"Are you still on the no fly list?"

From "Inside Job: My Life as an Airport Screener" in Conde Nast Traveler. Don't miss Barbara Peterson's fascinating tale. Photo by Marc Asnin.

Friends ask me this periodically. As far as I can tell, the answer is "no." Since our lawsuit concluded, airline clerks no longer respond to my ID with the telltale start and the phrase "there is something wrong with my computer." My boarding passes no longer get marked with a hand-scrawled red "S" (early days) or the current printed "SSSS" that means you are a "selectee" subjected to special search.

Of course the government never told us we off the list -- in fact, they refused throughout the lawsuit to say whether we were on the list. But my anecdotal evidence is that they've decided I'm harmless to air traffic (though possibly not to the T.S.A.)

What's important is that a lot of other harmless people are put through various levels of harassment by the U.S. audience-participation airport security theater. Not too surprisingly, an awful lot of them have Arab or South Asian names. A recent rant about being stopped on KABOBfest, an English language Arab blog, evoked these stories:

I have a little over a hundred boarding passes with the SSSS. I'm hoping to go into the Guiness book of records as the person with the largest such collection.

It's alright. I've never flown once without the SSSS. The last time I flew, I was so sure I was gonna get the SSSS that before the alaska airlines lady printed my ticket, I said, "How much do I have to pay you to remove that SSSS off my ticket?"

You know-after writing this piece, I realized that after returning from Venezuela in January (entering the US through Houston, where the infamous statue of George Bush Sr. is prominently displayed in the middle of the main terminal), where they interrogated me over the Lebanon stamp in my passport, that I haven't had a hassle-free airport experience since. After the customs booth issues, I was taken to a sequestered, hidden facility in the airport's baggage claim area where my luggage underwent additional screening. They were disappointed to find out that all I had in there were anthro papers and clothes! [This one strikes home for me because I too have the Lebanese visa stamp and recently returned to the country through Houston --probably an "Anglo" last name enabled me to walk right in, unhindered.]

***Today Josh Marshall is chewing over the story of distinguished law professor Walter Murphy who had a brush with the "selectee list." Airline personnel casually agreed with his suggestion that perhaps he was listed because of peace activities or vocal opposition to the Bush regime. Marshall was a greatly concerned:

Given who Professor Murphy is, I have no doubt this is an accurate account of his particular experience. And it would seem that the people who actually work with the list on a daily basis treat it as a given that the most innocuous and obviously protected forms of criticism of the Bush administration routinely get you on the watch list.

The T.S.A. has always insisted that any innocents on the list are cases of mistaken identity, not political persecution. But the sort of things airline folks told Professor Murphy are exactly what they told us about the list we found ourselves detained, way back in 2002. At that point, we assumed we were victims of a sort of "round up the usual suspects" phenomenon: after 9/11 all the various federal spy outfits threw together everyone they'd ever considered "suspicious." We probably turned up in a lot of categories having lived long lives of activism, so we were thrown on a list.

A recent Washington Post article headlined "Terror Database Has Quadrupled In Four Years: U.S. Watch Lists Are Drawn From Massive Clearinghouse," suggests wide-ranging collection of names is still the rule. The so-called Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) is now up to 435,000 names.

TIDE is a vacuum cleaner for both proven and unproven information, and its managers disclaim responsibility for how other agencies use the data. "What's the alternative?" [official Russ] Travers said. "I work under the assumption that we're never going to have perfect information -- fingerprints, DNA -- on 6 billion people across the planet. . . . If someone actually has a better idea, I'm all ears."...

The 80 TIDE analysts get "thousands of messages a day," Travers said, much of the data "fragmentary," "inconsistent" and "sometimes just flat-out wrong." Often the analysts go back to the intelligence agencies for details. "Sometimes you'll get sort of corroborating information," he said, "but many times you're not going to get much. What we use here, rightly or wrongly, is a reasonable-suspicion standard." ...

Every night at 10, TIDE dumps an unclassified version of that day's harvest -- names, dates of birth, countries of origin and passport information -- into a database belonging to the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center. TIDE's most sensitive information is not included. The FBI adds data about U.S. suspects with no international ties for a combined daily total of 1,000 to 1,500 new names.

Sure sounds like they just throw in "all the usual suspects" -- and everyone named Mohammed.

