The Heart Of The Day

Following our trail from Bangkok to Tak in the west of north central Thailand to Sukhothai and then east to Lop Buri and further east to Saraburi, Supaporn and I ended up at her home about 50km outside of Korat City (Nakhon Ratchasima) even further east. She lives 300km northeast of Bangkok and 20 Minutes from Phimai to the north. After transferring to a bus headed to Phimai, we got off at the head of a dirt road leading to her small village of about 25 houses 3km from the highway. She lives on a rice farm in Ban Hoatumnop Village. Supaporn called to find two people with motorcycles to come pick us up. And so there I was…in the middle of rice paddies and Jasmine fields and blessed quiet for three days after being on the noisy road for nearly a week.

Supaporn lives next to her sister and her husband and niece who live in Thai-style houses. The nephew lives on the other side of the sister. The nephew grows the rice and the Jasmine which the niece uses to make flower garlands (maa-lie) that she sells to people in the cities who offer them at various shrines and temples. She works about 12 hours a day and gets 10 baht each or about 30 cents U.S. for each one.

Supaporn has lived an interesting life. We are the same age…68. She left home, like I did, at the age of 12 but instead of going to school, she went to Korat City to work in a laundry. The American war with Viet Nam was ratcheting up in the early 60’s and Supaporn then found work in the laundry on the American Air Base just outside Korat…one of the three bases near each other belonging to Thailand, the U.S. and France.

She said that when she laundered the clothing of a platoon of several flying servicemen she would often come to work and find the name of one of them crossed off her list. She said it was very sad because it was like losing a friend. She said she wasn’t really very aware of the war…or how bad it was…until years later.

Then she found better work serving food and finally worked in the bar in the Officer’s Club where she met her first American husband. After 6 months in Japan, where she married her husband, he retired from the military and she lived in California for more than 30 years. She said he was anxious to get her out of SE Asia because he was convinced the war could easily spread to Thailand…as indeed it did later in Lao and Cambodia.

Divorced from her 2nd husband, she moved to Thailand and built a house near her sister and nephew two years ago. She was hesitant to tell me more…saying her past was complicated and difficult to explain. But she has written the first chapter of a book about her life that I encouraged her to finish one day.

Culturally, Supaporn is still very Thai…which surprised me. But I guess I shouldn’t be. I’ve been in Mexico 6 years and I suppose after another 25 years I would still be very American. It’s also an interesting comment on Mexican immigrants to the U.S.

I am very grateful for having Supaporn’s help as we made our way from Tak to Korat and I especially appreciate being in her home with her for the time I was there. At 6 in the morning of my last day with her I rode behind her friend on his motorcycle the 3km out to the highway where I stood by the road and waited for a cranky old bus to stop and pick me up and take me to the bus station in Korat.

I would have stayed longer as she had wanted but the heat was getting to me. The 3 hour bus took me back to Bangkok and my air-con room in my guesthouse just off Sukhumvit 20 and where I am catching up with my blog, listening to music with my tiny wireless speakers and waiting for my next dental appointment. And I am grateful for Couchsurfing.org because that is where I met her…online.

BTW, I’ve decided 3 hours in a bus is my max time. Now if I could just get from the States to SE Asia in 3 hours that would be awesome!

Lopburi is famous for the hundreds of crab-eating macaques that overrun the Old Town, especially in the area around Phra Prang Sam Yot and Phra Kaan Shrine, and there’s even a monkey temple/amusement park where you can buy snacks to feed to them. Every year the town throws them a bash…a huge buffet meal. That would really be something to watch! They weren’t really aggressive…just curious more than anything. And it tickled. 🙂

You have to keep an eye out for monkeys hanging from trees and wires and sitting on roofs and ledges, and be aware that they have some unpleasant bad habits including defecating on unsuspecting pedestrians from their overhead perches, jumping on people to snatch food or anything shiny like my glasses and stealing bags that they suspect may contain something edible.

Lopburi is one of the oldest cities in Thailand, a former capital and the second capital after Ayutthaya was established in 1350. It was abandoned after King Narai passed away in 1688, but parts were restored in 1856 by King Mongkut (King Rama IV) and in 1864 it was made the summer capital.

Lopburi has been an important part of the Khmer Empire, later a part of Ayutthaya kingdom, and Ayutthaya’s second capital under the reign of King Narai the Great, who used to spend eight months of the year in Lopburi. Later on, King Mongkut of the Bangkokian Chakri Dynasty resided here. There are remains from almost all periods of Thai history.

We stayed in the Ban Thai Guesthouse in New Sukhothai on an old road full of backpacker guesthouses bordering the Yoh River that runs through “new town.” Unfortunately during the floods of 2011 the city was inundated with water and you can still see sand bags lying around in front of the buildings. Subsequently they built up the concrete barrier to the river at such a height you can’t see over it. So the river is hidden from the guesthouses. However it didn’t stop the sound of Zumba coming from the other side! 😉

In north central Thailand, the Kingdom existed from 1238 until 1438. The old capital, now 12 km outside of New Sukhothai in Tambon Mueang Kao, is in ruins and has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage historical park.

The history of Sukhothai is the history of the oldest known beginning of Thailand.

Prior to the 13th century, Tai kingdoms had existed on the northern highlands including the Ngoenyang (centered on Chiang Saen; predecessor of Lanna) kingdom and the Heokam (centered on Chiang Hung, modern Jinghong in China) kingdom of Tai Lue people. Sukhothai had been a trade center and part of Lavo, which was under the domination of the Khmer Empire. The migration of Tai people into upper Chao Phraya valley was somewhat gradual.

Modern historians stated that the secession of Sukhothai from the Khmer empire began as early as 1180 during the reign of Po Khun Sri Naw Namthom who was the ruler of Sukhothai and the peripheral city of Sri Satchanalai (now a part of Sukhothai Province as Amphoe). Sukhothai had enjoyed a substantial autonomy until it was re-conquered around 1180 by the Mons of Lavo under Khomsabad Khlonlampong.

Traditional Thai historians considered the foundation of the Sukhothai kingdom as the beginning of their nation because little was known about the kingdoms prior to Sukhothai. Modern historical studies demonstrate that Thai history began before Sukhothai. Yet the foundation of Sukhothai is still a celebrated event.

With regard to culture, the monks from Sri Thamnakorn propagated the Theravada religion in Sukhothai. In 1283, the Thai script was invented by Ramkamhaeng, formulating into the controversial Ramkamhaeng Stele discovered by Mongkut 600 years later.

The Sukhothai domination was, however, short. Meanwhile, Ayutthaya rose in strength, and finally in 1378 King Thammaracha II had to submit to this new power. (Wikipedia)

Krathong takes place on the evening of the full moon of the 12th month in the traditional Thai lunar calendar. In the western calendar this usually falls in November.

Loi means ‘to float’, while krathong refers to a usually lotus-shaped container which floats on the water. The traditional krathong are made of the layers of the trunk of a banana tree or a spider lily plant. For many Thai it symbolizes letting go of negative thoughts. However, many ordinary Thai use the krathong to thank the Goddess of Water,

Loy Krathong takes place all over Thailand and parts of Lao and Burma but Supaporn, a Couchsurfing friend, and I traveled by bus 7 hours from Bangkok to Tak situated on the banks of the Ping River in NW Thailand to experience the Loy Krathong Festival there.

The Yi Peng Festival takes place at the same time so as well as Krothongs floating down the river we enjoyed hundreds of thin rice paper lanterns floating up in the sky. It is a time for making merit.

Waiting for the evening festivities, we also visited Bhomipol Dam about 3 hours out of Tak. But the bus dropped us off well before the dam. Supaporn put me out on the road to hitch a ride. They will never pick me up, she said, but they will stop for you! Ha! The last time I hitchhiked was Europe the summer of 1965! This sexy Thai guy from Chiang Mai picked us up in his pickup. He had a string of medals on his dashboard which he explained was from his work doing research on Bonsai…one of the King’s many projects to provide jobs and benefit the people of Thailand.

Cincinnati Bob, Oregon Bob and me

The American owner of the Bourbon Street Bar and Grill, just off the Ekamai skytrain exit, really served up quite a TG buffet feast. Oregon Bob bussed it in from Pattaya, about an hour outside Bangkok, and Cinncinnati Bob, a good friend and golfing buddy of my husband’s, interrupted his trip in Viet Nam for his birthday and to join us for the Thanksgiving meal.

Well, Facebook has cut into my blogging time. But since I am living in Mexico I love to keep up with my couchsurfers and friends I have made traveling besides friends left behind in the U.S. People say they prefer face-to-face interactions with friends but in my case that is mostly impossible.

Anyway I’m off on another RTW journey using AirTreks which is less expensive and less trouble than trying to negotiate multiple airline web sites. A friend I met through Couchsurfing will be renting my apartment until April when I return to Oaxaca.

Left Oaxaca Nov 1 for Oregon where I had multiple medical check-ups and in the process missed my flight out to Hong Kong to see son Josh. But I will be seeing him at a family meet-up the end of January on Koh Samui Thailand.

So this is my itinerary this year:
Oaxaca>Oregon
Oregon>Bangok Nov 18
Bangkok>Oman Feb 12
Oman>Istanbul Feb 19
Istanbul>NYC Mar 13
NYC>Oregon Mar 19
Oregon>Las Vegas not scheduled yet…sometime after 1st of April
Las Vegas>Oaxaca middle of April

So if any of you friends out there will be in any of my travel destinations at the same time as I am give a holler! 🙂

The NY Times Magazine ironically published an article called “The Opiate of Exceptionalism” or why, as I call it, that Americans seem to stick their heads in the sand when it comes to a civic discussion of sticky issues.

Positive thinking and Magical Thinking are two different things however.

As the article says, Carter was a positive thinker but he was crucified for bringing up problems because he thought they could be solved. Then they elected cheery Reagan who knew how to make people feel better about themselves and the country…a maximum magical thinker.

The problem with this is that politicos (aside from being bought off by lobbyists) then don’t have a popular mandate for dealing with the hard issues, eg. the financial system and the deficit, climate change, immigration, the “Drug War, gun control, military budget and continuing wars. None of these issues, were dealt with head on in any of the presidential debates.

People just don’t want to admit that there are serious problems in the U.S. and not only not talk about it but they don’t want to hear about it because it might upset their insular worlds. Candidates learned from Carter’s experience. If they do bring up these negative issues they are labeled “UnAmerican.” It’s called biting off your nose to spite your face.

http://tinyurl.com/9l8ozx5

Iceland, however is a good pragmatic example of taking the bull by the horns and making democracy work for the good of the country.

In the meantime I will sit on my veranda and watch the people in the park…with my music. And later finish packing in anticipation of my next trip to Asia to see my 3 sons.

But before leaving Oregon I will know how to vote and why.

I don’t think I would say that I exactly compartmentalize my life. As they say all politics are local and how we live our lives reflects the truth as we see it around us. So for example, living in Mexico I wouldn’t want to live a rich expat life in a fancy house and sacrifice my solidarity with the people as they struggle against impunity. And I see the value of the beauty in nature in the face of sterility of popular culture.

And as I travel I want to understand the lives of the people I am walking among. I find many parallels between Thailand and Mexico in regard to the accessibility of education for the poor and dispossessed. This informs the way I see my birth country.

So for me it’s a pretty integrated life but with an over-riding propensity for balance and most of all…laughter. As I say at the top of my blog…I travel to see what it reveals about the human heart and what we have become in this world. To look beneath the surface of things to the heart of each day. Does hope exist? Are people still falling in love? Or is everyone buying death as if it were cheap socks at a smoke sale?” I look for clarity. I look for signs of courage…of strength of conviction rooted in heart…in an authentic identity, in myself as well as in others.

I find it in the people on the street who are amazingly able to laugh and play in the face of impunity of their governments and they teach me how to do the same. Knowing they are there…but a kind of giving the finger to the exploiters, users and destroyers.

Upon receiving his Nobel prize for literature, Jose Saramago said:

“As I could not and did not aspire to venture beyond my little plot of cultivated land, all I had left was the possibility of digging down, underneath, towards the roots. My own but also the world’s, if I can be allowed such an immoderate ambition.”

