Cartoon 24: Cultural Competency

Granada, Nicaragua.  Working with kids down here is a different story coming from working with the tough cookies in L.A., the Bronx and Atlanta.  I remember when Joaquín (from México) came to work with me in New York and was almost knocked flat by the force of the attitudes of those ten year olds.  They knew how to strategize around getting anything they wanted and they were more decisive than I will probably ever be.  They tested the inner strength of every single person who walked through the doors of their community center.  You had to earn the right to teach them. 

Down here, although kids often start working and doing 'grown up things' at a young age, somehow it seems like their childish, playful, open spirit remains intact.

This cartoon is of a first acrobatics lesson I did with a group. It was a lesson in cultural competency for me. I left them alone for free human pyramid building time and I almost had a heart attack when I saw the positions they had gotten themselves into. Three boys were doing a three-high (one standing on another's shoulders and then another on top of him!!)!! It was like they had no fear and they trusted each other right off the bat. I ran up freaked out like "Okay um okay that's great!! How creative you all are!!! Umm okay let's just get down now." To myself I'm thinking, 'How the health are they gonna get down????!'  And they proceeded to calmly and easily help each other down to the ground. After this I was like, 'Light bulb! We do not need to practice teamwork and trust building here! Working as a team is much more often part of everyday life here. I imagine that all types of cultural factors play into this: bigger families, less resources, tighter knit communities, less value placed on individual achievement...  Here we needed to focus on stuff like individual expression and forming and sharing personal opinions. Taking leadership!
I flashed back to my class of super vocal, willful individuals in the Bronx... How amazing would it be if these two groups could work together! I wish I could just smash the two classes together and, with good facilitation, watch the learning sparks fly...

Don't you just love how teaching is an endless source of education? Yeek!

Cartoon 23: Recycled House

San Pedro Sula, Honduras.  This was the first place I ever saw a home made of things scavenged from the dump.  It's inside of a whole neighborhood of houses like this.  When we asked, this woman told us that her neighborhood is special because it is more peaceful than others.  She does not lock her door against possible intruders, in fact she doesn't have a door. 

The dump was just at the entrance to this community.  I guess the neighborhood was formed close to avoid having to lug building materials and other useful things too far?  People scavenged not only to build their homes but also to meet day to day needs.  The first thing I saw as we pulled off of the main road was the little girl on the top left of the drawing bound through the piles of trash in a bright turquoise princess dress.  I immediately flashed back to when I was a girl and wanted to wear my princess costume everywhere.   I fought my mom to wear it out anywhere we went- to the grocery store, to school, to the park.  I watched her and her friend play with a small cardboard box, filling it up and then dumping it out. 

Mmmm I'm trying to think of what reflections I can share.  The thing I thought most about after this experience is the odd fact that while I've never seen such poverty, I've also never experienced such generosity.  During the whole trip, people with way less resources than I'm used to have opened up their homes to us strangers and trusted us entirely.  They have fed us and opened up everything they have to us.  I have never invited strangers into my house and shared not only my space but fed and given the keys to a stranger, much less nine strangers!  I almost can't even imagine asking that where I'm from.  It kinda seems like when people have more (including myself), they are less open with what they have.  And people who have less are often much more generous and open.  So I'm thinking about how I define the limits of my generosity.  I'm asking myself, how often do I give something when it means that I will have to go without? 

Cartoon 22: Peace and Love???

Apparently 'peace and love' is how folks in Nicaragua refer to hippies :). I've been busted again but I still maintain I'm not a hippie.  We need to widen the categories for people living alternative lifestyles!

Anyway this kid poked his head into the window of the motorhome as we were preparing to do our social circus show in an urban community in Nicaragua. He said, "Oye, ustedes son 'peace and love' ?" Ha! Everybody burst into laughter thinking of all our bickering.  Nine people of different cultures living, eating, working, sleeping and waking together in a motorhome ain't what I would call 'peace and love'.  

Sometimes I feel like folks romanticize being a traveler.  Like it's all peace and love and complete freedom from your everyday troubles.  Many people say they wish they could drop everything and just go like we have.  This is not a complaint but in my experience, it is freedom but only because it gives you more everyday problems.  On the road we are constantly resolving what and where and how to eat, to get water, to sleep, which way to go, who to trust etc. so we don't have time or head space for the problems of a more stable life.  I think its been quite healthy for me not to be comfortable enough to let my mind wonder into the problems or pleasures of the past and future.  I really hope I can maintain this level of attention to the present moment in any lifestyle that I inhabit in the future.

One thing I can say about traveling is that it's freedom from certainty (the imagined certainty that we tend to invest so much in).  I read this quote on a wall in a cultural center in San Jose, Costa Rica and I wanna share it with you guys:

"Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position.  Certainty is an absurd one."