This isn't security. It is a combination of data collection gone cancerous, permanent welfare for government bureaucracies, and theatrical posturing to convince the population that Big Brother is on the job.

The man who pounded on the statue

Four years ago today, a massive statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled by U.S. soldiers in Baghdad, creating a piece of visual spin worthy of U.S. political consultants at their best. Though U.S. complicity in creating the scene was rapidly exposed for those who wished to see it, there were Iraqis who happily took part in the demolition.

One of the most visible of those was Kadhim al-Jubouri, a champion weightlifter who had suffered nine years in Saddam Hussein's prisons.


British TV went back to talk with al-Jubouri four years later. He now thinks he'd be better off if the occupation had never come and Saddam Hussein were still in power.

View and listen to Kadhim al-Jubouri's story here.

Some Nicaraguan birds and other critters

For no better reason than having enjoyed the extraordinary opportunity to take these pictures in various locations on the shores of Lake Nicaragua, here are some of the creatures we saw while traveling with El Porvenir. I'm not a birder and my Spanish is rudimentary, so the names I ascribe to these birds may be either weirdly spelled phonetic approximations or just plain wrong. Please comment if you can enlighten me.


This more or less tame macaw had a lot to say to us...


while these domesticated parrots focused mostly on each other.


There were little songbird critters.


Also large fishing sorts of birds -- this was called an "ajinga."


Some kind of green heron.


Ibis with a night heron.


Another heron.


Jabiru.


Roseate spoonbills look like they belong in Alice in Wonderland.


Pygmy kingfisher.


Stilt.


Capuchin monkey forages above.


This fellow waited on the bank of the Rio Papaturas for something unwary to float by.

Blogging for separation of church and state

In 1823, U.S. "founding father" James Madison wrote:

The settled opinion here is that religion is essentially distinct from Civil Govt. and exempt from its cognizance; that a connection between them is injurious to both.

He was right then and he is right now. When a religion tries to become the state, it not only becomes oppressive to individuals who do not share its rules -- it also betrays its own best values and practitioners.

I'm radical enough to believe that Christianity (the religion of the Jesus movement of which I'm an adherent) has been in trouble ever since it lined up the Emperor Constantine in 325. Being a Christian became a necessity for political advancement in the late Roman empire and the rest is history.

Pretty soon Europe had a empire that was "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire" but it sure had plenty of religious wars, especially when national aspirations teamed up with a new Protestant theology to challenge the rule of the pope. Sometimes, as in England, various brands of Protestantism fought it out for control of the state.

Madison and the U.S. founders may have held some religious beliefs (though one can wonder whether some of their evocations of the deity might not have been just necessary spin for their less skeptical fellow citizens), but they came from a tradition that saw religious government as a recipe for war.

These things don't change much, do they?

In the contemporary era of globalization, any faith that cannot live side by side with radically different belief systems, or no belief system, is a recipe for war and violence. And, I would add for myself, a religious faith that leads to war and violence dishonors the very possibility of God's existence.***Check out other posts in this blogswarm here. And check out First Freedom First for ongoing work against the theocrats.

On being an Arbitron household

If you are bothered by what's available to you on radio, you probably should be. My household has, for the second time, just done a week's stint reporting to Arbitronwhat we listened to from Wednesday through Thursday. Arbitron complies ratings and sells them to stations which use them to set ad rates.

We dutifully filled out our logs (and pocketed the shiny new one dollar bills they sent us) but, if you saw my Media Consumption Diet meme post, you'll know that radio isn't a big part of my life. And what I do hear comes almost entirely from the web. Wonder what they do with that data? They do ask us to record it.

Organizing consumers against water profiteering

Wednesday's "Think Outside The Bottle" (TOTB) meeting left me curious about the style of organizing I was seeing and reflective about the particular opportunities and challenges implicit in what Corporate Accountability International is doing.

It puts the campaign in perspective to learn, from the website, that Corporate Accountability International is the current name of what used to be the organization INFACT. INFACT started life as the Infant Formula Action campaign which from 1977 to 1986 sought to prevent Nestle from marketing baby formula to women in poor countries as a "better" substitute for their own breast milk. Irresponsible promotions led to women losing the ability to feed their newborns or to afford the magic new "food" Nestle had got them hooked on. After seeing passage of the World Health Organization's International Code of Marketing for Breast Milk Substitutes, INFACT went on to take on General Electric over its manufacture of nuclear weapons triggers and the tobacco industry.

