Got rid of my facebook acct. I may start posting a little more often as a blog (are there still blogs?). But I’m leaving WordPress behind.
If anyone sees this and is interested, you can get see my substack entries at
https://gersonrobboy.substack.com?utm_campaign=email-home&r=1yc57l
Needless to say, access if free. Until I get a million subscribers, at which point I’ll reconsider.
On this New Year’s eve I’m writing a rare blog entry, prompted by an entry in Darrell Grant’s blog, plus an item from the NY Times book review. Darrell’s blog is at
His sentence that struck me was this:
“… the ‘normal’ that we talk about [getting back to] is an illusion best left in the rearview mirror. It was built on a mythical narrative that buried vast swathes of lived experience and is sustained by injustices that once known, cannot be un-known.”
There are things about “normality” that I look forward to, like being able to hold my grand-daughter and take her places, and eating in a restaurant. But I have a roof over my head, and I am not an international refugee, and I belong to a privileged caste in America. My notion of normality is not what most people in the world even hope for.
When I was in Nicaragua interviewing Jews, I was not there as a journalist but as a tourist with the audacity to ask for interviews. Businessmen and ministers of government granted them to me. That was a glimpse of my status as a White American, a representative of the Empire.
The other thing, from the NYT book review, was an idea attributed to Elie Wiesel, who said that after the Holocaust, the world can never be the same. This is an orthodoxy among Jews, from the religiously orthodox to the secular. Certainly it is true for the victims and survivors of the holocaust, and their children and grand-children. Even I, a grand-child of immigrants who were safely in America at the time, and born after the holocaust was over, was traumatized by it. But is the holocaust really a fulcrum, a turning point of history?
Jews have held the holocaust up as a unique event that divides all of history into before and after. How unique is the holocaust? Genocide is a common and universal feature of our species (and also our nearest relatives, chimpanzees). The holocaust is not even the biggest genocide that we know about in terms of number of victims – that would be the genocide of the Native Americans, by maybe an order of magnitude. In the flow of history, the holocaust will eventually be seen as a normal run of the mill genocide. Genocide is a feature of our species, a fact of nature. If we are horrified by it, nature is indifferent to our opinions and emotions.
Have I expressed the relationship between these two ideas? I can’t put it into a neat equation, but to me it was powerful enough to prompt me to write about it. I juxtapose them here without trying to explain it.
So where does that leave us? On New Year’s Eve I have to conclude with something optimistic, inspiring, or prescient about the coming year, or at least give some kind of conclusion. Or maybe I don’t.
Dispatch 6: Back from Tijuana Dec. 28
Betty and I were talking about our trip with a friend and Betty said, “Gerson didn’t even tell about the terrifying parts.” I said, “What do you mean terrifying parts? What was terrifying?” She said, “You were oblivious.” So I asked her to tell us an example of something that was terrifying and she said, “What about when we up that dead end canyon in the truck to the church with the pigs?” This was a trip I described in my first dispatch in one sentence: “Then we went up an incredibly bad dirt road, which in places is an extremely polluted river, to a church called Iglesia Embjadores de Jesus, which is currently sheltering 300 migrants,” and I posted pictures, including a pig poking around in a polluted creek. So Betty described to our friend what it was like going up to that church and here is my paraphrase of what she said:
We went up a steep ridge through a sketchy neighborhood that got more and more sketchy as we went, and there was more and more graffiti. Lynn, who was driving, said he wouldn’t want to be there at night or in the rain. Then we dropped down from the ridge to the bottom of a dead end canyon, and drove up the canyon on a road that was incredibly rough; we had to be in a 4 wheel drive vehicle. We were delivering food and clothing to a church that was way up at the end of this dead end canyon. The creek kept crossing back and forth across the road so we were driving in water some of the time. The road was the creek, it wasn’t really a road at all. And right behind us was a pickup truck full of Federales with machine guns.
So my dispatches from our trip were entirely from my own point of view. Betty’s description of that outing is just as accurate, and more detailed.
Dispatch #5
Sunday, Dec. 23, San Diego
Google blocked my first attempt to send this, so instead of sending it with embedded pictures I’ll try it with pictures in a separate message and see if that helps. Also there may be an audio file of a mariachi band in a restaurant.
The first picture is a peek between slats of the border fence, with another fence beyond the border patrol vehicle. This is where the fence reaches the Pacific Ocean, seen from the Tijuana side. You can see the ocean beyond the two fences.
The second one is me with Cathie, Lynn, and their dog Mestly at the fence.