Right on. :)

Cartoon 21: The Salvadoran Guerrilla

We spent a week in San Antonio de los Ranchos, a community that organized to form part of the guerrilla during the war in El Salvador in the 80’s and 90’s.  Whoa, the stories.  One woman shared that during the war she was a lookout and a community organizer helping protect the civilians that escaped to the mountains fleeing the violence.  She told us of one of her many memories of the attempts of the military to extinguish the people in resistance in the mountains.   She barely escaped by running through a rain of bullets to a nearby peak only to watch the 16 remaining families massacred.  Later, to reunite with the group who had gone in the other direction, she had to walk through where the bodies of her loved ones still laid.  This woman is the one waving in the picture above.  She now directs a social organization that plays a huge role in maintaining a unified community through arts and education. (http://www.tnt.org.sv/ENGLISH/DefaultTNT.php )

The feeling of harmony, unity and safety in this community made it stand out from others.   Folks there told me that this was because religious and community leaders helped organize the people there before the war in resistance against continual oppression by the government and elites supported by our US tax dollars in form of military aid.  The human rights violations were so bad that many of the powerful members of the church took to the mountains as well as part of the guerrilla.  In another community that we visited, a man told us the story of how his family had to provide food and shelter to both guerrilla and government at different times depending on who was controlling the area.  He remembers a time when his grandmother fought with a guerrilla priest because he burnt down a church.  The priest explained that in current circumstances, the holiness of the space had been violated as it was being used as a military post. 

I was told that the war ended when the guerrilla had gained enough ground to negotiate with the government as equals.  The peace agreement included the formation of a political party comprised of members of the guerrilla, the Frente Farabundo Marti de Liberación Nacional (FMLN).  While we were in San Antonio de los Ranchos, it was election time and a large part of the community organized to offer political education and to get people to the polls.  At the end of election day, there was a huge community wide party in the main plaza to celebrate the victory of the FMLN in their county.

For me it was incredible to see almost an entire community organized around building the reality that they want for themselves.  It made me think of how back at home we are so separated, at least in middle class communities.  The possibility of self-sufficiency often leaves us living lives that are completely independent from our neighbors.  Too often in my life I've left the government to do the work of deciding for me how our cities, states and country run.  I let them decide by what rules I play.   I think that’s something that I want to do when I get back: dedicate sometime to creating a community, city, state and a country that really represent the values that I think are important.

Cartoon 20: Enemy of the State

In Guatemala City the police drive huge black pickup trucks and they are all over the place. In the face of all this security, I’ve never felt so insecure.  They look like war tanks roaming the streets prowling for the enemy.  This is in the wake of a 36 year war between the government and the pueblo that ended in 96’.  Come to find out that our US tax dollars helped supply the funds and ammunition for the Guatemalan elite to kill 200,000 children, women and men. 

I drew this cartoon after the fourth time we were stopped and searched by the police in Guatemala.  A group 8 of us were walking down the street to get a drink and one of those trucks pulled up and at least ten police men and women jumped out and told us to get up against the wall.  Each one had a huge gun that could probably extinguish a whole village in under five seconds (and maybe did at one point considering that many indigenous villages were massacred and erased during the war).

During the search I felt like I was in a bubble.  I was originally facing the wall but I turned around with my hands up to see what was going on.  I watched as the police-woman aggressively searched my friend, passing her hands over my friend’s body like it wasn’t a living thing.  I watched the looks on my friends’ faces being submitted to this invasion and waited for my turn. It never came, they skipped over me.  My friends told me that this is probably because I look so foreign and the police don’t want diplomatic issues.  I looked at the line of police that stood watching us with their riffles and I wondered how this scene would end.  They recorded our information in their little black book and then, not having found anything, informed us that this had been a routine revision and that we could continue on.

Even just being present, not having been touched or spoken to, I felt totally criminalized and violated.  What were these people doing pointing guns at us???  It made me think of how folks who were racially profiled in the aftermath of 9/11 must have felt.  Or Latino folks in Arizona and the other states that recently passed the law that says police can stop and search anyone they even suspect of being an illegal immigrant.  Or how folks in other marginalized communities in the US must feel at the hands of corrupt police.

One thing I love about what I’ve seen of Latin America is that people spend time in the streets.  People talk to strangers.  They joke a lot and are warm and friendly.   Quite the opposite, the people of Guatemala City seemed very serious.  People walk fast, they don’t say hello or make eye contact.   I felt like people were scared and couldn’t expand too much into their skin for fear of repression by the authorities.  I drew this picture at a barbecue thrown by the generous folks who housed us.  The backyard of the home was fenced in by a tall, cement wall topped with barbed wire.  With this cartoon I hope to express the feeling I have that the well being and happiness of the people of Guatemala City is seen as dangerous in the eyes of its government.