So going after the water privatizers and profiteers -- that's Coke, Pepsi and longtime nemesis Nestle -- is old hat for these folks. They have a track record of combining international work, mobilizing actual political clout, and involving thousands of grassroots consumers in their campaigns. There are not a lot of organizations whose model of organizing reaches across so many arenas. Think about it:

• Unions deal first and foremost with organizing people as workers in their workplaces; community campaigns and community allies are the stepchildren of that effort. Political allies are just useful adjuncts.

• Classic community organizations are neighborhood based and member driven -- and therefore usually very local indeed and often insular.

• Many environmental advocates and PIRG groups need the capacity to manipulate science and law at a level of sophistication which makes them, of necessity, professional and staff-driven. Any grassroots base is peripheral, touted when numbers and small donors are needed, but little involved in the actual work.

• Progressive electoral campaigns are short term projects that require broad-based coalitions of convenience. They can't and don't dig in for tough principles for the long haul.

So what INFACT and now Corporate Accountability International does, reaching across national boundaries, into political systems, and out to individuals as consumers is quite unusual.

That said, the model has its problems and they were all on display on Wednesday night. Not wanting to trash anyone, but here is a visitor's perspective:

Dealing with allies: Any outfit pursuing such a wide vision needs local partners. Organizers seemed to be from out of town -- so local groups were drawn in, including the speaker from the city department of the environment and a goodly list of sponsors that have some local base. You don't get 85 people in a room without some local turnout capacity and TOTB clearly had that help. But I had to wonder what those local partners felt they got out of it.

• Up near Mt. Shasta, the McCloud Watershed Council is apparently fighting a local water grab by the Nestle corporation. This was mentioned, but did those activists feel they had gotten the support they certainly need? I hope so.

• The event was billed as somehow involving "interfaith" activity and a Methodist group was one of the sponsors -- but the only nod to "religious" participation was a closing pitch by a nice, but inaudible, gentleman from Green Sangha. Did other religious types perhaps pull a no-show on the organizers?

• In an orthodox organizing sense, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was the target of the meeting: we were asked to sign a letter urging him to make the city unfriendly to plastic water bottles and the water profiteering industry. But Gavin was clearly also a main prop of the meeting, sending his Environment Director to speak and aide Wade Crowfoot to explain how strongly he supported TOTB's efforts. This makes sense for Gavin. The most significant opposition he'll face for re-election will almost certainly be a Green; we have more Greens than Republicans around. Getting out front against plastic water bottles, he gets himself an easy environmental issue that won't force him to work with the city's gritty local enviro activists. These folks want things Gavin doesn't want to give them like Saturday road closures in Golden Gate Park -- anathema to the city's rich culture vultures who donate to the likes of Gavin. So TOTB apparently has decided to carry water for its target -- and thereby advance its cause. This is a choice that a local group that depended on local environmental activists probably couldn't make.

Very notably, none of the excellent materials about the campaign pictured at the top of this post had any local contact address on them. Where are these TOTB people anyway? TOTB got our contact information, but organizing will be very shallow if communication is a one way street.

Replicable educational models. Big organizations pull off big campaigns by designing simple, replicable tools to give participants a common base of knowledge of their issue. That's a good thing. Last night we got a sample of TOTB's educational model. We were seated at tables of five, plus a table leader. The table leaders were supposed to lead us through a series of exercises to help us engage with some basic facts about water in today's world: who has it, who uses it, what we do with it, how the private water industry works, where those plastic bottles of water come from and what they do to our environment.


How effective these exercises were probably depended on the quality of the table leaders. If the table leader really had a grasp of the material in the script, the process probably went well -- in my particular case, we had a leader who could barely figure out what she was supposed to do and we stumbled along. Moreover, the people at the table had widely varying levels of pre-existing knowledge about water and were not particularly cooperative. To make this work, they needed strong leadership.