In the third picture is a quote from Matthew 19, 4-6. If you can’t read it on your tiny device, it says “What God has joined together let man not separate.” On the far left edge of the picture is the beginning of a section of fence with the names of U. S. military veterans who were deported.
Here are a few more details that come to mind. Central Kitchen was started by a celebrity chef (I didn’t write down which one), and has some big money backing. They had kitchens in Haiti after the earthquake, Puerto Rico after the hurricane, and other places, and finally added the word “World” to their name. The manager of the World Central Kitchen in Tijuana is a guy named Sam who seems to thrive on setting up complex operations under difficult logistical conditions. They send him wherever there is a disaster to get a kitchen going. I’m sure Sam would be bored actually running an established kitchen. Working with Sam is a guy named Brendan, a chef from San Francisco who also thrives on logistical difficulty. He also works as a chef at Burning Man and helps to construct the giant sculptures there. A characteristic of both of them that I noticed was a sort of inner cheerfulness in the face of obstacles and problems. They have to set up not only the production, delivery, and replenishment of the food, but also recruiting and managing lots of volunteers.
I left the collective house early this morning when everyone was still asleep, but then I just had to return later in the morning to say goodbye and exchange hugs. In just 3 days there, even though I’ve been a withdrawn old curmudgeon and haven’t joined them in their group activities, these kids seemed to take me in and I already had a nickname! My nickname was Gertie. I’m surprised at how quickly I became fond of them, although I did decline to go out with them in the evenings because they were too noisy and jangly for an old guy like me.
Thinking about where to donate the remaining money that we raised, I’m thinking of dividing it between these organizations:
The U. N. Refugee Agency https://www.unhcr.org/
American Friends Service Committee https://www.afsc.org/
World Central Kitchen https://www.worldcentralkitchen.org/
Annunciation House in El Paso https://annunciationhouse.org/financial-donations/
I invite comments pro or con.
I will make the donations after the first of the year through a matching program from my former employer, to get more leverage from the donation.
I thank Lynn and Cathie for hosting Betty and me, picking us up at the border, transporting us all over the place, showing us around, and providing enough knowledge so that we could just show up without any advance preparation or arrangements. Without them, how would we have known what to do or where to go or how to get there? I am thankful that, through sheer good luck and despite my efforts to make bad decisions in life, I ended up with such a cushy retirement that I could just decide to go to Tijuana on short notice and see what’s going on there. I’m thankful that my grandparents migrated where and when they did.
Dispatch 4
Friday, Dec 21
I slept at the collective house last night, and had a bed in a room with 2 other guys. This morning Cathie drove me to a store that sells water, where we bought drinking water for the Contra Viento y Marea shelter. Six reusable 5-gallon bottles cost about $30, mostly for the bottles. The water was 10 pesos (50 cents) per bottle. The shelter will re-use the bottles.
When we were at Barretal last week, Cathie observed that a group called World Central Kitchen was serving a lot of food and she expressed curiosity about them, which made me curious, so today I went over to World Central Kitchen to help them prepare food. It’s a whole different world from Enclave Caracol, the more hippie outfit I talked about earlier. This place has an industrial-style operation, cranking out thousands of servings of food and delivering it in trucks. A lot of the volunteers are local from Tijuana. This is not to put down the Enclave, because they are also serving food even if not doing it as well, and they are providing a lot of volunteer legal service and health services. But I noticed that I had more conversations with people at WCK, and more interesting ones, while spending a morning chopping lettuce, squeezing limes, and breaking eggs. I talked with a local Tijuana guy who is a professor of electrical engineering, a local woman who works for Intel (I never knew Intel was here), a Gringa woman who now lives here, with whom I reminisced about protesting the Viet Nam war, and two very young and earnest women who do some serious volunteer work, including starting a non-profit organization to provide drinking water to children in the third world, apparently mainly in Haiti. Last night I was talking with people here in the collective house, who are much more involved with the idea of political resistance. It’s partly a generational thing, but these conversations just weren’t as interesting to me.
So at WCK, besides them being able to immediately put me to work doing the boring grunt work of preparing food for people, it just seems like the people I met there are more interesting to an old curmudgeon like me. I’ve arranged to go back there tomorrow morning and go shopping at Costco with them so I can spend some of the money that some of you have donated. Speaking of donations, I also made a relatively small one to Enclave Caracol. It’s a hard place to give to because they don’t have a web site with “donate” button and you can’t mail them a check in dollars. So I gave them 800 pesos ($40) in cash. They deliver food to shelters, serve food in their own restaurant, distribute donated clothing, provide legal advice concerning asylum, provide some health services, and employ some of the migrants in the process. WCK is similarly complicated to give to, which is why I want to go shopping with them. They are more specialized on food, and they have the infrastructure to prepare 2 meals every day for 4000 people, and transport the food to its destinations. .