For me, however, I travel to discover what it reveals about the human heart and what we have become in this world. To look beneath the surface of things (dig down) to the heart of each day. Is God alive? Does hope exist? Are people still falling in love? Is everyone buying death as if it were cheap socks at a smoke sale?” To look for clarity. To look for signs of courage…of strength of conviction rooted in heart…in an authentic identity, in myself as well as in others.

You don’t have to travel a lot to get fodder for this kind of introspection. I am still “peeling the onion” of that trip to Europe in 1965…only 20 years after the war where houses still had dirt floors in the French country-side. I couldn’t believe how much young people in the pubs knew about [lived and modern] history in Germany. I discovered I was ignorant. I went home disillusioned with the ostentatiousness and new material successes of Americans after the war and am still dealing with it today even as I benefit from it.

Europe was full of Amerian hitchhikers in those years…many of the guys avoiding the draft. Other young people went on through Iran to Nepal…the Hippie Trail. We all went home to help give birth to a new set of values…for all the good it did.

I think you have to go to a country where the culture and values are entirely different than your own…at least once. Tours will insulate you…protect you…from the very thing you need to experience. And go alone so you are forced to confront and adapt to that culture and discover there is another very valid way to live. That…to me…is exciting.

I needed to go to Viet Nam where we fought the American War and see the abandoned air fields and the acres and acres of headstones in the cemetaries. And to China that Nixon opened up to the world. And S Africa where I saw the 8×8 foot room where Mandela lived for 30 years and where I roamed the hostels where the Apartheid War was fought in the township of Soweto. And Egypt where I later saw the birth of the Arab Spring. Go to Burma and Cuba before they too change.

That is just me. Others may have other reasons for choosing where to travel…or not. Where does your heart tell you you need to go? If there is no strong desire maybe, like Saramago, you can just do all this in your corner of the world. Another valid way to live.

“I felt like I was into a new routine and the constanly changing, spectacular scenery was losing it’s ‘novelty’ or ‘wow’ factor. Somehow the 500th spectacular beach had become the norm.

This said by a guy who had spent a year traveling a few years ago. It got me to thinking.

I think you have to ask yourself why travel again? You spent a year on the road so yes, you know you can do it but I get the feeling it was as a spectator.

The journalist Robert Young Pelton has been publishing a book entitled “World’s Most Dangerous Places.” In the preface he says this:

It helps to look at the big picture when understanding just what might kill you and what won’t. It is the baby boomers’ slow descent into gray hair, brand-name drugs, reading glasses, and a general sense of not quite being as fast as they used to be…. Relax: You’re gonna die. Enjoy life, don’t fear it.

Living is (partly) about adventure and adventure is about elegantly surfing the tenuous space between lobotomized serenity and splattered-bug terror and still being in enough pieces to share the lessons learned with your grandkids.

But then there are all sorts of other intra-personal reasons that have nothing to do with our expectations of “seeing the sights.” That is the insight that those hair-in-dreads backpackers have. They are growing up. And my couchsurfers who I follow on Facebook after hosting. I don’t care if I see another old building or temple for the rest of my life. It is the lives of the local people I am interested in…people very different than me…not people I “have something in common with.” If I wanted that I would have stayed in the states. I want to “grow up” too.

As for me, the best kind of traveling for Pico Iyer, the travel writer, is when he is searching for something he never finds. “The physical aspect of travel is for me,” he says “the least interesting…what really draws me is the prospect of stepping out of the daylight of everything I know, into the shadows of what I don’t know and may never will. We travel, some of us, to slip through the curtain of the ordinary, and into the presence of whatever lies just outside our apprehension…” he goes on to say. “I fall through the gratings of the conscious mind and into a place that observes a different kind of logic.”

Alaine de Botton, the English travel writer says, If we find poetry in tattered old men weaving home on bicycles, a grateful charm in smiling young country girls… and a shared intimacy in the look of recognition in the eyes of kindred travelers we have found “an alternative to the ease, habits and confinement of the ordinary rooted world.”

introspective reflections revealed by large sublime views and new places may reveal thrilling or disappointing aspects of ourselves here-to-fore hidden from our awareness.

Another travel writer says “it is not necessarily [only] at home that we encounter our true selves. “The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we [think] we are in ordinary life…who may not be who we essentially are,” says the author.

Anyway, I retired in 2002 and traveled for about 5 years and finally moved to Mexico 6 years ago to live…having found an ideal day-to-day living situation. How long are you going to be here, people ask. Oh, until I don’t want to be here anymore, I say.

Long term travel doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Go back home for awhile when your heart tells you to. And get those medical check-ups your health ins. pays for. You don’t have to decide ahead of time whether it will be 6 months at a time or 2 years at a time.

I found that “being on the road” is exciting and full of novelty but every few months I needed “down time” to reflect and integrate my experiences. It could be 2 weeks or a month. Or 2 months depending on the need. Maybe 6 months or a year or more to really get to know the people, get your nose into another culture and try to adapt to it. That’s when you will really find out a lot about yourself.

In short, long term travel helps one to integrate the outer world with one’s inner life.

In my case I kept the house in the states…renting it out to cover mortgage, taxes and a bit more to travel on in addition to my pension…and as a back door in case of chronic health problems down the road. And remember, traveling in so-called “developing countries” will be much less expensive.

Now, I am still traveling and will be starting on another RTW at the end of October for 5 months…Hong Kong to see one son, SE Asia (including Thailand to see another son) and this time Oman before spending nearly a month in Istanbul to get to know “friends” there and as a base for overland travel from there.

I feel soooo much gratitude for having had these years while I still have the energy and physical ability.

Don’t wait…for…what? And keep a travel blog for your family and because you will forget a lot of it until you go back and read later…savoring those memories.

And peeling your onion.

Richard, Lulu, Carlos and Lumina

I’m counting my blessings that couchsurfing has given me this morning. I had the best birthday ever yesterday!

A lovely couple (she from Uh Merca and he from Britain) has been staying with me for the last couple of weeks because their landlady refused to pro-rate their last month of rent. Did my heart good because she (the landlady) was a conniving one!

Lumina went out and bought delicious heirloom tomatoes, hand made corn tortillas and flowers. Then a former couchsurfer from Guadalajara (says he left “the machine” behind) showed up with flowers and chapulines (fried grasshoppers). When Carlos, from Guadalajara, came, he left his bicycle and said he was going to the ATM…a five minute walk away. Came back more than an hour later. He had gone to one market about 6 blocks up the hill for flowers and it was closed. So he walked all the way to the big market on the other side of the zocalo (8 blocks) and back just to get flowers. And I’m not even a young chica! An example of the heart that resides in a Mexican. It’s why I’m here and why I stay.

Then a Chilanga (what they call you if U R from Mexico City) couchsurfer showed up with a gift of four lovely Mexican coffee cups. She works for the health department driving into remote mountain villages to take information and meds to the little clinics. Diabetes is endemic here and she says they are trying to get people to change their diet and behavior instead of just giving them pills. Good luck with that, I thought.

In Mexico, when you have a birthday, you stay at home, people just show up and everyone eats food you have prepared. I had made Pork Ribs with Green Sauce and rice and we drank lots of mescal. No face pushed in the cake thank goodness. Lumina had purchased some Mexican pastries she stuck a candle in.

They have been my friends for the year they spent in Oaxaca…he a writer and she a yoga instructor. Having met in S. America a couple years ago, they are going to be married in Ohio in July and then live in England.

I dropped Lumina and Richard off this morning at the bus station with a lump in my throat.

Meanwhile, as teacher strikes continue in Oaxaca and all over the country, it has became clear that the PRI (the corrupt political party that has had a strangle hold on the country for more than 70 years) candidate, Pino Nieto, is the front-runner for the up-coming election for national president. The government controlled TV media is supporting him with impunity and bias. So the young people, mostly university students and others, are demonstrating peacefully in Mexico City and other cities. They are saying that Peña Nieto takes “historical responsibility, moral and political” for the human catastrophe of Atenco. (Read: crimes, rape, abuse, missing, devastated families, political prisoners ….). when he was Governor of Mexico State. When they asked him which books he read he bragged that he doesn’t read. During a speech at a library in Mexico City the students railed against him with jokes and demands for him to get out.

Then, Pedro Joaquin Coldwell, president of the PRI,” gave a radio interview demanding “punishment to the rebels and expulsion of students.” The students responded with cries of “we have changed…you haven’t!”

However the university authorities’ response was unequivocal: the Universidad Iberoamericana guarantees its students the full right to freedom of expression with the “same integrity of the authorities” that, in 1968, (after over 200 students were gunned down in a university soccer field) led the Rector Javier Barros Sierra to protect UNAM students against the intervention of government power. Now, police authorities are not allowed on any university campus. However, now, only one university, so far, is unconditionally protecting the right of students to be critical…the prestigious Universidad Iberoamericana.

So 131 students of the Ibero, “despite the siege and the threats that are reported in the media,” decided, through twitter and Facebook, that “it is dignity which makes possible the bonds of community.” One by one, the 131 students, ironically mostly from affluent families, took responsibility as members of their society. Now, all my young Mexican friends on Facebook are posting “#YoSoy132” which is the twitter hashtag for what is becoming a movement. Face after face, name after name, identity number after number, “together-we-stand” is transforming the political consciousness of a young generation who are sick of death and corruption and just want to get on with life.

The problem, though, is not just refusing to be intimidated by power. But how to disarm it.

My god, they look young!

For two weeks now, the teachers have constructed a planton in the Zocalo and in the surrounding streets. Tents abut each other and guy-wires (actually cord), holding up tarps to protect from the rain, extend in every direction…low enough so that it’s difficult for a tall person like myself to make my way through the streets. Doorways to businesses are virtually blocked from sight…with teachers lying and sitting on the sidewalks in front of them.

The governor must have made some deal with the teachers before the strike. No graffiti to speak of and no huge political banners…only signs indicating which town or region a group is from.

The major roads into the city have been and are barricaded at intervals including the road to the airport. Banks, state offices and the like have been blocked intermittently. My dentist complained that she often is blocked from getting to work from her home in Huayapam to her office in the city…leaving patients to sit and wait.

It is assumed that Section 22 of the Oaxaca teacher’s union think the barricades put pressure on the government to negotiate positively with their demands. But all I hear from the people who live and work in the city is “the barricades don’t hurt the government….they just hurt the people!” Read the rest of this entry »

Open Fire Kitchen

Click on the photos to enlarge them.

The wedding was held in a tiny church behind the Flower Market. We three (2 gringos and 1 Mexican) arrived at 4pm, the supposed time of the wedding. Just one old woman in a rebozo and a young girl was there. But this is Mexico!! So we walked to the main road across from TelMex to find a bar. After two beers and some botanas later we walked back to the church…just in time!

As part of the ceremony to symbolize unity, a large loop of rosary beads called the Lazo Cord, is placed in a figure eight shape around the necks of the couple after they have exchanged their vows. The symbolism of the lasso is to show the union and protection of marriage.

Thirteen gold coins (arras), representing Christ and the 12 disciples, are given to the bride by the bridegroom, signifying he will support her. This represents the brides dowry and holds good wishes for prosperity. These coins become a part of their family heirloom.

Rigo and his family (wife and two children) and extended family are from SANTO DOMINGO TEPUXTEPEC in the mountainous Mixe region SE of Oaxaca City. The Mixe are one of the 16 indigenous groups…all with their own languages…in Oaxaca state. It is not uncommon to wait until a family has the money to actually have the marriage ceremony.

Rigo and his family live in Oaxaca City now. and takes care of our flowers and plants in our apartment courtyard as well as gardens belonging to other families. My neighbor, David, me and a Mexican friend Edgar were the only people there that were not Mixe. A DJ friend provided music on a keyboard. The Pollo Asado (chicken in guajillo chili sauce) individually cooked in tin foil, beans cooked with avocado leaves and up-to-date macaroni salad was delicious. Nothing like beans with avocado leaves cooked over an open smoky fire!

This was the loveliest and sweetest wedding in Mexico I have attended. This Mixe wedding differed from Mestizo events in that it was quiet and attended mainly by extended family. It was also different because the wedding was held in Oaxaca City where they live instead of in Santo Domingo Tepuxtepec, four hours away in the mountains, where they are from. Unfortunately my camera ran out of battery before I could get more photos of the guests.