Many of the table leaders in this meeting were interns, folks who were inexperienced with both the material and with moving groups through the exercises. Some didn't do very well. Big outfits like TOTB need both to create easily replicable educational methods-- and invest in training whoever they assemble to use them. Organizing is very labor intensive and very expensive, but the structures we can build through these organizing methods will have shaky foundations if the investment in training is insufficient.

What can we do? There is little point in mobilizing groups of people to a cause if you don't put them to work. I was genuinely surprised at how poorly this TOTB meeting carried out its "crunch" -- the part where you get people to take action. There was a weak fund pitch from the Green Sangha guy (organizing theory says get a respected local leader to do this) and vague mention of a letter to Gavin -- something that seemed less than useful since his people had all but made this a Newsom campaign event. This was the moment to put the bevy of interns to work -- give them clipboards and don’t let anyone out without getting signatures, promises to attend specific future events, etc. I was genuinely surprised not to be more vigorously solicited to action.

Does this campaign really want grassroots engagement? No one should ever come away from an organizing meeting asking that question.***Okay -- this was just one meeting. The campaign is clearly a right one, and also, very likely, ending our addiction to plastic water bottles can be won, in the developed world anyway. The track record of the sponsors is that they keep at it -- kinks will probably get ironed out. I bother to point a few out because I respect the project.

They'd sell our mothers to us, if we let them

Last night I attended a meeting promoting the Think Outside the Bottle Campaign (TOTB) of Corporate Accountability International. About 85 people, almost all white, mostly young, gathered at the Women's Building in San Francisco to learn about world water realities.


By far the highlight of the meeting was a wide-ranging presentation by Jared Blumenfeld, director of the San Francisco Department of the Environment. Nobody was going to walk out of there without understanding that U.S. consumption habits mean we consume a share of the world's water resources vastly out of line with our numbers.

The campaign aims to build consumer awareness and political pressure to stop Coke (Dasani, Evian and others), Pepsi (Aquafina and others) and Nestle (Poland Spring, Arrowhead, Calistoga and others) from selling us water whose quality is unregulated -- it is often tap water -- as if it were better than what comes out of our home faucets. The bottled water industry is a consumer con, convincing us we "need" to pay for something we already have. It also uses vast amounts of petroleum in transportation and in making those ubiquitous plastic bottles.

The individual acts we can take to help are easy and simple. If you don't trust what comes from the tap (and in most of the U.S. you could), get an aftermarket water filter like a Brita. Get a glass or aluminum bottle and carry it. You can also sign on with TOTB to help build political pressure on the water profiteers here. *** This meeting reminded me of an innovative effort to recycle those darn plastic bottles that we saw on our recent trip to Nicaragua with the water group El Porvenir. Selva Negra is a campy mountain resort (think pseudo-Black Forest cutsey), a working coffee plantation, and an experimental laboratory of organic agriculture. Among their numerous innovations, they gather up the bottles and make insect traps out of them to hang over their mountains of fermenting organic compost.

Peace movement: Gone off to be Democrats?

Considering we've gotten to the point that some 60 plus percent of folks in the United States want us out of Iraq now, the peace movement seems kind of anemic. Not that there isn't one, but instead of gaining momentum as public opinion has come to agree with it, demonstrations and other visible manifestations of opposition aren't grabbing center stage the way we might expect. This essay is not a slam at that peace movement; I have huge respect for its efforts, especially, nationally United for Peace and Justice and CodePink. But somehow we just aren't having the heft one might expect from something so popular.

Two smart thinkers from the Vietnam protest generation (my generation too, just to be clear) have recently weighed in on this question. At Tom Dispatch, Tom Engelhardt gave us a long, nuanced essay which I won't attempt to summarize, except to pull out three differences from the Vietnam era which he enumerates:

• no draft;

• young people of the 60s believed they could change the system in a way no one does today;

• and, however alienated they were, young people of the 60s believed they would be and should be listened to -- again, today, no one has that faith.

Max Elbaum, my WarTimes/Tiempo de Guerras friend, wrote a much shorter but perhaps more even more convincing effort to explain the phenomenon available here.

the anti-Vietnam War movement emerged out of a period of progressive advance and was infused with near-utopian optimism. First and foremost, the Black freedom struggle had become a powerful force which every other opposition movement drew on for lessons, inspiration and strength. There was a direct line from the African-American upsurge to the revolt within the military itself, as Black soldiers spearheaded the G.I. rebellion which rendered the U.S. occupation force virtually unusable by 1971.