I’m glad to have stayed here this long because it’s starting to feel like too long, and it’s worthwhile to observe how my moods change. For the first few days, there is the euphoria of being back in the good old third world and it all seems exotic. There’s being proud of knowing my way around and walking around without being terrified. But then after a while you start to see not the exoticism, but the poverty. It’s a sad place, noisy, crowded, dirty, and environmentally degraded. In the past I would have added corruption to this list, but now never mind. And that’s aside from the migrants, who have fled for their lives to a place where they are now stranded and living in shelters. So after a while I revert to my normal state of being, which is anxious. I am still able to observe these shifts in mood. And to say Tijuana is a sad place is a gross over-simplification because it is a big city with a lot of vitality and diversity. A few days here is not enough time to connect with a community and learn about where to hear music and other cultural events.
Here are some small examples of how Tijuana is interesting, having nothing to do with migrants from Honduras. Tonight I ate dinner with Lynn and Cathie at a middle-eastern restaurant run by a Palestinian. Like all Latin American cities, Tijuana has a Palestinian diaspora. Another example is more complicated. Tucker, who is staying in this collective house that I’m in, went out on the beach last night and found these strange objects that he brought back to the house. The biggest object was a red thing vaguely like a vase or an urn, ornately decorated with gold keys. It was about a foot tall, and on top of it was a little statue of an African beating a drum. He said he found these things in the ocean, and he brought them back to the house. We puzzled over what these strange things were, and how they could have been in the water but not be all beat up by the waves. Natasha, another person in the house, told him he could not keep them and had to take them back where he found them. So tonight I asked Natasha about these objects and she said she recognized this thing as a shrine of some Afro-Caribbean kind of religion. She said someone must have been doing an observance and when they were done, they gave the shrine to the sea. Tucker must have found it very soon after, or it would have been more beat up. So here in the upscale Playas neighborhood of Tijuana, there are Afro-Caribbean people who observe some kind of old religion. I was told there are also seven mosques in Playas alone. So how can I wallow in anxiety for long when there are so many things to wonder at? And how can I feel like I’ve been here too long, when I haven’t been here long enough to scratch the surface? And if the world seems wondrous when traveling, they why is it not equally wondrous at home?
Here is a statue that a guy in Tijuana built in his back yard from concrete and re-bar. Notice that the building on her right is 3 stories tall.
Saturday, Dec 22
Went to World Central Kitchen, went out on three shopping trips and spent some of the money we collected, on ham and cheese for 4000 sandwiches, mayonnaise, catsup, forks, and napkins. The accounting is below. Soon I will propose where to donate the rest of the money, and I will accept input from all of you by email.
Here is a photo of the beginnings of about 3000 ham and cheese sandwiches (there isn’t room on the table for all 4000 at once):
To be clear, I did not buy all of the ham and cheese, but contributed most of the cash that I was carrying at the time. Afterwards I helped to make a few of the sandwiches, minus two which I ate, and helped WCT to better organize their space by moving and assembling shelves, and organizing food and supplies.
This is my last night in Mexico. Tomorrow I’ll cross the border and hang out in San Diego overnight before catching an airplane home, not because there’s something I want to do in San Diego, but as a precaution against delays at the border. You never know when they’ll shut the whole thing down.
If I feel like 10 days is longer than I wish to stay in nice houses with friends and eat in restaurants, how do the migrants from Honduras feel, who don’t know when or if they will be able to apply for asylum? Once they’ve applied, there is a backlog of years to rule on each case.
Dispatch #3
Weds, Dec 19
Betty and I went to San Diego and she returned to Portland. I am back in Tijuana.
Before we start throwing around Spanish names, here’s a little review. Enclave Caracol is a volunteer agency that is helping the migrants with donated food, clothing, and legal help. The place has a counter-cultural vibe and has a lot of volunteers coming and going, including volunteer lawyers. It is located in the center of downtown Tijuana. Benito Juarez is the outdoor sports stadium where the migrants were until they were evicted. It is also downtown, just a block from the border fence and about a half mile or so from Enclave Caracol. Now the stadium is empty and many migrants are camped out in the streets around it. While we’re at it, the new president elect of Mexico is Andres Manuel Lopes Obrador, who is often called by his initials, AMLO, pronounced like a word. He is the first leftist president, after about 90 years of the dominant PRI party.