Upon talking to folks, I began to understand their response beyond the seriousness and closedness  that I perceived and it is truly amazing.  Many neighborhoods have organized their own community police.  They take responsibility for keeping justice within their own communities and negotiate with the state and federal police for them to only come for routine checks.  A friend brought me to a creative and interactive free museum documenting the war which seeks to assure that the war crimes do not go unpunished. We worked with an organization called Caja Ludica (www.cajaludica.org) that hosts international parades of stilt walkers which declare loud and proud their dedication to free expression, art, song and dance. 

I leave Guatemala feeling deeply shaken with my heart strings pulled up and down by equally fierce forces...  

Cartoon 19: You Might Be a Hippie If...

I’m getting quite good at peeing outside. It’s something I’ve always had trouble with, never could seem to not splatter myself.  But on the road I’ve gotten lots of practice. Aren’t you proud mama? 

I’m letting myself get all hairy too.  It’s kinda crazy cuz for most of my life I’ve shaved almost every day.  My toenails were always painted and I even blow dried my hair for a while there.   Now I am meeting parts of myself that I’ve never known!  Weird!  I realize I’ve never known what I truly look like, without any alterations.  For the first time since I was 12 I am not seeing my legs as sexual objects.  The beauty of my armpits is not more important than truly knowing and honoring myself.   I have to admit that for a while there I didn’t want to lift up my arms cuz I thought people would be grossed out but little by little that's less important and now my bushy armpits make me feel rather cool.

And you know that style of jewelry that’s all beads and shells and seeds?  The kind thats often brightly colored and sometimes really big?  Don’t tell my new friends but I always thought that kind of jewelry was kind of tacky.  But it turns out for some, wearing it is a source of pride and an act of rebellion.  The pride comes from using products that celebrate a closeness with and respect for nature.  The rebellion is against systems and industries that radically damage the earth and its inhabitants… In this case, specifically against gold and gem mining.  I want to try to explain what I’m understanding about this rebellion… We all know that folks from Europe came to the Americas, among other reasons, in the wild search for gold.  They killed, raped, pillaged and exploited in the name of progress.  What I didn’t know is that this conquest is still in progress.  That was 500 years ago and all that gold got used up.  But the demand for it hasn’t gone anywhere so the conquest continues.  So many communities that I visit here share the story of being forced either physically or by poverty, to leave their land to big mining companies from Canada, Europe and the U.S.  All of the sudden wearing jewelry made of beads and seeds is a lot more appetizing.

The last thing I want to talk about are my crusty feet.  For real, this is a big deal for me cuz like I said, I used to paint my toe nails all the time.  There wasn’t a day that I didn’t have a perfect pedicure.  Now, oy vey, I’ve got callouses and infinite desert sand under my toenails. The callouses are kind of useful though cuz they’re great for scratching the millions of bug bites all over my hairy legs!

Oh the sacrifices we make for our dreams…

Cartoons 18: Shelter for Sons of the Beast

One of our first stops in the caravan was a shelter that was built close to the border between Mexico and Guatemala that was established as a refuge for sick or injured immigrants. "The Beast" has become the name of the cargo train upon which undocumented immigrants ride through Mexico on their way to the United States. (I originally thought that this train went through Central America so that's why the drawing shows it there.) The path of these people is incredibly violent.  As shown in the picture, the immigrants ride on top of the train. Many loose their lives because, having traveled for long periods of time in constant risk and without rest, they simply fall asleep and fall off the train. One young man told me that he got caught up in the adrenaline of the constant danger and began testing the limits jumping from train to train. He lost his footing and lost his legs.  A woman that I met told me that woman who travel this path pray that rape is all that happens to them...

When we arrived at the shelter, I stepped out of the motor-home, saw the people missing legs and arms, and I stepped right back in. I sat my butt down in the bathroom of the motor-home and cried all the tears my eyes could squeeze out.  Out of respect, I didn't want to cry in front of these folks who have lost so much fighting for the opportunities that I was born with.  I closed my eyes and imagined myself growing roots.  Time to face reality.  As grounded as possible, I stepped out and almost immediately, a woman with one eye in a wheel chair called me to her.  She spoke garbled Spanish but I eventually understood that she wanted me to roll her into her room and put her next to the fan.  It was HOT.  I met the other two woman who lived in the room, one missing a leg and the other didn't speak.  The two vocal women started squibbling over who the owner of the fan was and I just sat down in a plastic garden chair that was one of the few pieces of furniture.  In the face of basic humanity of the squibbling woman, all of my big understanding of the social systems that brought us to this moment faded out and with it my anxiety about being there...

We stayed at the shelter for three days learning about how it functions and interviewing workers and residents. On the last night, we did a social circus show for the folks living there and in the surrounding community.  Afterward we performed excerpts of the show in the rooms of the folks who couldn't come out to see the show.  The moment in this picture moved me to tears.  During our performance was the only time I saw the woman lying in the bed open her eyes.