Today’s antiwar movement, in contrast, follows 30-plus years of right-wing rollback, which has weakened the Black community and the other social sectors that provided the base for the antiwar, anti-racist and progressive motion of the 1960s.

Last, for all the anticommunist hysteria of the Vietnam era, no one from the International Communist Conspiracy (and certainly no Vietnamese) ever actually attacked the U.S. But the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 was an all-too-real crime against humanity which traumatized the country. It provided Washington with a perfect excuse to justify its military adventures, and with a powerful ideological weapon for manipulating popular fears, demonizing Arabs and Muslims, and intimidating critics.

It seems to me that both these guys are on to something; go read both of them. And remember the context of consolidation of corporate media in which this all takes place.

And then join me in thinking about another difference from those long ago times that I think is shaping our current responses. Today's war is clearly branded as a Republican war. Vietnam started as a Democratic war and remained a bipartisan war pretty much throughout. By the time Nixon was elected with his "plan to end the war" which turned out to be to bomb his way to victory, both political parties seemed hopelessly implicated in the immoral carnage in Southeast Asia. There were antiwar folks who tried to bring the peace movement into the Democratic Party -- in 1966, the columnist Robert Scheer unsuccessfully primaried a Democratic Congressmen from Berkeley of all places, who like most good liberals of the era was gung ho for the war.

But serious anti-Vietnam war activists quickly concluded that the Democrats were not really much better than the Republicans. Certainly the party apparatus was not where they could most usefully put their energies. Because Vietnam was a Democratic war, a whole generation of smart political people dropped out of the electoral arena and into cultural and identity politics movements, into Third World-oriented Marxism, even simply off the grid, back to the land. The Democrats got the careerists and the unimaginative from the 1960s. It is probably only a slightly over-sweeping generalization to suggest that the Democratic Leadership Council set are very much the people who missed the boat in the 1960s and have never quite got over resenting the braver, more creative --if less materially successful-- members of their own generation.

Since Iraq is branded as a Republican war, the political dynamics play out differently today. Though Bush got bipartisan support to launch his war, it is relatively easy for contemporary Democratic politicians to distance themselves from it. And newly minted peace activists who were not formed by the Vietnam era look to the Democratic Party as the vehicle that will end it. Howard Dean brought a lot of them into the fold in 2003; the Lamont primary campaign showed they could win in a limited arena; winning a Democratic Congress in 2006 convinced many that they had found their right place in the struggle. And they didn't just shut up and go home -- they/we are still hammering that new Democratic Congress to cut off war funding.

The Democratic political blogosphere has given this new generation of peace activists a place to meet and created a culture that keeps us engaged. These folks are not (usually) hostile to the activist peace movement -- just peripheral. They are carrying out their own strategy for making peace -- by challenging and, they hope, becoming the Democratic Party. They know this won't be easy. BooMan laid it out recently:

The war in Iraq will have consequences. One of those consequences will be a renewed vigor on the left, as it has devised tools to overcome the crap served up to us by the Washington political establishment.

He's worried that a Hillary Clinton nomination will stop the movement he is a part of -- and I think he should be. None of the Democratic candidates can be relied on to listen to pressure from the left, activist, base. But only Clinton can afford to completely ignore us, if not repress us.

I would hate it if it took a lousy Democratic administration to give the peace movement the energy it would need to once again seize center stage. But this could happen. Better we make the Dems stop this damn war now.

What's kosher anyway?

One more thing for seder... This was read at our ceremony/meal last night:

Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev discovered that the girls who kneaded the dough for the matza drudged from early morning until late at night. Thes he cried aloud to the congregation gathered in the House of Prayer: "Those who hate Israel accuse us of baking the unleavened bread with the blood of Christians. But no, we bake them with the blood of Jews."

The rabbi pronounced the matza tref [not kosher] because it was produced by oshek, the oppression of workers.

I'm sure the Genetech cafeteria workers ostensibly employed by Guckenheimer would agree with the rabbi. Their working conditions are unholy indeed.

Passover meets Holy Week

Tonight my lesbian feminist family will again enjoy the Passover ritual, the seder, and eat festively and probably excessively.