I often encounter locals in Mexico who are quite shocked to hear that I have three sons…one in the U.S. one in Hong Kong and one in Thailand part of the year. To make it worse my husband is in Thailand also.

Why do you let them go there!? Never mind that the kids at least are 44, 42 and 37! And as if I could do anything about it anyway!

Sticking his finger out at me, one teacher implied I was a bad mother to let them go. Why not, I asked? Because it is dangerous! Never mind that the countries they are in are no more dangerous than Mexico! Never mind that kids as young as 12 crawl across the border illegally without their families. But that is survival and maybe another story. Or not.

Mexican children are expected to take care of their parents until death. This means not leaving home (or at least nearby their home) while they are alive if they have a choice. It means that Mexicans who have immigrated to the U.S. and lived there for 30 years are proud to come home as their parents age to spend their last years, months, weeks or days with them. Maybe we Americans could learn something from these people if we had more respect for our elders.

We Americans, until the recent economic downturn, usually have expected our kids to be on their own by about the age of 18…or out of college. We Americans are pragmatic. My Mexican-American friend, who was born in the U.S. but grew up with migrant parents and now lives in Mexico with her Mexican National husband responds this way when she hears Mexicans lamenting the American style of family

“If 18 years isn’t long enough to teach your children to be independent, then how long does it take?” Ha ha. That’s Patty!

I would never want my children to feel pressured by any kind of emotional blackmail. I would hate for my kids to feel a “duty” to me instead of love and interest freely given and received. I have my own life as does my husband in Thailand and we are careful not to try to live out our lives through our children….in other words…laying a trip on them. Often it is the parents who are getting their needs filled through their children.

I feel that I had a chance to live my life the way I wanted. I left home at the age of 12 because all children of isolated farm families had to go away to school if they wanted a decent education within which to prepare for university. My mother, a child of Polish immigrants and having grown up on an isolated ranch in Montana, did the same.

And it is now my children’s opportunity to answer to their heart’s desire. When I talk to young Mexicans this way I sense yearning. When I describe what my children are doing in various parts of the world they sigh. When I talked to my young female dentist about her mother who she took care of until she died, I asked if she was very sick. No, she said. She just had a problem in her head. Oh, I said…she was senile? No, no, no, she said. She was fine. She just wanted her children around her all the time so me and my three brothers would take turns visiting her each day! Oh, I said. Needy. Yes! she said. Then she sighed.

I think it’s good not to confuse geography with intimacy. It’s not the location that makes the difference. For me, it’s the frequency and quality of the communication. You can be interdependent and not living in the immediate vicinity of each other. Whether it is “fashionable” or not strikes me as an odd question. I am proud of my very close relationship with my “kids.” And thank God for video skype. I suspect they are quite happy that I am not in their hair all the time with me in Mexico. 😉 They always just rolled their eyes and did what they wanted to anyway.

Having said that, however, we are all very dependent on each other for safety and helping each other with personal needs. I have recently sent my oldest, in the US, a lengthy list of instructions…and put his name on the title of my car, and my living will, in case something happens to me here in Mexico. My Thai daughter-in-law says, “mom, I take care you!” You should have seen the look on my son’s face! hahahaha. Whatever will be will be but I know I would want to be independent as long as possible. Maybe located in a group home with a wonderful caregiver where my 94 year old mother-in-law is.

The kids left home when they went to university and afterward found their own paths in life which happened to take them away from their birth place. The oldest, unmarried, is in Las Vegas because that is where there was the greatest demand for his work at the time. Besides he hated the cold and windy and cloudy NW of the US and Chicago where he did his medical residency and likes the heat to physically train in. The middle one visited Thailand, loves the culture and the water and fell in love with a young Thai woman to whom he has been married for 9 years. She’s the daughter I never had and she’s funny and very wise. The youngest went to culinary school after university which led to working in Manhattan for eight years, Beijing for two and now Hong Kong for three. He has decided to stay in HK, has just been promoted to Executive Chef at the American Club and is quite happy to be avoiding the financial crisis in the US. It probably helps that he has a long-term relationship with his Cantonese girlfriend. 😉

I suppose living internationally came naturally to my family because they were raised within an extended Mexican family that I had lived with in high school. Then I was a volunteer director of a foreign student exchange program while they were in high school and they were exposed to students of many cultures when I would often host parties for them in our home. And I had a disabled Mexican girl for six months and a boy from Brazil as exchange students for a year in our home. And they all separately often traveled internationally before settling into their jobs.

Truthfully, I am so happy that they are all healthily capable of living independently…finding adventure and new horizons. I am excited though, that, after 14 years, we are all meeting up together on Koh Samui Thailand at the end of January 2013.

A friend in a Couchsurfing forum observed that when he first moved to Malta he would try jokes, wry observations, and other kinds of humor I was used to back in New Hampshire and Boston. I’d usually receive blank stares, nasty looks, and be ignored. I stopped the jokes, quickly.

Slagging in the Med might result in your new car being scratched by a key or maybe even a more severe, dramatic action. Losing face is a major traumatic experience in the Med.

——
I think gender plays a big part too. Women are more geared to sympathy-giving however sincere it may or may not be. And there may be other more arcane reasons too.

I think razzing/slagging is more a male thing in the western world…a safe way of bonding…if there is a common understanding and it isn’t underscoring hostility or used as a way of keeping emotional distance. Which is another story entirely. Heaven forbid that an ordinary western man would admit to sentiment! Although I have met some…and read some…of the most deeply sentimental men. It takes great courage and confidence.

I grew up hearing my father razz his friends and being razzed by them. Then I lived in a house for years with a male spouse and 3 male off-spring and their friends. I was the in-house “straight man.” I soon learned that it was much more fun to join them than to go off sulking…thinking they were making fun of me. And to give it out as good as I got it. A bit of a confession here: Fortunately or unfortunately it has become second nature for me but usually people don’t expect it coming from a woman. So generally I prefer being around men who don’t take everything so deadly serious.

But this only works within cultures, as you say, where it is known and understood what is going on. And it can be absolutely hilarious. To this day I love being around my kids and their friends and listening to the repartee. “Intelligence” may play a part in how quickly a person can pick up on it and think of a “comeback though.

Outside of a culture that does this, though, it can be very dangerous. I had to laugh at my friend’s description of men in Malta!

My husband has a very dry sense of humor and he could say the most outrageous things possible with a totally straight face when we were traveling together. Getting enjoyment, of course, out of watching a shocked face of the person who doesn’t get it and takes him literally. Many times I have wanted to crawl under a chair when they get the feeling they are being made fun of.

This is most common in Asia. It got so tiring of having to take care to “save face.” Which is why I am so simpatico with Mexico and most Latino cultures that place a great value on humility. They can laugh easily at themselves and they are delighted when you tease them and they can tease back. The countries we were in in East Africa were great fun in this regard too. And India was the best of all! Indians can be really funny and they were great fun! Of course these are all generalities.

In the Couchsurfing International Politics group right now we are seeing a lot of sparring between an ardent edgy Iranian female feminist and an irascible male New Yorker neither of whom “get” the other’s sense of humor. Of course the start of it was a self-proclaimed satirical post which bombed because no one there really knew her and took it literally.

But humor is a great way of getting under the skin of another culture…if you survive to tell about it! Ha!

Why have I spent the last three visits in the States during the winter, I ask myself. Well, spending time with at least two of my off-spring during Christmas has a lot to do with it. But perhaps it is my need and not theirs.

After a few weeks in Salem Oregon with my middle son and 10 days in Las Vegas with my oldest son, I’m leaving today to go back to Salem for another 10 days before driving to Oaxaca (the Nogales crossing this time) and the sun!! And no more doctor check-ups to get some return on my medicare payments! Whoopie! But am happy to say that it looks like I probably won’t die anytime soon! 🙂

I miss my tribe of young friends in Oaxaca. I will be happy to see them again.

I was invited to a wonderful Thanksgiving potluck…turkey, trimmings and all. Far more than any of us could eat in a week of course. Most of these young people were volunteers for En Via…a local micro-finance project. Some were former couchsurfers who had stayed with me. And some I met through the others. Great bunch of younguns! And I am grateful they included a 67 year old lady! ha!

Meltdown: The Men Who Crashed The World

This is a 4 part documentary of the worldwide financial crisis and the inside story that will keep you on the edge of your seat. After watching part 1 click under Meltdown: (part 2) A Global Financial Tsunami, (part 3) Paying The Price and (part 4) After The Fall.

The men who crashed the world – Meltdown – Al Jazeera English.

And if that is not enough there is the earlier film called “Inside Job.”

In short, a comment on Facebook: America’s wealthiest one percent owns 40% of the country’s total wealth. (The bottom 80% owns just 7% — no typo) — America’s wealthiest one percent owns 51% of all of the country’s stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. (The bottom 50% owns just one-half of one percent.) — America’s wealthiest one percent takes in 24% of all the income generated each year. — Between 1923 and 1929, the concentration of wealth at the top of the country’s economic ladder was at the highest point in US history. Then came the Crash and the Depression. For decades afterward, the middle class was dealt into the game at a much greater level. As recently as 1976, America’s wealthiest one percent took in only 9% of the country’s income (again, the current figure is 24%). Time Magazine, hardly an outfit full of liberal kooks, says that the concentration of wealth has again reached 1929 levels. Something is wrong here. To quote a great man: “But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists. We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.”

In response we now have Occupy Wall Street sit-ins all over the U.S. and the world by young people who cannot find jobs in their chosen fields and, in the U.S., are saddled with education loans up the ying yang that they cannot repay. Jobs have been lost. Homes lost.

Statement published by Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Together

I have been glued to the Occupy Wall Street Livestreams worldwide where I am watching “a learning tribe that is trying to BE what it wants the world to grow into.”

What you don’t see going on in the occupations and is so difficult to communicate to the media, mainly because they don’t get it, is the TRANSFORMATION that is going on in the working groups and in the General Assemblies and in the personal interactions. It looks from the outside so diffuse because each individual is connecting into it from where they are personally in their growth and circumstances.

Comment I saw this morning to a controversial CNN YouTube video: F**k the media. Each and every one of them. They’re out there with one objective and that’s to create division between us. Everyone PLEASE stop with this Hippie, Teabagger, Republican, Democrat, Conservative, Liberal name calling classification bullshit! Don’t you fucking get it? None of it matters! All that those monickers do is provide ammo to the shit starters. Were all are in the same boat on this one and we all need to stick together as AMERICANS if were going to get anything done.” Right on! ”

A friend who is participating in Occupy Seattle says: I am trusting the nonviolence to win out.

It’s a process. Not a linear one…but an organic one. They don’t know yet how the movement will change anything. But they for sure know that nothing will change without a change of consciousness of each individual. IMO it will change when there is a critical mass of people that have changed. One by one. Each in his/her own way.

I have been hanging out with a group of young current and former Couchsurfers and volunteers here in Oaxaca (when I am not glued to the Livestreams) who are participating in the same process. Occupy Wall Street is just one manifestation of where these young folks, world-wide, are taking us. With their clear-eyed insight they are edging me out of my old paradigm…out of old categories. We spent all day saturday at a sustainability fair with representatives from 80 communities all over Mexico.

What amazes me the most is the lack of cynicism and the hope and trust they have. They are losing hope of being able to pursue their careers they studied for, so they are looking for other ways to plug into the transformative process. The exchange with them is exhilarating…and yes…they are changing me too.

Some of these young people have just come off a year traveling to 4 countries to live in and study local sustainable projects in India, Tanzania, New Zealand and now Oaxaca. They underwent life-changing experiences (and in one case a near breakdown) as they came to understand that you cannot go into a country to “show them how to do it.” That old liberal do-good paradigm is dying.

But you can empower local people in their own efforts and learn from them new ways like the one in indigenous communities here in Oaxaca called “Uses Y Costumbres” which is a consensus process they use to govern themselves and the Zapatista movement in Chiapas.

The director of the year-long program is here in Oaxaca. Here is an interview with him. He turns Paulo Friere’s educational pedagogy, that has become orthodox in US educational reform movements since the 70’s, on it’s head.

A high school and college friend on Facebook recently told me I have too much time on my hands! hahahahahaha. Can’t think of a better way to spend my retirement than encouraging and affirming all these young people!