In the last dispatch I passed on that joke about the Mexican contractor and the Chinese contractor. So now here is a headline in the N. Y. Times: Mexico’s Strategy for Dealing With Trump: Warn Him About China It says if the U. S. won’t help to improve conditions in Central America by investing there, Mexico will turn to China for help.
On Monday the 17th Betty and I went to Enclave Caracol and helped them take food over to the migrants camped in the streets around Benito Juarez, and served the food. There was not enough food for the hundreds of people who lined up, and it was heart breaking to run out of food with a long line of people still waiting. Today after Betty returned to Portland and I to Tijuana, I went again to Benito Juarez to help serve food and walked back to the Enclave with a young Honduran man named Joel, who said life in Tijuana is hard and sad and he wants to return to Honduras but he doesn’t have the resources to get there. I asked him if it’s dangerous back in Honduras and he said yes but he thinks he can get from there to El Salvador (the logic of which is lost on me). He said he has relatives in New York but they won’t help him.
I had the idea that I would spend some of the money we collected by going shopping for the Enclave, buying food for the migrants, but that’s not as easy as it would seem. For one thing, the place is full of volunteers who raised money from their friends and they all have the same idea. For another, the Enclave doesn’t want to buy groceries or coffee at Costco because they want to use locally sourced food. As I said, the place has a counter-cultural vibe.
Being among volunteers who are generally younger than me, I’ve encountered a generation gap. When I ask them for a phone number to put into my contacts so we can coordinate later, they ask me if I have WhatsApp. Actually considering how Metro PCS “unlimited” international service works, I’d be better off with WhatsApp. They get around using Uber, and not only get themselves around but use Uber to haul stuff.
Two additional women arrived at Lynn and Cathie’s tonight, and it seemed to me that having 5 people staying in the house would strain Lynn and Cathie’s resources (not to mention my own resources), so I asked them to recommend another place for me to stay. Cathie took me to a house that is not a hostel or an Airbnb, but an activist “collective”. We asked them if they’d have a room for me to rent and after some ambiguous back and forth, Cathie established her activist credentials by telling them who she knew and what she’d done. Once she had credibility, she then established my credibility with them, and I chipped in a little by telling them a little about where I’d been. There were a whole lot of people in the house, all hyper-friendly and with a young-person kind of energy. They reminded me of the Communists in San Francisco whose floor I slept on when I attended an Anti-Viet-Nam-War rally there in about 1965. (Luckily I wasn’t a Trotskyite). But Natasha, the woman apparently in charge here at the collective, said she’d call me later (on the phone since I don’t have WhatsApp), because they were just on their way out the door to deliver Christmas presents to a migrant shelter near Benito Juarez (using Uber cars). But when they saw that Cathie was driving a car, they talked her into taking some of them and a bunch of stuff downtown and cancelled the other Uber car. Later I got a message from her that they got in too late to talk.
So am I glad to have come here? Yes I am. As far as what I can accomplish as a volunteer, it is next to nothing, and far less than could probably be accomplished just by donating the money I spent for airplane fare. But being a witness and telling the stories is important to me. What does it actually accomplish? That is, does it help in some way to alleviate or fix the problem we’re looking at? I don’t see this as a case of: Here is a problem to solve, and here is a solution. I see this as an early stage of a greater crisis. As the poor parts of the world become increasingly unlivable, we’ll see much greater numbers of people on the move, trying to get to where the food and water are. The rich parts of the world will not be willing or able to support that. Something’s got to give. It won’t happen without violence. So my desire to go to ground zero of the crisis is not a question of solving a problem. It’s a question of going there and telling about it. Because I don’t know what else to do.
Thursday, Dec 20
Cathy told me there is a shelter that needs drinkable water for the kids, so I found some people at the Enclave that were going shopping and I went along in the car to buy water. In the car we had a Honduran who is working at the Enclave, and three gringo volunteers including myself. It turns out all three of the gringo volunteers were Jewish, all belong to Jewish Voice for Peace, and all had collected donations that they wanted to spend. So this migrant thing is a windfall for GoFundMe. I will not dwell on the inadequacy of logistics and communication, but I did not accomplish much this morning.