This morning Boston Globe columnist James Carroll published a timely reminder to those of us who are Christians that we have long misused our own scriptures:

Because the Christian observances of Holy Week are structured around the last days of Jesus, which were themselves structured around his own Jewish observance of Passover, the two are intrinsically linked, and always will be. ...

Many Christians assume the Gospels [the scriptural stories of Jesus' life and death] were written by eyewitnesses who were present for the events reported, but that is wrong. Mainstream scholars are unanimous in dating the Gospels to a period about two generations after the death of Jesus, between the historic crises of the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple (in the year 70 ), and then of Jerusalem itself (in 135 ). These catastrophes prompted the questions, What is it to be a Jew without the Temple? What is it to be a Jew without Jerusalem?

Some Jews answered that observance of Torah, or Law, would be the center of Jewishness now, with memory joined to hope. Rabbinic Judaism was born, and its cry at Seder tables would forever be, "Next year in Jerusalem!" But other Jews answered that Jesus was now the "new Temple." They understood themselves as the "new Jerusalem," and became the church. The important point is that Christian-Jewish antagonism began as an argument within Judaism.

Then lots of other folks, Gentiles, became adherents of the Jesus movement. They didn't have a horse in the family fight between the two strains of Judaism -- but they vigorously adopted the quarrel as their own and took it out on the weaker party, the Rabbinic Jews, for a millennium or so. As Carroll adds:

Christian antagonism mounted, even to calculating the calendar, with Easter set negatively against Passover, a polarity of time. Holy Week became the season of anti-Jewish violence. To leave the "Christ killer" time bomb behind, Christians must read the Passion narratives with a critical eye, emphasizing that, when it comes to the question of "the Jews," the Gospels are not gospel.

***Last summer, we got a chance to have a look at what Moses is reputed to have seen after he led the ancient Israelites out of bondage in Egypt and to the "Promised Land." The story goes that he didn't get to enter that place "of milk and honey" because of the unfaithfulness of his people, but he gazed out from Mt. Nebo in what is now Jordan and saw it lying before him. Here's the contemporary view:




Now I know I've been writing about the human contribution to desertification lately, but it is hard not to wonder whether God pulled a fast one on Moses.

Rising seas

Ever wonder what global warming and rising seas could do to your neighborhood? Here's mine:


That darker blue on the right is San Francisco Bay. The lighter blue is the amount of what is currently land (and houses and warehouses and roads...) that would be covered by the Bay if the seas rose one meter.


At three meters of rise, much of what is now the Bayview district would be covered.


At ten meters, a large new bay would cover parts of Highway 101. We'll need those boats that are supposed to go with rising seas.

You can find your own location, anywhere in the world, and see what various heights of rising waters would inundate by clicking here. Just choose your continent at the top and work your way to your location.

H/t to Corey McKill at Gristmill.

Rosa Tan CoChien's lasting legacy

Oneida Hernandez of the El Porvenir staff stands beside El Poseron's new well.

During our trip around Nicaragua with the sustainable development groupEl Porvenir, we were happy to be able to visit the project that our friend and fellow-parishioner, Harvey CoChien, had made possible in honor of his recently deceased mother. In the tiny village of El Poseron, eighty people enjoy potable water, lavanderos, latrines and a budding nursery in memory of Rosa Tan CoChien.


The well is located a short hike uphill from the community.


The builders -- community members with a minimum of professional help -- had scratched the completion date on the enclosure.


Oneida displayed the plaque that will be mounted at the site.


Freddy, our Nicaraguan translator, tried to pass along to the local people the words that that Liz Specht read out about Rosa Tan CoChien's life.

Harvey's mother and father were both first generation immigrants from China to the Philippines. Rosa Tan CoChien, his mother, was the second child in a family of 11 children, the oldest daughter. She was educated through high school and wanted to go to college, but her mother insisted on her marriage. At the age of 16, she was married to Harvey's father who was 17 at the time. It was an arranged marriage, though Rosa was actually very opposed to this tradition. Rosa knew it was too early to marry and wanted more of an education. Before her marriage, as a traditional daughter, she made all the clothes for her family and did beautiful embroidery on the linens. She also worked in the family candle-making business packing candles.