This comunique will not make much sense without the back story but it will give you a taste of the flavor of the struggle in the indigenous pueblos for autonomy that was promised by the Mexican government in 1945 and the indigenous resistance against the effort of the PRI Party, in control for over 75 years in Mexico, to take over their land…rich in precious metals and minerals. This is not even to mention the resistance against foreign mining companies who suck up precious water to take the gold…lining pockets of government bureaucrats while giving the people pennies on the dollar for the use of their land.

Letter to an authoritarian government. Communiqué from VOCAL
Published: AUGUST 20, 2011
To: Mr. Marco Tulio Lopez Escamilla, Minister of Public Safety of the State of Oaxaca

CC: Mr. Gabino Cue Monteagudo, Governor of the State of Oaxaca.

Read the rest of this entry »

I retired in 2002 and spent the next 5 years on the road…then chose Oaxaca as a home base. Since I live alone with extensive travel only every year and a half or so, when my surfers from other countries come I feel like I am traveling again!

I have grown attached to every single one of my surfers and I keep in touch with many of them on my FB page. I space them however, so that I make sure I am “up for it” when they do come and that my time with them is quality time. The young women sometimes become like the adult daughters I never had and I totally relate to the young men who make me feel like I am with my 3 boys who are off to the winds. And I’ve loved the bicyclers!

If surfers are just enjoying some “down time” in my apartment I enjoy seeing them enjoy themselves and I enjoy cooking for them. Having said that, however, I hope I never make them feel obligated to spend any more time with me than they are willing. I take my cues from them and don’t try to control their experiences…letting them be as independent as they would like. I hope they don’t feel “mothered!” :)) After all they are adults traveling to experience other cultures/languages and as an expat in Mexico I try to introduce them to as many locals as I can…often inviting them to join our dinners. I like to share local mores and politics if they are interested.

And my age means that I don’t get the hard-core partiers that come in late drunk. The fact that surfers choose me says a lot about them, I think. And I read and screen profiles well. Reading between the lines is an art.

The tone is set in the beginning. I trust them to be respectful and responsible just as I did with my own kids and the kids in my alternative education program for 10 years. So far my surfers have lived up to it. My fingers are crossed but then if there are troubles I will just consider it a teaching moment for us both.

I just get high on the smiles and laughter my surfers bring to me which I think is reciprocated.

Thank you to all my surfers now and in the future. And of course I enjoy all the other ages too! Bente and all the 50+ friends I am waiting for you! 😀 I know, it’s summertime and Norwegians are outside and not on the computer!

JULY 4th

Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence?

Five signers were captured by the British as traitors, and tortured before they died.

Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned.

Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army;

Another had two sons captured.

Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War.

They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

What kind of men were they?

Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists.

Eleven were merchants,

Nine were farmers and large plantation owners; men of means, well educated

But they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured..

Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags.

Thomas McKeam was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him, and poverty was his reward.

Vandals or soldiers looted the properties of Dillery, Hall , Clymer, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Rutledge, and Middleton.

At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson, Jr ., noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. He quietly urged General George Washington to open fire. The home was destroyed, and Nelson died bankrupt.

Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months.

John Hart was driven from his wife’s bedside as she was dying; their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished.

Comparing being in any country that is not your birth country for 2 weeks and being in a country for an extended period of time is apples and oranges.

Take a look here:

It’s not easy. I have been in Mexico for 5 years and still am not fully culturally adapted. Honeymoon, denial, resistance, humor, anger, rejection, acceptance, adaptation all happens at the same time on different levels at different times. There are some things about Mexico I just cannot accept let alone adapt to and probably never will. You probably know what they are. It’s all over the papers north and south. I watched the Mexican documentary Presumed Guilty There is no “system” of justice in Mexico. I am watching this system unroll since the murder of a friend. Four suspects (2 American and 2 Mexican) have been released at the whim of a judge who probably didn’t read the unorganized 6 inch file. I suspect he just hopes the whole thing will go away to avoid an international incident. I get to make the decision whether to accept it or not. But then I get to experience the frustrating consequences of that nonacceptance.

The cultural shock of reentering my birth country has always been the worst because I am reentering a changed person. Living part of the year or every second year in Thailand complicates things. Mexico to the US>US to Thailand>Thailand to US>US to Mexico. Each time my friends may think I have reverted to the PMS stage of my life. It feels like it until I smooth out.

It would be happening in whichever country one chose to live. The most valuable thing the new country is giving their expats is a chance to grow as a person. Anything else is gravy. There is no way a local is going to be able to understand the inner processes of the expat unless they have had a similar experience. We often are blessed with their patience. It may take years to peel back the layers of the onion if we are willing to reflect.

The least of what the locals will be gaining is a chance to learn and practice English. They will have to speak for the rest of it. I can’t speak for them. I just hope it is positive.

Ironically, probably the most difficult feeling is the intolerance we feel when we meet the intolerant because we open up and meet a brick wall. This forces us back in on ourselves. This is when we grow…or not.

Monday April 11 one of my American friends…a long time expat…went missing in Oaxaca sometime between 7:30am and noon. On thursday his body finally rose in the well outside his kitchen door. The motive appears to be theft but some also suspect vengeance because Tonee was beaten to death before he was shot in the back of the head. Two other Americans…a man and his wife…are among the suspects although the case has not closed yet. They have been released with no explanation. Locals nod knowingly and say “money.” Two other Mexican male suspects remain in jail.

Tonee lived in my apartment before me. His walls are painted with his colors. I sleep in the bed he had built especially for him. My dishes occupy his cupbords and my spices are in his spice rack. His best friend, my apartment manager, lives downstairs. He was one of the most gentle and generous people I have known. Tonee’s son is here. He is his father’s son for sure. Why him? Maybe his goodness made him vulnerable to some crazed psychopath?

This unspeakable event has colored my life for the past month and a half. Easter week came and went unnoticed. Friends call friends desperate for information. Rumors abound. Life goes unkindly on.

This Sunday morning there is the usual weekend Tai Chi group trying to generate some peace in the park across from my apartment while a birthday party on the edge of the park 50 yards away a very loud hard rock band blares so loud I can hear it in my back bedroom like it was playing on the veranda! LOL

Tai Chi

Birthday Party with Hard Rock Band

In 2006-7 I lived in an apartment on Calle Fiallo about 6 blocks south of the Zocalo in which I got to know the maid, Adelina, and her lively bright daughter Fernanda. Adelina is a great single mom and I am helping finance Fernanda’s schooling. A couple Sunday’s ago we went on Adelina’s only day off, to the village about 4 hours from Oaxaca City, that Adelina was raised in, to visit her mother and other family members.

Fernanda, me and Adelina

Adelina's mom making tortillas

Tortillas for the week

Adelina Serving us Cafe de Olla

Mom and cousins

Well, I haven’t posted for quite awhile. Been on twitter and computer livestreams ever since the uprising in the MENA (Middle East North Africa) trying to make sense of it. Suffice it to say I am supporting the rebels and the humanitarian aspect of the intervention to the consternation of many on leftist internet forums who are incensed that the US and Europe would AGAIN enter a ME country with their planes and bombs. Interestingly enough, the far right tweeters I am following are just as incensed.

But I did take a break and drove 6 or so hours over a rotten mountain road with constant switch-backs and huge potholes to Zicatela Beach at Puerto Escondido. My first visit to the coast. Lovely. No high-rises. Just palapas and beach…and surfers…and great weather.

I went there with a Canadian friend who used to live and work here in the 70’s. We visited a family, old friends of his, in Colotepec, a small Zapotec village about 30 minutes from Zicatela.

Friends Mica and Bardo live in Huayapan, about 30 minutes from Oaxaca City on a good day. Mica’s mom is raising two nephews whose parents are living and working in the States. So it came time for the baptism and of course the accompanying fiesta with DJ music for dancing. Few people actually attended the baptism in the church but instead waited at Mica’s mom’s house where the party was to be…visiting with family and friends.

I have been glued to Aljazeera on my computer for a week. I am bleary-eyed. This youtube video posted today was a bit uplifting. Notice all the women.

Protests going on from early morning and people will remain in Tahrir Square all night. It’s spread all over the country and other countries. Three dead. It’s after midnight there and twitter, cell phone, TV and all the rest have now gone down but there are some iconic pics that have been coming out of Egypt. And YouTube is full of video. This uprising is a really big deal! Even a friend in Serbia is all but afraid to hope.

My fav post:

Lessons of Tunisia:

To the Arab dictators: u r not invincible.
To the West: u r not needed.
To the Arab people: u r not powerless

Internet Friends!

A Norwegian friend just posted this on a www.couchsurfing.com forum that made me laugh:

If the stone age son did what the stone age father told him to, we would still be in the stone age

January 11th, 2010
December 23rd is the Fiesta of the Rabanos in the Zocalo. Huge radishes are grown just for the annual carving up into all manner of scenes, animals and whatever the imagination conjures up which are all on display and then judged. You can read a more detailed description of the Rabanos in an earlier post here.

The Zoc was packed so my friend Sharon and I made our way slowly to the Palacio to listen to a music group…Las Tunas…a hilariously funny singing group of guys all dressed up in Medieval Spanish costume…looking quite ridiculous. A suited up guy came out of the Palacio in the middle of a crowd of people around him. Hey look, the new Governor! God is he good-looking!

Christmas week four Couchsurfers…two on the living room floor. The first couple (Mexican and Dutch) was hitch-hiking, and getting into Oaxaca a few days late, overlapping with the second couple (Swiss and French Lao).

But on the 24th I had promised Oaxacan friends I would be there for Christmas Eve dinner and I just couldn’t take an extra 4 people and it was a damn good thing. What time, I asked. Oh, 7 or 8pm they said. Ok, I thought, I’ll go at 8. But I should have known, after 5 years living in Oaxaca, that time means nothing to Mexicans!

I picked up my old friend Max. 9pm came and went and I didn’t think anything of it. But then 10pm…and then 11pm. I had forgotten the custom was to eat Christmas eve dinner at midnight!

After dinner they invited me to come the next morning for breakfast at 11:00. It is the custom to eat left-overs from the night before for breakfast. Max and I got there at 11am. No breakfast. Nobody said anything. 12pm came. 1pm came. 2pm came.

Then another friend (born and reared in Italy and having lived in the U.S. and now Oaxaca) showed up and she knew immediately what was going on! About 4m she finally says, Oh, come eat with us! By this time it was time for cena (the last meal of the day) so we all happily went to eat left-overs with her and her husband (including the family who had invited me for breakfast) and her two grown kids visiting from the U.S and Spain.

During all this time the Couchsurfers had been happily cooking and entertaining each other in my apartment!

Mexicans celebrate New Year’s Eve or locally known as Año Nuevo, by downing a grape with each of the twelve chimes of the bell during the midnight countdown, while making a wish with each one. Mexican families decorate homes and parties, during New Year’s, with colors such as red, to encourage an overall improvement of lifestyle and love, yellow to encourage blessings of improved employment conditions, green to improve financial circumstances and white to improved health. Mexican sweet bread is baked with a coin or charm (in Oaxaca it is a tiny plastic Jesus) hidden in the dough. When the bread is served, the recipient whose slice contains the coin or charm is believed to be blessed with good luck in the new year and they are supposed to give the next fiesta party. They don’t…they just laugh.

New Years Eve I was in bed by 8 trying to enjoy some badly needed sleep interspersed with fireworks, rockets, banda music, church bells, laughing and squealing.

Next year I will know better.

I will be spending this Christmas with four lovely couchsurfers who are staying with me and we will all be christmas orphans together. One, a part Lao guy born in Paris who has recently been living in Canada, who will be going to Lao for three years to work on a development project and who has invited me to visit him on my next trip to SEA. He met his travel companion, Fanny, in Canada and who is from Switzerland. Another guy is from Michoacan Mexico and his travel companion, Inge, is Dutch. He is selling his photographs as a way of paying for his travel.

I wrote up this description of Christmas in Oaxaca for them:

Little kids dress up like Jesus and Joseph and march in a procession…usually with their respective church members. These are called Posadas. They stop by various homes asking for posada (shelter) in a ritual song, but are refused by those within who also answer in song. The group is finally received at a home previously agreed upon, where the padrinos ( God-parents ) of the particular posada will receive the pilgrims with song and prayer. Then, coffee and tamales are served for the adults and a piñata filled with fruits and nuts for the children.

