and buy them. We took a cool tour of the Paragas Cigar factory and watched the leaves be processed and dried and then hand rolled. The most expensive cigar available is the Cohiba Esplendida. One costs around $20, which is about equal to one month's salary of the worker who makes 1200 of them a day. It seems one of the major industries in Havana in the black market cigar trade. Workers are allowed to keep 2 cigars a day (and whatever else they manage to slip into their pockets), and then they have their "brothers" and "relatives" who work as hotel security guards or waiters sell them to tourists. Most of the underground market though, are not the "back door" cigars, but rather whatever they can wrap up and package to look like cigars.

We knew to expect to be hassled to buy these, but we were surprised at their skill. "Hi, where are you from? Estonia! Nooohhh! I am going there next month to play music! Will you come see me play tonight? I have been married 11 years and today is my anniversary: I love my family!... I would like to give you free tickets. It's at the Buena Vista Social Club. Come in (to this shady non-descript bar) and I'll write you a VIP pass. 20 minutes of charming conversation, a few salsa dances, and three 5$ mojitos later, we were being offered the "best price" of $200 on a box of 25 Esplendidos because he liked us so much. When I looked over and saw another guy bringing in 2 white people and writing them a "VIP pass", I figured it was time to get out of there and hope the drink wasn't poisoned.

Apparently if you buy from someone with accountability (e.g. you know the name, where they work, where they live), you will probably buy the real thing. This is because selling fake cigars to tourists will get you 15 years in prison. So my boyfriend, the overnight cigar connoisseur, after spending some dough on the real thing, took a chance with a box of Esplendidas from a security guard at the Plaza hotel for $50. We smoked one. It was pretty good.

Cuba is a treasure beneath dust
The big Sports Center. Fidel puts his face on everything good and says it is all the fruits of revolution. There is another sign on this building that says "Beijing! We can do it!" Maybe this will encourage olympic athletes to work in place of money and individual glory.

It combines the best of the Caribbean with the best of Europe. Like in most socialist countries, the literacy rate is almost 100%. The climate is excellent; the beaches are breathtaking; the architecture is awesome; the Cuban people are proactive (for Latin America), friendly, dignified and diverse.

As soon as they kick off the dust, the foreign investment will pour in and it will be one of the most fantastic nations on the planet.



It will not be easy to be friends...
Being here really opened my eyes about US foreign policy. I've lived in the Middle East and all over Asia and Europe and what I always see is that if the US were less ignorant and disrespectful of other nations and cultures, most of our problems and enemies would subside. We are an arrogant clumsy elephant in a world of varied, ancient and precious porcelain statues. But with Cuba, it's different. It is especially important now because we are about to choose the next president and Cuba also is getting a new president. (By the way, Raul Castro will not be much of a change. He has been alongside Fidel since the very beginning, in charge of the army and receiving Communist Glory. Freedom will have to wait.)

The thing is, if the US extends friendly diplomacy of any kind to this government, they will take the right photographs and twist it around and tell their people that the Imperialism is finally backing down to the power of the Revolutionaries. And how will they know the difference? No internet, TV, satellites... Then it will be harder for change to happen.

There is a challenge for the future among Cubans and Americans of my generation. We will live to see freedom in Cuba, and when that happens, we will have to put pride down and have a dialogue with lots of international exchange (tourism, study abroad, AIESEC). Because Cubans are made to believe that the USA is as backwards and twisted and wrong as we are made to believe that Cuba is. The gap between these two nations is way way bigger than the gap between the USA and any Middle Eastern country.

Us with Our Cuban friends: two University students who showed us around and gave us insights into the Cuba beyond the tourist circuits. They said, "Take our picture that way we can finally travel the world," and then laughed.