Her greatest regret was not being able to pursue a higher education. She instilled in each of her 8 children (5 boys and 3 girls) the value of going on to college (or beyond) -- and each has done so. She encouraged them regardless of their gender. She would say, "I'm going to send you to school if you want to go, whether you're a girl or a boy."

As Harvey was growing up, she made the family home an open one. There was always something to feed a guest and Harvey felt free to bring home a classmate or friend. She understood poor people and taught generosity by her own example. That's how she taught her children, by example more than words.

From her own savings, she bought real estate and stock. She was very good at making wise investments and possessed a sharp business sense combined with solid common sense. All her criteria were down to earth. For instance, she could see that a certain plot of farm land would be in a prime business location as roads developed and the city expanded. She bought it and later sold it for a very good profit.

Harvey had hoped to join the trip to see the improvements he had been able to finance as a memorial to Rosa but was unable to join us.


People listened intently to Rosa's story -- this gentleman was the diviner who had pointed out the location at which to dig the well.


Community members and El Porvenir staff joined together for a picture with the well and plaque.


And then we all trudged down the hill to see the miracle of new water in action.

Friday cat blogging: Some Nicaraguan cats

This one was pretty sure I was more dangerous than its friend. In general, I didn't see many adult cats. Maybe they are adept at hiding, because there are certainly plenty of kittens.




Tiny kittens.


Then there was this critter painted on the wall of Padre Ernesto's church. It seems too benign to be one of the jungle jaguars, but what do I know?

Padre Ernesto's Eden: A visit to Solentiname

Painting by Silvia Arellano, 2007.

An archipelago of volcanic islands sticks up from Lake Nicaragua in the far south east of that huge body of fresh water. The island are collectively called Solentiname, a place known for Fr. Ernesto Cardenal's experiment in artistic experimentation and spiritual discovery that flourished there in the mid-1960s. The several thousand people who live there still dream of a more hopeful Nicaragua (perhaps based on eco-tourism) and continue to create folk art in the style of the painting above.

Though I had long seen reproductions of Solentiname paintings, I certainly never thought I'd get there. But on our recent trip, we did. This has never been an easy trip. An elderly nun of our acquaintance told us sitting stiffly on a chair on the deck of a cattle boat for fifteen hours in the old days. It is no longer that hard, but it is not yet simple either.


We flew from Managua in a 14-seat, single engine prop plane to the grassy landing field in San Carlos, a small town on the lake's edge...


then rode on a launch for an hour across the lake to reach our hotel, aptly named "El Paraiso." This simple place has about eight rooms and a warm and helpful family of hosts.


It was immediately evident why the painters of Solentiname choose their signature subjects: they paint what they see every day in this lovely place.






When you live on islands, boats are your life. The wooden launch pulled up on shore was under repair throughout our stay.


The islands are close enough together a dugout will serve to get around in calm weather. It is not the kind of place where people hurry much.


Of course some people do mundane work -- she is washing the morning's laundry.


Many people continue to make their living from producing crafts for sale. This fellow is carving balsa wood to make animal and bird shapes. Balsa is wonderfully soft and a sapling becomes a 30-foot tree in a couple of years in this tropical climate.


She is painting what he carved.


And here are some of their finished products.


Outside a house they advertise their wares.


More ambitious artists, the painters, have their own gallery, founded with help from a U.S. solidarity group.


This painting accurately portrays Fr. Ernesto's church and the monument to Solentiname residents who were killed in the Sandinista uprising against the Somoza dictatorship. Fr. Ernesto's influence is still felt. We spoke with painters, still working, who remembered how Cardenal had brought Roger Perez de la Rocha, a respected painter from Managua, to the islands.


The Managua artist didn't directly teach, but he did paint the island as he envisioned it, above. The painter who remembered him proudly told us that she knew she had her own, Solentiname-originated, way of seeing. And she still paints folkloric scenes.


The altar wall of Fr. Ernesto's church, now without a resident priest, features locals' own images of their islands.




A local fellow was kind enough to play for our group a few songs from the Misa Compesina-- the mass of the people, the peasants -- whose entrance song begins Vos Sos El Dios De Los Pobres -- you are the God of the poor.


Looking out from our hotel, it was not hard to understand how this place came to serve as an image of Eden for many influenced by the dream of liberation and the beauty of creation. Dreams are a gift of hope in a hard world.