Beginning with the ‘calenda’ (the procession in which people march in a procession at night with candles and sing songs…often with an accompanying band…and sometimes on the backs of decorated trucks ) on the 6th of December, the party continues with another calenda on the 10th, announcing the upcoming celebrations of the Virgin of Guadalupe. On the 12th, a festive breakfast is served to all in front of the Guadalupe church.

On the 16th, the nine days of ‘posadas’ begin, as well as the calenda of Oaxaca’s patron saint la Virgin de Soledád (Virgin of Solitude) around the zócalo. This calenda is filled with cultural and religious expressions of the indigenous people from the seven regions of Oaxaca. There is a solemn procession and then the famous and colorful Danza de la Pluma is performed outside the basilica of Soledad.

From the 16th through the 31st, is the ‘breaking of the plates’; eating buñuelos (a classic Christmas dessert) and drinking hot chocolate and then smashing the ceramic plates to the ground. (They are made just for this.) Beside the Cathedral, restaurant, stands serve chocolate and “bunuelos” out of bowls which are then thrown against the sidewalk and smashed. It is said that this has something to do with the ancient Indian custom of destroying all of one’s belongings every 52 years, at the end of a cycle proscribed by the Gods. It is also suggested that this comes from Moctezuma’s habit of never eating from the same plate twice.

The people from the mountains bring down the moss and orchids called “San Miguelitos” for the manger scenes on people’s home altars.

On the 17th, there are fireworks in front of the Soledad Basilica. On the 18th, in the morning, people can have breakfast in the patio of the basilica and listen to indigenous music from around the state.

The Noche de Rabanos (Night of the radishes) is on the evening of December 23rd, when the zocalo becomes the scene of a huge exhibition of figures sculpted from radishes.

The fourth and biggest posada is on December 24th, when groups from all over Oaxaca meet in the zócalo to celebrate the arrival of Christmas night. Prior to arriving at the zócalo, each posada will proceed to the home of the madrina (god-mother) who will provide a statue of the child Jesus for the local parish’s nativity scene. After a joyfully festive parade around the zócalo and through Oaxaca, the community returns to its parish church and prepares to celebrate the ‘Misa de Gallo’ (mass of the rooster), the first worship celebration of the Christmas feast.

The fiesta in Oaxaca, of course, is not limited to the days leading up to the 25th. The twelfth day of Christmas (Jan. 6th) is still celebrated here as the ‘feast of the three kings’. Small gifts (hand-made toys or sweets) are given to children on this day. Families, sharing a meal on this day with compadres, are served a special ring-shaped loaf of bread called a ‘rosca’. Inside the loaf are hidden a few tiny images of the child Jesus. If a person finds one in his slice of rosca he/she is obliged to host yet another fiesta for the final celebration of the Christmas season on February 2nd. Most people just laugh but they don’t really host another fiesta! But on this day, families are supposed to bring an image of Jesus from their home altar along with candles to be blessed at church which they do. This feast has come to be known as calendaria.

The Night of the Petition, “Noche del Pedimento” is an indigenous celebration on Dec. 31st. On a hill near Mitla, near Oaxaca City, this ceremony is acted out at a tiny chapel where a cave represented the entrance to the other world, symbolized by the mouth of the jaguar god. Country people, and many from the city come with small models to petition favors from the gods.

Of course the majority of the people are Catholic, in custom if not always in faith, so people of other faiths or no faith just join in the “cultural” activities.

There are things like this going on constantly all throughout the year (anything for a party) and sometimes I wonder how anybody gets anything done! :))

Upside Down World has an article by a local writer summarizing the end of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party that ruled Mexico for 70 years) in Oaxaca and the inauguration of the new governor.

The writer describes the ceremony on December 1…the beginning of the new administration:

In the afternoon ceremony in the former government palace, Cue introduced his cabinet; indigenous groups offered a symbolic cleansing (which might apply to the building as well, since Cue has declared he will re-open it for Executive business); conch shells called fifteen ethnic groups of Oaxaca to give and receive symbolic batons of office; marches and street parties enlivened Oaxaca City. Rigoberto Menchú attended the event to sign an agreement between Oaxaca and Menchú’s environmental foundation. The Teachers Social Movement and the APPO (Asamblea Popular Pueblo de Oaxaca) mobilized 60,000 teachers who jammed the zócalo. Azael Santiago Chepi, Secretary General of the Education Workers union Section 22 stated: “Ruiz practiced the politics of terror and persecution and will go down in history as an incompetent who refused to hear the people…the teachers union is prepared to work with the new administration on all issues….” Punishment of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (URO) was demanded, again.

A friend who watched the march arrive in the Zocalo described a crowd that was impossible to walk through. Then by the middle of the afternoon the crowd emptied leaving the Zocalo nearly empty.

However by 5pm, when I arrived, a humongous stage had been erected in front of the cathedral and another different crowd was entertained by a famous Mexican singer and a Columbian (??) band. The Zocalo had been cordoned off on the north side in front of the stage so access was limited to the south end…unless you wanted to maneuver through thousands of people in front of the stage. I sat at one of the few remaining restaurant tables at the end nearest the rear of the stage. I was the only gringo in the zocalo that I could see.

The new Governor spoke about an hour…of course I couldn’t understand much of it. I hope there weren’t too many promises. The fireworks were good. I left about 11pm for the walk back to my apartment…with the music still playing.

This time it was the middle middle class. Not the fancy dressed upper-middle and upper classes…who I assume would have probably been aligned with the PRI. The people have cautious hope in a governor reputed to be honest and with the best intentions. I felt cautious too. We in the north were once excited about a new president too.

I waited until the day we left for Queretaro to call and tell my friend Patsy (we go waaayyy back) that we had changed our itinerary and would be seeing her that evening. What fun! It had been three years since I had seen her and Jose…in fact since June 13, 2006 when they drove into Oaxaca the night the municipal police tried to tear gas the striking teachers out of the zocalo. Haven’t seen her in Oaxaca since!

After she and Jose married in Oregon five years ago, they moved to Mexico so they could be near Jose’s aging mother after so many years working up north. A trained ESL teacher, they survive on what she makes teaching English in her home (cracker boxes are thanks to low-income housing by ex President Vicente Fox) and Jose’s meager computerized and complex mechanic work. Even though born of Mexican parents in San Francisco CA, Patsy feels isolated and lonely in this new country, she says. Interesting…

Parked the car in her fenced yard…in the care of her dog…and got a nice hotel in downtown San Juan del Rio. Drinks and dinner on me. My great pleasure. And I unloaded a few treasured magazines and books for Patsy.

The next morning after breakfast and coffee, Patty and Jose led us out to the toll road toward Mexico City so we wouldn’t have to use my GPS like we did during a Saturday fiesta day on the way in. Grrrrr. A brand new toll road cuts off after a few miles, however, toward Pueblo where we could then go on to Oaxaca. Open about a year. So we didn’t have to traverse Mexico City which can be crazy even on a Sunday. Cars are only allowed in the city on alternate days with licenses that end with even/odd numbers and we didn’t know which day was which…so the new Puebla toll road…as expensive as it was…about $30…was worth every penny.

Incidently, drivers are completely covered by Mexican insurance on the divided toll roads. Just keep your pay stub. Some are federally owned and some are owned by private corporations which are fenced to keep the animals out. A solar powered phone can be accessed every few meters from which a call to the Green Angels will bring out an ambulance and trained medical personnel. Or a mechanic. Repairs and replacement parts are free. A totaled car is replaced. A medical facility at the end of the toll will provide intermediate emergency care until transport to a nearby hospital. Now, why can’t the U.S. do this if Mexico can!?

From Oregon to Oaxaca Mexico! And all that worry for nothing! We’ve been reading too many newspaper articles up north. Flew through the Nogales border and down highway 15…no stops…no searches…no dogs…no federales to bribe…or narcos dressed like federales…no banditos!

No cars pulled off the toll road and set afire by narcos trying to block the police like happened at Loredo a few months ago. 18 of them! I made the mistake of telling my son about it…which disappointingly resulted in his reneging on a promise to give me his VW Taureg!

At the 22km mark got my $36 car permit good for the duration of my FM3 visa (one year) with no trouble. It renews automatically when I renew my visa. Good thing for plastic. Cash would have required a $400 deposit for a new Nissan Xterra to ensure no resale in Mexico and it’s return back across the border. (Some day) Sure wouldn’t want to take a sale from a Mexican auto dealer.

Nearly three weeks in Las Vegas with my oldest son Greg and his sweet Yellow Lab was a joy. He has to be kissing you and in your lap constantly…the Lab…not Greg! My early rising habit came in handy…I made coffee every morning for Greg before he joined another doctor and some others for a 7am workout with an ex Navy Seal. Then it was my job to rub on the Icy Hot and Peppermint Oil. I made Pork with Green Salsa and lasagna for his freezer. Maybe he’ll let me come back some time! Weather was great! Sat out by the pool with my computer every day. “You’re darker,” my friends here are saying. Good. Need that vitamin D!

I had picked up a friend near Palm Springs to ride down with me and as we approached Mazatlan we made a last minute decision to drive over to Lake Chapala. Expat City. Don’t even have to meet any Mexicans…

Spent the night in a very clean luxurious “love motel” in Guadalajara for $20…a “hot pillow” motel my friend called it. We confused the heck out of the maids when we asked for two rooms! Pulled the car through a narrow curving driveway and maneuvered under the room behind a metal door. Then up the stairs…never to be seen by anyone who might tell…

One wall full of mirrors. Vibrating king-sized bed. Porn on the TV. Bathroom two steps up…condoms and lubricants at the ready. Glass-walled shower allowed a view from the room below. You could order all sorts of toys, more condoms?? and viagra…that would be whirled around through the wall in a metal contraption that kept the maid from seeing anything. What a waste on me, I thought!

The next day we managed to make our way into the old silver mining town of Guanajuato without getting lost among all the canyon tunnels. Here is a video of one such tunnel.

The city is much bigger than I remembered from a visit many years ago. There are several colleges here and on a week day the streets were crammed with “kids.” Our beautiful old colonial hotel was also crammed with kids who kept us awake all night. Arghhh.

There are tunnel “raves” with electronic music held every year here. Incidentally, these are common in New York City and all over Europe. One of my couchsurfers from Berlin recently told me about A Love Parade rave in a tunnel in Duisberg Germany in July 2010 that ended in tragedy when the crowd stampeded and 21 were left dead and hundreds injured. That annual Love Parade, which started in Berlin, was permanently canceled. Below is a video of one in Guanajuato.

Visited Diego Rivera’s home which is now a museum…and of course the Mummies of Guanajuato. About a hundred naturally mummified bodies were found interred during a cholera outbreak in 1833. Horribly, you can tell some of them were accidentally buried alive. They were disinterred between 1865 and 1958, when few relatives could pay a tax in order to keep the bodies in the cemetery. They are so popular with tourists that the city has built a beautiful new museum to hold them…open about a year.

Well, that’s Guanajuato. It was my second city of choice when I moved to Mexico in 2006. Next stop, San Juan del Rio…just south of Queretaro.

I moved to Oaxaca City in 2006 to find 70,000 of the state’s teachers striking in the Centro. They had been striking every year for more than 20 years to gain a minimum of educational standards for a state with 16 indigenous groups living in the mountains…all with their own languages.

The strike gained scores of supporters, including human rights activists and civil organizations and this time it lasted 7 months before it was put down by thousands of federal riot control troops. It left more than 20 dead, including an American independent journalist and hundreds more beaten and/or incarcerated or disappeared. No one has been convicted of any of it.

I reported on much of this in this blog, thinking, like many other expats living there, that helping shine the light internationally on unlawful acts by the authorities, would help protect the innocent. I am not so sure any more because the impunity of the authorities has been escalating. The most recent incident is the killing of a Finnish human rights worker along with two Trique leaders as he accompanied a caravan bringing food and water from Mexico City to a barricaded Trique community. Repeated inquiries by the Finnish parents, the European Union and even the UN has not resulted in justice.