However, I returned to the collective house and arranged to stay there. To be a little more fair, there really is a reason for them to want to check on people’s activist creds, for the sake of security. I’m sure there are plenty of counter-activist spies around. Natasha told me the people in that house can take me shopping and they know who to talk to at the shelter (which is called Contra Viento y Mareas, Against Wind and Tides), so we should be able to get water to those kids. Also, I just talked to Cathie and she said they also need solar flashlights because there is no light in the shelter, so we will go shopping for them.
More stories about the collective house to follow.
Sunday Dec 16
Today (Sunday) Cathie and I went to El Barretal, the big shelter way out in the suburbs where the gov’t moved some of the migrants. We rode out there with a woman named Ana, who is originally from Puebla and does a lot of volunteering with the migrants. I asked her what brought her to Tijuana from Puebla. She said it was getting too dangerous to live there, so her husband asked his employer for a transfer to Tijuana, a safer place. El Barretal used to be a big dance hall, now closed up. Inside and outdoors around it, it’s now a tent city and appears clean and orderly, with excellent security. There were a lot of volunteers, and a lot of English being spoken. Volunteers were serving food and bringing in bags of clothing and Christmas gifts for the kids. There were a lot of kids’ activities going on.
For people who fled from their country under traumatic conditions and traveled 2000 miles and are stuck living in tents in a shelter and have dim prospects of getting into the U. S., the migrants appeared to me to be remarkably calm and not stressed, as I imagined refugees. They did not visually match my stereotype image of wretchedness. I have yet to talk with any actual migrants. I hung out there all afternoon and could have tried talking with someone, but it felt like violating their privacy. It needs to be in a context other than me approaching someone and asking questions.
How do I feel being here? I feel comfortable in the minor discomforts of traveling and being in a place that’s not so comfortable. I enjoy being in places where some of our first world illusions of order and cleanliness are stripped away (more on this later). I embarked on this trip on an impulse, with just a couple of weeks to get airplane tickets and go. At the age of 71, there’s not a lot of time left to do stuff like this before I lose the capacity, or the energy, or mobility, or am limited by the need for medications. It can happen at any minute, as can the end of life. Some people my age might find it daunting to put a few changes of clothes in a backpack and walk across the border. I’m impressed that Betty, however daunting she may have found it, came with me.
It’s rumored that people are leaving El Barretal and going to other shelters, or to camp out on streets near the Benito Juarez sports field from which they were removed, because they don’t like being stuck so far out in the suburbs. Also, according to a local newspaper article, 2000 people have climbed over the border fence to be arrested and try to apply for asylum. That is a huge number of people and I don’t believe it.
Tijuana has around 2,000,000 people, and is one of the most diverse cities in Mexico, with many people from elsewhere in Mexico, Central America, the U. S., and the rest of the world. There are quite a few Asians here, and U. S. expatriates. The Tijuana/San Diego combined metropolitan area has around 5 million people, with an international border running through the middle of it. Due to its high growth rate, Tijuana struggles with the disposal of sewage and other pollutants, and with heavy traffic on the roads.
Here is a joke from a local newspaper. Trump wanted to paint the white house, so he got 3 bids. A Chinese contractor bid $3 million, a European contractor bid 7 million, and a Mexican contractor bid 10 million. So Trump asked the Chinese guy why he bid 3 million, and he said 1 million for the paint, 1 million for labor, and 1 million for my profit. He asked the European, and he said 3 million for paint of the highest quality, 2 million for labor and 2 million for my profit. Then he asked the Mexican guy, and he said 4 million for you, 3 million for me, and 3 million to pay the Chinese guy.
In North America we’re pretty good at getting rid of our garbage, sewage, litter, noxious gasses, and industrial waste from around our own homes. We hide all that stuff away so that we have the illusion of living in a pretty clean world. This is not so much the case in poorer countries, especially in a city where a some people live in shanty towns without services such as garbage collection and sewers. The reality of existence is more visible and this attracts me. Having staked out such a noble position, I’ll add that in Mexico I’m a rich person in a poor country where things are cheap for me. If people resent a gringo, they don’t show it because they attribute power to a gringo. Some imperial arrogance is unavoidable, even if you fight it. So that’s one side of the attraction.
I chatted with another volunteer at El Barretal, a woman named Angela, who is from Colombia. She said she came to Tijuana as a student. She asked me what brought me there, and I said I’m on vacation. She looked surprised and asked me if that’s common. I said, “No. Pero es mi forma de turismo.”
Here’s an article from Newsweek:
https://www.newsweek.com/migrant-caravan-children-unicef-ceo-1259445
Here are some pictures. They aren’t the best ones, but they don’t have recognizable people in them for the sake of privacy.
Saturday, Dec 15
Betty and I rode the trolley from San Diego to the border at San Ysidro, and walked through the border crossing. Our friend Lynn met us on the Tijuana side and drove us to the house he shares with Cathie, which is where we’re staying.
The situation right now is that there were maybe around 5000 migrants in an outdoor sports field until it was flooded by heavy rain last week, leaving them all wet and muddy, and most of them sick. The Mexican govt moved maybe around 2000 migrants to an indoor covered stadium around 15 miles from the border, called Barical. The rest are scattered around in shelters operated by churches and social service agencies all over Tijuana, or staying outdoors. Many of them refused to go so far away from the border, and are camped out in the area around that original sports field, which is about a block away from the border fence. The U. S. immigration service is processing about 60 applications a day for asylum, so most of those 5000 migrants will have a long wait in Tijuana. A few of them are climbing over the border fence in order to be immediately captured, which may speed up their process of applying for asylum.
Today we went with Lynn and Cathie to a collective organization called Enclave Caracol (Snail Enclave) in downtown Tijuana, that operates a free restaurant and provides other social services and advocacy.
This place was crowded with migrants and volunteers, cooking food and carrying supplies in and out. We loaded Lynn and Cathie’s car with food and supplies, which we took to two shelters. With heavy traffic and long distances, this took all afternoon. First we went to a place called Oracion de Migrantes, which shelters 32 men. Having arrived in Tijuana hours before, I didn’t have the presence of mind to take pictures there.
Then we went up an incredibly bad dirt road, which in places is an extremely polluted river, to a church called Iglesia Embjadores de Jesus, which is currently sheltering 300 migrants. We have some pictures, below, but first a little accounting.
There were $710 in donations to our GoFundMe campaign, of which $684.89 was distributed to me. In addition, people sent checks directly to me totaling $123, so the total amount raised is $807.89. It’s my intention to spend some of this in productive ways, such as possibly buying supplies that the migrants need. Whatever is left, I will donate to a worthy organization. So far, we have one expenditure, which is $48 for gasoline for Lynn and Cathie, who have been tirelessly hauling supplies to the migrants in their own car.
So here are some pictures from Iglesia Embajadores de Jesus.
Just got back from a gastronomic tour of Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver, B. C. that is the Orange County of Canada. It’s all Chinese. In the central business district there are little indoor malls in every block, each with stores, restaurants and food courts. It’s said that there are over 400 Chinese restaurants within a radius of a few blocks. With the help of a N. Y. Times travel writer, we were able to find some of the best of them, hidden away in the upstairs food courts of obscure malls, and at the parking level of a giant superstore.
We also went to the Richmond Night Market, a huge, crowded, noisy carnival with stalls selling cheap Chinese plastic goods, hundreds of food stalls, and carnival rides. On the performance stage at the Night Market, we had to stop and listen to a guy who may be Asian but we think he may be First Nations, nattily dressed in a vest and tie and a long coat, his long hair tied back in a pony tail, doing impersonations of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, singing some of their signature songs. For me, one trip to the Richmond Night Market in my lifetime is enough, but I was glad we stopped to hear that guy.
Other highlights: We visited our friend Maureen, watched the sunset from her deck, and played a couple of songs for her. Went bicycling and walking of course.
That last blog entry was a little dark, so rather than to leave it at that I’ll talk a little about what I actually like about Central America in a more positive way instead of saying I prefer being alienated there rather than here.
I’ve already said that I like the absence of blandness. Really due more to poverty than choice, the raw edges of things are not covered up with a veneer that’s intended to hide, when you come right down to it, mortality. The visual environment is more lively, authentic, less visually impoverished. Secondly, I enjoy meeting other travelers and expatriots from all over the world and sharing our stories. Most important, I like meeting Central Americans. I may be on thin ice, in danger of delusion when I talk about people poorer than myself being friendly, easy-going, warm, but there is something of that in their culture. Here are two stories I’ve told often, probably in this blog, but they make the point. In a little restaurant in Nicaragua, I went upstairs to the bathroom and found it occupied. Then the owner came out of the bathroom all wet with a towel around his waist, and after he got dressed he joined me downstairs for a cup of coffee. In Guatemala, I went into a bakery and asked the owner if she had coffee and she said no, but then she said she’d make me some, and she went into the other room, which was her own kitchen, and made a pot of coffee, and then she sat down and joined me. So I keep going back to Central America.
A Reporter at Small 