However, it is also unlawful in Mexico for foreigners to “interfere” in Mexican national politics and the authorities are free at any time to define what constitutes “interference.” The authorities can arrest or deport (or more) any foreigner on the spot and it has been done.

So when I return to Oaxaca, I will not be reporting on my blog on activities that I feel could be interpreted as “interference.”

However there are reputable blogs reporting breaking events in Latin America, including Oaxaca. Two of these are Upside Down World and Narco News.com with 450 co-publishers reporting.

Looks like another week holed up with my son, Greg, and my favorite sweet golden laborador, in Las Vegas. If Las Vegas is invaded I am quite certain I will survive. 🙂

I am cooking for the freezer as is usual when I visit him. Split pea soup with ham hocks, lasagna, Oaxacan pork ribs in salsa verde.

Greg has offered to take me to the Cirque du Soleil “Elvis” but just can’t bring myself to watch this dog and pony show of my old raunchy 7th grade love.

I am missing the Day Of The Dead in Oaxaca. I would definitely prefer to celebrate the dead there than to watch the dying off political process in the U.S. of A.

Sigh…

From Klamath Falls I cross the California border…past the WWII Japanese Internment camp at Newell near Tule Lake…euphemistically called the Tule Lake War Relocation Center…and head south toward Reno Nevada.

I have a blown-up photo of my father herding sheep on the Liskey Ranch on the drained tule lake beds. (tules are plants that grow in water.) In fact, when my father died, it was the lead article on the front page of the Tule Lake newspaper, which at the time was surprising to me. I hadn’t realized what he stood for in Freedom Country.

North and south of this border is the ORCAL (Oregon/California) freedom country where, as a little girl…my father’s shadow…I grew up listening to my father rant on his rounds of visits with his farmer friends about the government, the trilateral commission and the Federal Reserve and all other forms of perceived intrusion of the government in their lives. My father would get far-right mailings from far-right organizations that my mother wouldn’t let in her house…making him read them outside on the porch. He used to declare that if the govmt ever showed up at his house he would blow them away with his hunting rifle. Such was and is the mentality of these 19th Century land settlers and their descendants.

Fast forward to the near-end of the Bush-Cheney presidency. Thousands of farmers in the Klamath Basin Irrigation District (of which my father once was president at a time when they were letting excess water flow into the sea rather than let California have any of it) were struggling to keep their crops from turning to dust in a recent drought.

As growers were counting on a century-old complex of dams and canals to irrigate 400,000 square miles of potato and alfalfa and grazing range from water in the nearby Lower Klamath Lake, the Bureau of Reclamation was getting ready to shut down the water gates. Federal biologists announced that the Endangered Species Act had determined that diverting the water from Lower Klamath Lake to the Tule Lake farmland was necessary to save the lives of 3 endangered species of fish…the Shortnose Suckers, Lost River Suckers and the Coho Salmon….at least one of which was the fish that the Klamath Indians had fished for centuries. This was just the kind of thing that drove so many western farmers around the bend.

But I wonder now what my father would think about water being diverted from Klamath County Oregon to Tule Lake California.

My own opinion, at the time, was that, in the first place, all this was the result of draining Tule Lake to create more farm land with no assurance of an adequate future source of water. Mess with mother nature and this what you get.

In the meantime, I was not surprised to learn that protests against the federal water cut-off were edging toward violence. Farmers and their families organized a symbolic bucket brigade of 18,000 men and women on May 7, 2001, then staged raids in June and July, using blow torches and chain saw to open irrigation gate that the Bureau of Reclamation had welded shut. Some of them clashed with U.S. marshals who were called out when local law enforcement officers refused to intervene. One group of protesters formed a mounted cavalry, organizing a Klamath T Party of civil disobedience.

Anti-government activists from out of state, including militia activists from Montana, Michigan, Idaho and Nevada, gathered in August for a Freedom Day demonstration at Klamath Falls. You had farmers sitting in front of the locks. It was an emotionally charged and potentially explosive situation.

Vice President Dick Cheney asked the interior department to convene a God Squad. The Republicans had lost Oregon by only one half of one percent in the prior election in 2000 and all they needed for a Republican win in 2008 was a draw that pitted one group of scientists against another. Cheney’s shadow government was not looking for answers as to how the fish could be saved and the farmers still get water. This was not about fish. It was about politics.

So with plenty of television coverage the headgate was opened as farmers chanted, Let the water flow!

In late September 2002, the first of an estimated 77 thousand dead salmon began washing up on the banks of the Klamath River where it passed through Yurok tribal lands. The threatened Cohos were dying but in even larger numbers were Chinook salmon which was the staple of commercial fishing in northern California.

So, on my way to Vegas, I wasn’t surprised to see this archway with the word Freedom at the head of a dirt road leading into one of the ranches.

My iPhone google maps gets me around Reno to highway 95 to Las Vegas. Then no service appears on my phone as I drive through the seemingly unending Nevada desert. At dark, I stop in Tonapah to spend the night in a $38 with senior discount trucker motel with free WiFi where I let my son in Las Vegas know where I am via email.

The next morning I drive up to a Mexican dive for breakfast. An old guy was sitting on the sidewalk in front of the car. As I walked past him, he says I am from a good state.

No wonder there are so many “old people” at McDonalds! A $1.00 coffee is only 69 cents for seniors! The waitress looks up and says, you aren’t a senior are you? I say yes, 66. She says, really! Maybe just my granma looks old!

A guy next to me starts bantering with her. We went to circus school in Italy together, he says. Cirque du Soleil! So much for Klamath Falls being Red Neck! 🙂 My son, Greg, is taking me to see the Elvis Cirque when I get to Las Vegas. The Beatles Cirque last year was outstanding! Almost unbelievable!

George and Jan took off this morning for Eugene…just to see a football game! Back at McDonalds…WiFi and listening to NPR…discouraging news but the station redeems itself with enlivening world music.

Now killing time waiting for an old high school classmate to get into town tonight. What to do? My choices seem to be a walk along the river, the county museum or the Indian Museum.

A few years ago at the County Museum, I found an article in an old newspaper with a picture of the Winema Riverboat that carried my paternal grandparents across Klamath River into Klamath Falls in 1906….that is after coming out west from Kansas on a “citizen train” to Dunsmuir CA (the end of the railroad at that time) where they climbed aboard a stagecoach to meet the Riverboat.

My aunt Mary was a little girl at the time…my father still in utero…has always talked about the ferry turning over on the way. I’ll be darned if I didn’t find a news article about that accident too!

But that wasn’t the end of the trip. A horse and buggy carried them another 40 miles to Malin…a whole Czech settlement that moved out together from the midwest because of the promise of plentiful irrigation water and where my father (Cecil) grew up being called “cecelic,” or some such spelling for some kind of little animal because my father was small. As a small girl I loved those Czech people who delighted in children and always made me feel liked and cared for. Well, the Irish sheepherder friends of my father did too…entertaining me no end with leprechuan stories.

Sometime before I kick the bucket I am going to have to lug all the Indian artifacts to the Indian Museum and give them back to the Klamath Indian tribe. Hundreds of pounds of pestles and bowls were plowed up over the years by my father on the property…Big Springs Ranch… which was years before a Klamath Indian encampment. Huge beautiful springs ran through it feeding the nearby Lost River…my childhood playground where I pretended I was an Indian Maiden like the ones I saw in John Wayne movies. Sometimes I would be a stealthy Indian tracker. Heck with the cowboys!

Oh dear, look what happens when I have time on my hands…

So I begin skype-chatting with a Thai friend in Bangkok.

I’m back at McDonalds…pretty good latte here…cheaper than Starbucks. I’m sitting in my car using their free WiFi when a bent-over older (old sounds unkind) fellow appears at my open car window which is apparently an invitation for conversation.

Watcha doin’? Studyin’?

You like this car? Big tires. You get better gas mileage with bigger tires. I say gas is expensive here…$2.99 to 3.07. Yeah, he says, they’re all crooks. Doesn’t cost that much to get gas in here. They’re all crooks.

You know what the fellow up there says? There are no pockets up there. No money. He (I assume he means God) doesn’t like his name on money. No pockets up there. His name on money comes from some European country. No pockets up there and we will find that out. Yep.

I don’t know what else to say. Ok, he says, pointing to the birds all over the parking lot, I gotta go feed the pigeons.

Bet McDonalds loves that.

Klamath Falls is turning out to be just as, if not more, interesting than many other places in the world I have been.

After 7 weeks in Salem Oregon taking care of a lot of unfinished business and spending time with my son Doug, who will be returning soon to Thailand to join his Thai wife, I am finally on my way back to Oaxaca in my new car loaded with stuff.

First stop. Klamath Falls in rural SE Oregon. I grew up 50 miles from here on a sheep ranch just outside of Bonanza (little more than 300 people) and attended junior high and high school in Klamath. Bea and Sal are gone now, but I am visiting with what’s left of my second family that I lived with during high school.

Red Neck country for sure. Of course I didn’t think that when I lived here. Hunting with my dad in the fall was something to look forward to after a summer of haying and irrigating 10 hours a day. He used me to flush the brush in the draw while he stood watch on the ridge. Sleeping out under the stars at night under only a blanket. We’d laugh at the city folk all dressed up in fancy orange gear lugging their sleeping bags, lanterns, cook stoves and such. Lambing time wouldn’t come until February. It is fall now and many businesses are closed with Gone Huntin’ signs on the doors.

I also didn’t notice the neighborly generosity when I lived here. I guess because I was used to it. My mom would trade eggs for ice-cream from the milk man. She was always taking cuttings of her plants and giving them away to anyone who visited.

George makes chorizo and salsa and gives it out to his appreciative co-workers at the lumber company where he works nights maintaining the machinery. His next door neighbor brought over fresh home-grown peppers and tomatoes yesterday. At Christmas, George grinds and cooks his own corn for masa for tamales like his Mexican dad always did…continuing a generational ritual. He will give away most of those too.
George gives me a bag of beef jerky for my trip south. George would give you the shirt off his back.

Last night, after a high school football game (football is endemic here), and while George was at work, his wife Jan, his daughter Melina and her husband and his parents and their twin 17 year old boys and their 20 year old daughter (my god where has the time gone… Melina is the same age as my oldest son…43!) and I gathered at Wubba’s BBQ rustic rib joint for dinner to celebrate Melina’s husband’s birthday.

I was the first one to arrive at the restaurant, so I had waited on a bench by the door…perusing my iPhone for emails. When Melina entered I jumped up to hug her leaving my iPhone on the bench. I was already seated when this young guy comes over to my table. Do I know you, I thought. Then I saw he was holding out the iPhone.

It has been a few years since I have seen Melina’s kids so she re-introduces me to them. Remember Eunice? Then she says I used to live with her dad! Everyone’s mouth drops open. She clears it up. “When Eunice was living with dad and his family when they were in high school,” she says laughing.

The 20 year old daughter squeals with excitement about moving into her own apartment with a friend. Almost everything they need has been given to them but they still need a few things, one of which was a microwave. People are often loud here and the daughter is so loud she could be overheard by those at nearby tables. I had been noticing a big guy with a face so work-dirty it was nearly black in a nearby booth. Suddenly the daughter and Melina’s husband disappear…coming back to announce that the guy with a dirty face had given her a small microwave that wouldn’t fit into the space for it in his work truck. He GAVE it to her. He didn’t ask to sell it to her. It was nearly new.

This morning I am sitting in my car at McDonalds using the only free WiFi I can find in Klamath…of course after having coffee (coffee is surprisingly good at McDonalds) and a Egg McMuffin. An older guy walks by my open window and notices my computer propped up against the steering wheel. He looks at the computer screen showing Amazon.com. He asks who I’m chatting with. Then he announces that he caught his wife talking to these guys on internet chat in kind of a “personal” way. Then he tells me that sometimes he sees naked girls whirling around on his screen. But his wife, he says, tore up his Playboy. I laugh…and he laughs and he moves on into McDonalds.

I’m here several hours (Jan is at work and George is sleeping) when I realize I am hungry again. A young kid with tattoos and a baseball cap comes out of McDonalds and holds up a bag with two chicken sandwiches. For you, he says. I am speechless as I gratefully take them with a big smile. I have no idea why he gave them to me.

What is this? Off the beaten track, Klamath County is one of the most economically depressed counties in Oregon. Gas is 2.99 a gallon here. Jobless numbers exceed national and state figures. Maybe they realize they are all in this together and they have to help each other out. Or maybe they were just always this way…

Colorful indigenous mountain villages are wonderful to visit in Oaxaca. Having had an older SUV there for a year in 2007, I drove it back to the states where my son killed it…an oil leak in the motor.

But, missing Oaxaca, I moved back down again. Then the options were frightening chicken buses that often go over the brink…the gory details in the back of every newspaper. Or colectivos…shared taxis piled with as many bodies as would fit…often with a small child who would upchuck around the curves. No potty stops…no photo stops. I would often wish I could explain to the drivers how to take a corner…slow down… and then about 2/3 of the way into it step on the accelerator which picks up the car and helps keep nine bodies from ending up in what’s left of each others’ laps….back and forth…constant low-level nausea. It offers up a story or two for your friends but it gets old fast.

So. I flew back to Oregon to buy a mountain car and bring back some more of my stuff. My 23 inch computer monitor for watching movies (I don’t have a TV), hand mixer, food mill, a small microwave with English language controls, real maple syrup, pourable salt, Krusteaz mix, corn meal, (can you believe that with all the corn in Oaxaca you can’t get the kind of corn meal to make corn bread), spices and some favorite kitchen ware. You know the stuff.

I decided on the Nissan Xterra. I requested estimates on the internet and then followed up in person. I had a limit and let them know, but they will tell you anything just to get you on the lot.

First lot…Gladstone in Portland Oregon…called the internet contact and asked for an appointment. Oh, yes, I’ll be here she says. NOT!!! Got there and she hid in her office…sending out another salesman to deal with me. I showed him the email with her offer. Conference ensued between manager and 4 other people. Oh, that was a typo in the email they said. Riiight!

Walked out and called Wilsonville. Told them my limit. Salesman confers with his manager. Comes back to the phone and tells me they have a demonstrator with low mileage for well below my limit. Go to the Wilsonville lot. Oh, we can’t possibly sell it for that! The salesman was new and didn’t know what he was doing! Riiiight!

I call Hillsboro who had a basic model for well below my limit. I call McMinnville who had one Xterra S with big tires. Ohhh, damn. Should have gone to Hillsboro first. I wanted the S. Told the salesman what the other two lots did to me. He said, oh, are they still doing that? That’s what they used to do in the 60’s! Sold it to me for my limit. But no car manual in the car and had to go back to McMinnville a week later to pick up a copy they ordered specially. They promised an extradited car title. It’s been over a month and I have yet to get it. Oh, well.

My first and last auto purchase…I hope!

Update wed:
Well, I hope the governor is good and embarrased after overstating the damage in Oaxaca and drawing intense international media attention. He has now issued a statement saying that 11 people are missing, no confirmed dead and 3-4 houses buried. Shhiishh!

Oaxaca has been inundated with two feet of rain in the last two weeks with record rainfalls for a month before that. The New York Times carried this report this morning:

A hillside collapsed onto a village in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca early Tuesday, burying houses in mud and stones and trapping hundreds of people as they slept, state authorities said.

As many as 300 houses in the village of Santa Maria Tlahuitoltepec may have been buried in the landslide, said the state governor, Ulises Ruiz.

Rescue workers trying to reach the village with earth-moving equipment have been hampered by blocked roads in the remote area, which has been pounded by incessant rains. “We hope to reach in time to rescue those families who were buried by the hill,” Mr. Ruiz told Mexican television.

This is about 50 miles from Oaxaca City where I live. And the latest news report on CBC says they couldn’t even land one helicopter there today (!!)
People in Oaxaca are forming help centers and are asking for donations. This appeared in the Oaxaca group on couchsurfing:

Up to us a lot more responsibility now with the tragedy that has befallen the people of Tlahuitoltepec, Mixe. They can overcome this sadness is in large part on all of us! Let’s help these people with great history, traditions and poverty.

In my facebook profile for me, Rodrigo Guzman, I have the account number to which they can make donations, so you can donate nonperishable food, bottled water, beans, rice, sugar, canned goods, can opener, antiviral drugs, clothes in good condition, covers and mattresses in any of the collection centers that are opening throughout the state.

The other tragedy of the moment has to do with the Trique indigenous communities in the Mixteca region north of Oaxaca City.

Three years ago, the indigenous Trique municipality of San Juan Copala, in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, declared itself autonomous from the government. Since that time they have faced severe repression, with community members being kidnapped, raped and assassinated by two state-backed paramilitary groups in an attempt to destroy the autonomous project. Two caravans bringing food and water to the town were driven back with several people murdered…one a Finnish human rights worker. The people have been driven out of their town and taken over by Oaxaca government allies.

Join Friends of Brad Will along with guests from Movement for Justice in El Barrio, to learn more about San Juan Copala, including a short documentary and video-message from residents of the autonomous municipality.

Friends of Brad Will is a national network working for justice for Brad Will, an American independent journalist murdered by state paramilitaries in Oaxaca in 2006.

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, a bridge to the Oaxaca airport has collapsed caused people to have to walk in and out.

Wish me luck driving down in mid-October.

EVERY 100 years, Mexico seems to have a rendezvous with violence as again the country gathered on Wednesday night for the ceremony of the “grito” — the anniversary of the Revolution…the call to arms that began the war for independence from Spain in 1910.

As they have on every Sept. 15 for 200 years, Mexicans gathered together in the central squares of our cities and towns, even in the smallest and most remote villages. At midnight, they heard a local governing official re-enact the grito uttered by Miguel Hidalgo, the “father of the fatherland.” They shouted, jubilantly, with genuine feeling: “Viva México!”

Euphoric cries were mixed with a flashy Mexico City military parade, a counter-bicentennial gathering, fresh outbreaks of narco-violence in different parts of the country and goads of symbolism that embodied the past, present and future of a nation of more than 100 million people. As the historic day faded, Hurricane Karl bore down on the state of Veracruz, already battered by this summer’s torrential rains.

At a ceremony in the town of Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, the unassuming place where Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla launched the 1810 rebellion that resulted in Mexican independence 11 years later, President Felipe Calderon was greeted with a sprinkling of obscenities and unusual shouts. Some members of the audience reportedly yelled out “Viva El Chapo,” or “Long Live El Chapo,” in apparent reference to fugitive drug lord Joaquin Guzman Loera. “Death to the Bad Government!” also was heard.

Later, Calderon presided over a Mexico City military parade of about 23,000 Mexican army and navy personnel, including members of elite anti-narco units. While air force jets flew overhead, military delegations from 17 countries were on hand for the historic commemoration.

What’s that all about?!!!

The participation of a Federal Police contingent was an unusual feature of this year’s parade. As the emerging front-line force in the so-called drug war, the Federal Police headed by Genaro Garcia Luna is the institution favored by Mexico City and Washington to take over combat of organized crime from the army and the navy.

Meanwhile in Oaxaca more than 2,000 police and military personnel are guarding entry to the Zocalo as a security measure. Wed night was the Grito, and Thursday was the parade.

Against whom are they guarding? All we know is the ambulant vendors, the unions and protesters.

In Oaxaca El Grito belies a different kind of violence…one instigated by the PRI (the powerful party in control for the last 80 years) to pit one group of Trique indigenous people against another group seeking autonomy as the government had promised years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

A bit of information about the formation of the individual and national consciousness of people in the U.S.

Sorry for length, but this is mostly for people who are not “United Staters.” :))

We all know that the US was settled by people who had already rejected religious and political persecution. My own Polish great grandfather, when the Germans who had taken over the part of Poland they were in, toward the end of the 18th century, wanted to conscript the boys into the German army and only allow German to be used in the schools, said “hell no” and sent my grandfather and his older sister, 17 and 18 at the time, across the ocean in the middle of a harrowing storm, to find a home for their parents and the rest of their 10 siblings. Imagine that!

They worked in the mines in Illinois until they had enough money to rent farms. My husband’s German parents, fleeing the fury of Stalin in Ukraine, settled first in Canada and then lived in earth huts in North Dakota…carving out a life out of stone and mud. People were “bootstrappers.” They were “free thinkers” and were some of this countries first teachers. This is the stuff that this country was made of…and still is if only in the national consciousness.

Then came WWI and WWII. I don’t know if many people realize that “Americans” in the U.S. contributed a great deal of support to the war effort… especially by severe rationing. After the war, in the 50’s, there was a GI student loan program that enabled returning veterans to leave the farms and become educated and join the booming middle class…many donning suits to work hugely long hours in new businesses. (Man In The Grey Flannel Suit).

There was an economic rebound and people were able to enjoy all those material things they had never had before…buying washing machines, sewing machines, modern kitchens with sinks and refrigerators and all kinds of things produced by the industrial revolution. This was when the states became very materialistic. Families wanted to provide the things for their children they never had for themselves.

But the collateral damage was huge. The children of these families grew up feeling neglected by absentee fathers. Mothers and other women, largely uneducated, were kept out of the work force and except by a few brave vocal ones, became the “perfect” housewife. The culture became extremely conforming. A woman’s skirt, one inch above or below the norm was considered weird. By this time, in the late 50’s, with increased economic stability, children were entering college. They began to notice the materialism and lack of values. They began to feel stifled by the conformity and perceived hypocrisy. This spawned the Beat Generation:

From the “Free Wiki”:

The Beat Generation is a term used to describe a group of American writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, and the cultural phenomena that they wrote about and inspired (later sometimes called “beatniks”). Central elements of “Beat” culture included experimentation with drugs and alternative forms of sexuality, an interest in Eastern religion, and a rejection of materialism.

The major works of Beat writing are Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize what could be published in the United States. On the Road transformed Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady into a youth-culture hero. The members of the Beat Generation quickly developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.

The original “Beat Generation” writers met in New York. Later, the central figures (with the exception of Burroughs) ended up together in San Francisco in the mid-1950s where they met and became friends with figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance.

This is what attracted kids later to the streets of San Francisco.

Meanwhile, “Old Leftists,” (largely Socialist and Communist) seeing the handwriting on the wall became vocal but were drummed out by a culture diametrically opposed to their political agendas. Union organizers were beaten by police at the bidding of robber barons.

In the late 50’s, Jerry Rubin lead the “Free Speech Movement” largely centered at the University of California at Berkeley. I have friends who were swept off the steps of Spraul Hall by water cannons during those demonstrations.

These were the spiritual predecessors of the next generation of “drop-outs” in the 60’s and 70’s…rebelling against conformity and lack of free expression. Kids left home to live on the streets or join “back to the earth” communes. (The Beatles “She’s Leaving Home” and songs by first Pete Seegar and then Bob Dylan). Conscientious Objectors fled to Canada rather than be drafted into the Viet Nam War. And they were “loud.”

Backpackers by the thousands hit the “Hippie Trail” that led from London to Kathmandu and found alternative cultures and values.

Those who initially objected to the involvement in Vietnam fell into three broad categories: people with left-wing political opinions who wanted an NLF victory; pacifists who opposed all wars; and liberals who believed that the best way of stopping the spread of communism was by encouraging democratic, rather than authoritarian governments.

The first march to Washington against the war took place in December, 1964. Only 25,000 people took part but it was still the largest anti-war demonstration in American history.

In 1967, a group of distinguished academics under the leadership of Bertrand Russell, set up the International War Crimes Tribunal.

In November, 1965, Norman Morrison, a Quaker from Baltimore, followed the example of the Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Due, and publically burnt himself to death. In the weeks that were to follow, two other pacifists, Roger La Porte and Alice Herz, also immolated themselves in protest against the war.

The draft increased the level of protest. Students protested at what they considered was an attack on people’s right to decide for themselves whether they wanted to fight for their country. Young men burnt their draft cards.

The Civil Rights Movement raged in the late 1960s. Anti-Vietnam War leaders began to claim that if the government did not withdraw from the war they might need the troops to stop a revolution taking place.
In New York, over a million people took part in one demonstration.

Eldridge Cleaver argued that blacks were being denied the right to vote in elections. Therefore, blacks were fighting in Vietnam “for something they don’t have for themselves.” As another black leader put it: “If a black man is going to fight anywhere, he ought to be fighting in Mississippi” and other parts of America.

The most dramatic opposition to the war came from the soldiers themselves. Between 1960 and 1973, 503,926 members of the US armed forces deserted. Many soldiers began to question the morality of the war once they began fighting in Vietnam.

In 1967, Vietnam Veterans Against the War was formed. They demonstrated all over America in wheelchairs or on crutches. People watched on television as Vietnam heroes threw away the medals they had won fighting in the war. (Senator John Kerry was one of these.)

Jerry Rubin and the Yippie movement had already begun planning a youth festival in Chicago to coincide with the Democratic National Convention in 1968. Students For a Democratic Society and the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, also made their presence known. In the end, 10,000 demonstrators gathered in Chicago for the convention where they were met by 23,000 police and National Guardsmen. And they were all very loud.

The Black Power and Brown Power movements threatened the “Establishment” “The Man.” They were loud. In 1968, at the Olympics in Mexico, the two Black medal winners held their black-gloved fists up during the national anthem.

The older generation and the conservatives by nature became confused and frightened. Society became divided. And is divided still. Libertarians have joined the New Leftists as if in two ends meeting in a circle in their demand for freedom for the individual. For the Libertarians and Constitutionalists, it means too much governmental power. With the world economic crisis, militias and the gun culture is growing…expecting a Mad Max world. Tea Partiers, on the margins, sick of “political correctness” and being made to feel guilty by the demands of the minorities are holding up misspelled signs. Glenn Beck is earning millions on Fox TV. The left has turned to blogs on the web. And they are all loud.

What has all this to do with the American personality? We are demanding freedom of expression and openness…politically and personally. There is a class war developing. Genteel behavior is just a reminder of the stifling 50’s and the superficiality and materialism it spawned. Gentility is also associated in many minds with the stifling cultures that “the Americans” fled in the last couple of centuries. Gentility is not considered very important in the scale of things. Backpacking leftists and tea partiers alike are extolling the “common man” against the monied oligarchy and abuse of governmental power. And they are loud.

Those on the sidelines, either have been greatly influenced by the continuum of popular and political culture eg some people in the south still fly the Confederate flag left over from the Civil War. Or are just not aware…busy making a living and/or raising kids. All these strands are immensely diverse depending on personal histories and the histories and cultures of the regions and states they live in, whether urban or rural, and anyone wanting to get a “feel” for the people would have to at least live there awhile but also travel extensively to see it. I would even go so far as to compare the states in the U.S. to the countries in the EU. Nearly impossible to make very many generalizations except for historical facts.

Whew!

I read travel warnings and take them into consideration. They are useful if detailed, recent and taken together with other sources of information. But in my opinion they are primarily a cover-your-ass thing. They are used by tour companies and exchange programs for the same reason…to mitigate against extreme criticism and lawsuits in case anything happens to a tourist both of which affects the bottom line as well as reputation.

The reason I don’t rely on them is because I have been in too many places that have received ridiculous travel warnings. In 2002 there was trouble in Kashmir, so the US state dept issued a warning for the entire country of India! We found out that even foreign businesses were ignoring it. We were, however, refused a visa extension in India…we think because of the warning.

There is a large amount of local and expat hostility in Oaxaca where I live because of travel warnings and expats who live here just roll their eyes and shake their heads when they are issued. In 2006-7 there was a popular uprising and yes people were killed…killed by government thugs trying to take down the leaders. An American Indymedia videographer was also killed…by a govt thug. The result was that hotels, guesthouses and other businesses were closed and hundreds if not thousands of people lost their jobs. Mexico depends largely on tourism so alarmist warnings can decimate the local economy.

I was in Thailand during the coup in 2006 If you didn’t know the coup was going on you wouldn’t know anything was happening. Same thing this April and May 2010 in Bangkok when tens of thousands of demonstrators occupied the two high-end hotel/shopping and business districts and upwards of 90 of them died including 4 journalists.

My guesthouse was only a couple sky train stops from the main staging area. But if I didn’t know what was going on I would never have known by just going out to the street. A friend and her husband were staying in their condo just a couple blocks away from the staging area and never saw anything. Most local violence is directed by locals against locals. My guesthouse workers were a great source of info. At least one of them joined the demonstrators every day after work.

I think the important thing is to take responsibility for your own safety by talking to locals, comb the internet travel forums for eye-witness information,  find out who is doing responsible tweeting, which political and personal blogs to pay attention to and read the local press…most countries have English-language news sources. Ask locals what they think of them. It didn’t take me long to know the score in a general way. Probably the most useful thing when you are in a country is to talk to long-term expats. They are probably better sources of information than the locals because they monitor the situation for themselves and usually know all sides of an issue.

And PAY ATTENTION! I was in the Saladaeng business district of BKK as late as 5pm just a few meters away from the military the day they entered it. They were all hunkered down in the overhead skytrain flyways. Everyone expected them to try to rout the demonstrators there but no one knew when. My pharmacist said, come back tomorrow and I will have your meds. I said, oh yeah???!! You could feel the tension in the air. I didn’t go back and sure enough that night and the next day locals and tourists alike were gravely injured in attacks that included tear gas and bullets with more than one local killed.

I follow Thai politics because my son lives there and I go there often so was reading and hearing rumors long before the trouble started. All you have to know is the political history of a country to know when there will be trouble. Most of us know beforehand when we are going to a country. Start researching as soon as you know.

Often an issue will quickly develop into a crisis WHILE you are there…not before, even if you are aware of the political environment as with the two events in Thailand.

I learned my lesson to research when I decided to move down to Oaxaca June 1 2006 although it wouldn’t have made a difference really. I got off the plane at night…got up in the morning in the hostel and went outside to explore. Much to my surprise I found 70,000 striking teachers camping in all the streets of the Centro. I moved into my pre-arranged apartment and 4am on the 14th woke up to gunshots, church bells and helicopters. The municipal police were trying to rout the teachers from their encampment in the Zocalo (central plaza).

This was to be my biggest education about corrupt governments with no rule of law, no economic development with money going into pockets instead, poverty, popular uprisings, history, US foreign policy, and bureaucrats in the pockets of foreign companies and a frightened middle class that I had ever had…first hand.

I spent the next 7 months reading, video taping, taking photos, documenting, witnessing and reporting until the President of Mexico finally sent in the federal riot control police in November who swept the Centro, picked up a couple thousand people off the streets, (not one foreigner) beat up a lot of them and hauled them to jail…raping some. This time, however, we saw it coming and I and some friends drove up to a mountain pueblo for the day even though if you are not participating tourists will be left alone.

No one wants an international run in. In Mexico this includes the narcos who will shoot the marijuana growers and runners if they make trouble with tourists. The locals wanted us out there because it made them feel safer and more difficult for the government to lie…although it did not stop it entirely.

It was amazing how similar the causes, uprising and government response was in Thailand. If you are already there develop local contacts and do some more research. One of the best immediate ways of gauging the environment is by following the tweets of the place you are going or are in.

Editorial comment: I tell people that if they find themselves in a country with upheavals going on for heaven’s sakes, don’t complain because it is “ruining your vacation.” You are in their country and they are in charge of making their history. They are not there to entertain the tourists unless their jobs depend on it.

Having said all that you will hear about the random tourist who will get into trouble.  But to provide some perspective I recommend reading “World’s Most Dangerous Places” by Robert Young Pelton. Here’s what he has to say:

“The United States has a very comprehensive system of travel warnings,” says Pelton, “but conveniently overlooks the dangers within its own borders. Danger cannot be measured, only prepared against. The most dangerous thing in the world,” he says, “is ignorance.” Welcome to Dangerous Places…”no walls, no barriers, no bull” it says in the preface. “With all the talk about survival and fascination with danger, why is it that people never admit that life is like watching a great movie and–pooof–the power goes off before we see the ending? It’s no big deal. Death doesn’t really wear a smelly cloak and carry a scythe…it’s more likely the attractive girl who makes you forget to look right before you cross that busy intersection in London…

It helps to look at the big picture when understanding just what might kill you and what won’t. It is the baby boomers’ slow descent into gray hair, brand-name drugs, reading glasses, and a general sense of not quite being as fast as they used to be that drives the survival thing. Relax: You’re gonna die. Enjoy life, don’t fear it.

To some, life is the single most precious thing they are given and it’s only natural that they would invest every ounce of their being into making sure that every moment is glorious, productive, and safe. So does “living” mean sitting strapped into our Barca Lounger, medic at hand, 911 autodialer at the ready, carefully watching for low-flying planes? Or should you live like those folks who are into extreme, mean, ultimate adventure stuff…sorry that stuff may be fun to talk about at cocktail parties, but not really dangerous…not even half as dangerous as riding in a cab on the graveyard shift in Karachi.

Living is (partly) about adventure and adventure is about elegantly surfing the tenuous space between lobotomized serenity and splattered-bug terror and still being in enough pieces to share the lessons learned with your grand kids. Adventure is about using your brain, body and intellect to weave a few bright colors in the world’s dull, gray fabric…

The purpose of “Dangerous Places” is to get your head screwed on straight, your sphincter unpuckered and your nose pointed in the right direction.”

Right on!!

BTW, in addition to an ice storm in the NW upon my arrival and the tsunami in Thailand while I was there (that almost took the lives of my son and his wife), I am developing a certain reputation and friends are jokingly warning me to stay away from them. 🙂

New York Times
The Summer That Ended All Summers
By JOSH WEIL
Published: August 21, 2010
Leverett, Mass.

No one — not the doctor in Cairo with his egret-feather hair and bad-news eyes; not the spinal surgeon, with his broad Egyptian shoulders and eagerness for the knife — knew how it happened. It might have started during Ramadan, out by the pyramids, on a spine-rattling, bareback gallop. It might have happened 13,000 feet up in the Alpine swamps between Uganda and Congo, as I leapt from tussock to tussock with 50 pounds of gear on my back.

But whatever caused the disc to burst and splatter against my spinal nerve, it brought the endless summer of heat and adventure that I had found while living in Northern Africa for a year suddenly, surely, to an end.

Ever since I was a kid, I’d lived for summer — and, until a few years ago, sharing it with my older brother was what brought summer to life. We used to crouch on the bank of the Deerfield River where it wound south of Vermont, taking turns blowing up our Kmart raft, bulge-cheeked and frog-eyed, our mouths on the inflation valves, dizzy and sputtering with laughter. We’d buckle on bike helmets, paddle into the rapids and spill.

If you’ve ever been hurled head-first into white water, you know the feeling: your world upturned, your hold on it spun loose, the current pitching you forward so fast you struggle to grasp what has happened to time. When you come up to breathe, the air is pure exhilaration.

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As death toll rises, Mexico rethinks drug war strategy

By TIM JOHNSON
McClatchy Newspapers

MEXICO CITY | The drug war in Mexico is at a crossroads.

As the death toll climbs above 28,000, President Felipe Calderon confronts growing pressure to try a different strategy — some are even suggesting legalizing narcotics — to quell the violence unleashed by major drug syndicates.

Many Mexicans don’t know whether their country is winning or losing the war against drug traffickers, but they know they are fatigued by the brutality sweeping parts of their nation. For example:

Eighteen people were killed at a July 18 birthday party in Torreon, the capital of the state of Coahuila. A prison warden freed the assailants and lent them vehicles and assault rifles to do the killing.

In Durango, eight severed heads were left strewn around the state one late July morning. Outside of Monterrey, soldiers discovered a mass dumping ground of victims of the drug wars containing 51 bodies.

During Calderon’s tenure, gangs have killed 915 municipal police officers, 698 state police, and 463 federal agents, said the Secretariat of Public Safety.

Beyond the drug trade’s public violence, its corrupting aspects have affected many aspects of Mexican society.

“There are powerful interests in Mexico who benefit from the drug trade and the $40 billion, or whatever it is, that is pumped into the Mexican economy,” said Scott Stewart, vice president for tactical intelligence at Stratfor, an Austin, Texas-based company that provides global analysis. “You’re talking bankers. You’re talking businesses that are laundering money, construction companies that are building resorts.”

When the huge drug trade boils into the public eye, it threatens another of Mexico’s major trade channels — tourism, the nation’s third-largest source of revenue, and generator of one out of every 7.7 jobs in Mexico.

Fighting the cartels
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Then. How to read a book:

Now. How to read a computer: