A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall

The moment I arrived home to Guate I felt strange energy. It's that feeling you get after leaving the creepy first world where everything is rigged to look good, but really isn't. Here, everything looks bad, and most of it is bad. The whole country seemed wet, drenched, like a wet dog staring at me before a bath. My father welcomed me with the story of driving by a bullet-holed police truck after three coordinated shootings against vehicles of the penitentiary system, orchestrated by drug lords from in jail, killing three. There's no wonder why Guate is 3rd worldwide in homicides. Then followed a discussion with my brother during the windy highland drive towards Lake Atitlan, about Guatemalan problems and solutions. His view is simple: centralize power, alter the constitution to do so, come down hard on gangs and drug lords with brute force including torture and the use of the army, and elect a strong, charismatic leader who will amass political power to eradicate this amount of violence. My view: not so simple, structural explanations, international influences, anti-militarism, anti-torture, anti-constitution alteration, anti-centralized power. Who's view is more realistic? That's the problem, I have no idea. Realistic ceases to make any sense here. My brother wishes to stop violence and chaos with more violence. I wish to stop violence with 'politically correct' principles and theories. He has had my position in the past, and now he's tired of it, because his nails are worn to the nerve from scratching at the frustrating metal box that is violence. That once you're country is in it, and you want out, everything appears what it's not. And the walls seem to get thicker.
So with that, I listened to some Bob Dylan and we made it home safely. It was raining outside from the moment I flew in, to the moment I arrived home. Damp, everything was damp outside. Without my phone with numbers, and having not told anybody in the community I was coming, I was alone, at home, but not really home. And that's how I spent my first two days home, alienated from home and thinking about how fucked up this country is and how strange it is that my family exists as if in a bubble of illusory protection, and how it is that life just goes on here, despite the rain, despite the deaths, the terrorism, despite the metal box.
And life did go on. A volcano exploded in Antigua, closing the airport and cutting off tourism for the next few days. I was thankful I had made it in. It rained water, mostly, and a little sand and ashes, and rained... and rained. After having taken my dad to have ankle surgery, he was destined to bed-ridden-ness for the next few days. Saturday May 31st rolled around, and by mid, day I could tell that something was up with the amount of rain, and judging by our experience with Hurricane Stan's rains in 2005, something bad was going to happen. Even the rain sounded different, quieter, welcomed into the ground by heavy mud. Somehow, after about three days of rain, the birds were still singing. On Saturday, it rained a total of 3 feet, (1m) of water, superseding records, and river beds.
As I sat in the car staring out at the pouring rain, I filled the tank, anticipating being stranded from the outside world of essential resources, and Bob Dylan's a Hard Rain's Gonna Fall came on. "I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin."
It was disgusting to me, in a tragi-comic way, how the best word I could find to describe the situation on Facebook that evening was, "apocalypse?"
I saw how we welcomed this tragedy, in a nearly masochistic way. We stood by the rivers, waiting, documenting, nearly hoping to see something bad happen: a bridge fall in, the river rise, a house fall in. I saw language conjure a "disaster" out of nothingness. Everyone wanted to be the first to make others know of the severity of the situation, as well as the impending disaster. I saw how lots of rain turned into "Agatha," the tropical storm. I saw how "a landslide" turned into "landslides" that "wiped out X, Y and Z' s houses" that were "gone." I saw how landslides on roads turned into "roads completely destroyed." The exaggerations, although completely false, only served as a means with which to 'make something of' the scary situation. In talking about it in such terms, one's opinion and assessment was validated, and taken more seriously, one became the hero, who told the world the truth. The impact of the exaggerated language, unfortunately, didn't rival the severity of the material reality. Those signifiers and signifieds can only be experienced in person. The exaggerated language merely served as a way of coming to terms with, or coping with, the material reality that seems completely out of our control.
That night, "bajo el rio" (the river came down), an expression used here on Atitlan, where parts of towns are built on mainly river deltas due to growth, and after rains, it's expected that a sudden rush of water make it to the village slightly afterword, usually small enough for the bed to contain. Last Saturday at around 6:30pm the boulders in the rivers thundered through mud, trees, garbage in huge overflowing rivers, shaking the near-by ground, powerful enough to smash through entirely submerged homes, fill nearby houses with thick mud and create new riverbeds that didn't exist the day before. This happened to El Jaibalito, the Mayan town I grew up next door to. Luckily, people were evacuated that evening, or took to higher ground.
Sunday, the rain's slowed down, leaving behind region-wide, thousands evacuated, hundreds left homeless, 150 dead, and lots of money to be spent on roads and 32 unusable bridges. The inflammatory language was viral, and seemed to serve a soothing function.

I would come home and do my best to update my bed-ridden father about the state of his property, town and department. I had been to one of those houses that had been submerged. It's roof was gone, walls half-bashed in, completely emptied of its insides. Next to it was Aurelio Simon, a current construction employee of my father, salvaging the electricity breaker box of his light blue house. He was quiet and serious. He told me, "mucho problema aqui" (many problems here). I think of this as an expression sometimes used by indigenous in Atitlan used to describe anything that's unwanted that has entered life. It's used for social feuds, health problems, money problems, relationships, alcoholism, crime and in this case, disaster. In what was once the interior of his house, was a bright red, blue and yellow painting of the virgin Mary. Something about that touched me, and brought unwanted moisture to my eyes and that radiating tingly feeling through my nose, stomach, and throat. Was Virgin Mary his way of warding off "problemas?" How was he supposed to explain this? How does anyone explain unwanted, unexpected, undeserved, and unforeseeable loss? I want to think that the Virgin Mary protected the family by allowing them time to evacuate, and didn't permit the little piece of wall she's painted upon, nearly leveraged over the riverbed, to be destroyed, in order to leave them a message from God. Actually, that's what happened.
How do you get to the root of what's happening to your country when all you see is what surrounds you, badness? How do you explain what's happening to it without veering off into fantasy explanations, or self-serving intellectual martyrdom or guilt-trips? How do you manage when what you see and don't see leads you to extremism, and reality smacks you in the face every once in a while? How will Don Aurelio Simon manage? How will Guatemala manage?
"Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number...
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall."




My friend Anand, who once was TA for an moving class, now doing research in anthropology, responded to my email from Delhi, India:
Far away from the comforts and consumption of Delhi, where I live, a civil war rages in the forests at the heart of my country. You might have read about this. Maoists, committed to violence against the state fighting for (and sometimes against) tribals who are being dispossessed by the state, so that the minerals under their lands and their forests can be easily exploited by big industry. It is a war far removed from me but the casualties are apparent even here, in Delhi. The river that I cross twice every day, the river that was once the life of the city, runs dead and black, killed by industrial effluent, sludge and sewage. Delhi is a massive groaning city of 18 million people, many of them smugly unaware of their relative privilege. Delhi's drinking water comes not from this river that we have killed, but piped from a massive dam built in the faraway mountains, a dam which displaced a few hundred thousand people. Delhi itself is a city built upon ruins and graveyards. A city built upon its own forgetting. A city birthed by violence which has nearly obliterated the memory of what a city could be -- not at war with its own people and everything around it, not a pillager upon the land; but in harmony with itself, and with nature. Perhaps when you are here, I will show you some of those ruins. But you seem to have seen ruins enough in Guatemala.

This is not a poetic exaggeration but a sober statement of fact -- the world we live in has never been so fucked up. This has been true for every generation since the late nineteenth century, (or arguably even further, since the beginning of "modernity"). The world that we've all lived in, generation after generation, has gone catastrophically wrong in a way that could never even have been imagined previously. What can we do? It is important to do what you are doing, to truly witness what is going wrong; to be moved by what we are losing. For not enough people see it at all. People are too cocooned by false comfort, in the belief that life is the best it can be, and going to get better. To bear witness to the truth, to prove this "first world" notion (not just restricted to the first world) false seems to be the best we can do. There were lines you left out of the Dylan song, which kind of answer the how to deal with and what to do questions with which you ended your mail --

And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',
But I'll know my song well before I start singin',
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,

It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

None of it is easy. The burden of witnessing never is. And it leaves us marked and scarred and forever changed. But I'm glad you're carrying that burden. For your corner of Guate, and for the world.

A cousin from Chicago responded:

this was an incredible email. i was on the train this monring on my way to work, surrounded by all the everyday downtown people, in some ac-cool train shoulded to shoulder with Iphones, blackberry clicking and red-eye newspapers, with the smell of bad cafe in the air. ( my half ass attempt at setting a backdrop)
i had the articles and pictures in my head of the storm and damage mixed in with all the people and almost pretend worried feeling, because im so distant from it and have no real way of connecting to it, honestly i was more worried about your dad and he's surgery.
i see the email come into my phone and decide to give the primo benj first eyes in the morning look at he's email.
withing 2 lines i was transporting myself into your head, i guess it was like a 3'rd person view of your week. i felt like i was in the crazy curves of the mountains and the ups and downs, bumpy roads and talking to tian, i can see exactly where he's points come from and i see myself answering alot like you. i lost track of time and space, missed my stop by 3. at one point i felt hot and humid, but i was really cold and dry. if i had better words or a more extensive vocab i would go on telling you how crazy this was, but im kinda dumb that way so. It was great writing and i truly saw it and felt it.
thanks for making that possible for me, here in rigid 1st world country Chicago.

fotos de un lugar bien lejos

Que tal mucha, les mando un album de fotos de esta ciudad en la que estoy, Lahore, Pakistan.
Les mando todos los mejores deseos a todos, y un abrazo de aquellos que son en persona.
http://picasaweb.google.com/luisfogarty/OfMyPakistaniDaysLahore#

Cuentenme, que onda con ustedes, locos!

Benji

Cobertura en las Noticias

Me parece interesante como los diferentes noticieros cubren lo que uno mismo vive. Al leer noticias de varios lados, uno ve cuales son los mas llenos de mierda y cuales dicen la verdad. Es una de las pocas instancias en las que uno puede comparar casi objectivamente las noticias que sacan los jiganges de los medios.
Les reuni varios links para que vean lo que digo:

New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/world/americas/02guatemala.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/latin_america/10200440.stm

Estos dos anteriores casi dicen lo mismo, con poca variacion....
Ahora:

CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/06/01/guatemala.sinkhole/index.html?iref=allsearch
(in a fucking footnote!)

Sky News?: http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Guatemala-Tropical-Storm-Agatha-Triggers-Giant-Sinkhole-That-Swallows-Building-And-House/Article/201006115641463?f=rss

Agatha, Volcanes y Pana.

Hola mucha,
Les escribo viendo por la ventana una lluvia fuerte que me recuerda mucho a Stan.
Llegue a guate hace dos dias. Desde el aeropuerto hasta Pana estuvo lluvioso. Ha llovido bastante en las ultimas semanas, asique las tierras estan ya muy bien regadas por los dioses. Se ha pronosticado que seguira lloviendo hasta el Lunes o Martes siguientes. Segun la vecina, Dona Mary, quien me acaba de llamar totalmente friqueada, el puente cerca de San Andres se va ir y los bomberos le han dicho que estan evacuando a Patanatic y que partes de pana corren peligro. No he oido nada respecto al gran pedazo de montana floja. Espero mandar esto antes de que se vaya la luz, que ya esta parpadeando por aqui. La tormenta afuera de las costas se acaba de crear, se llama Agatha. Viene hacia las costas y solo alli haban vientos fuertes. Por aca solo lluvia.

Lo que podemos esperar es que seguramente no habra paso dentro de poco tiempo, y si se lavan algunos puentes, tomara unos 5-10 dias para que se rahabilite. Estoy a punto de salir a llenar los autos con gasolina, y apuesto a que se va a cancelar la tercera noche de la obra, que esta sucediendo en el terreno de Jan y Sid, abajo del puente amarillo.

Los vuelos ya no entran ni salen de guate por Pacaya. La Prensa dice que hasta el Domingo en la tarde, pero por la tormenta Agatha no se sabe. Ojala podas entrar Dani, aqui te espero yo con un te.

No se como cantan los pajaros aun, deberian estar mojados. Pues todo el amor hacia ustedes que estan lejos. No es cosa de tener miedo, sino de saber lo que esta pasando y anticipar los dias que vienen.

Un abrazo bien fuerte a todos y a todas,

Benji

el colegio, los colegios y John

bueno...

Llevo acá unos días y la situacion del colegio esta medio complicada. Primero, les cuento que esto ha sido difícil para mi, yo quiero muchísimo a John por todo lo que me ayudó y bueno, porque como persona me cae bien. Voy a tratar de contarles lo que he logrado entender, pero tampoco confien tanto en mi que yo también ando sin saber que hacer.

Va, parece que hay dos lados, los voy a llamar ¨Las Manos¨ y ¨John y Aliados¨

Las Manos - (gente clave: Jan, Andy, Jobi, Phillippa, Pana Kids, talvez LIFE)->

Lo que dicen es que John si fue bueno cuando estaba con nosotros, pero que ahora nada que ver. Que se la pasa en su trabajo en Antigua y que lo único que le importa de AMA es el dinero extra que le dá. Que nunca está allí y que descuidó todo, ya nadie lo conoce, no da clases, etc. Además, puso a una directora que al parecer esta menopausica y llora todo el tiempo. Entonces, le propusieron comprarle el colegio y que el fuera encargado del programa educativo (pero no de la administración). John se negó porque no cree que un grupo de papás son aptos para manejar el colegio (empezó pidiendo $200,000 y despues lo bajó a $50,000).

Entonces, Jan, Andy y Jobi ya se habían separado y abrieron un colegio chiquitin que la verdad no se como funciona. Phillippa consiguió una donación para comprar Las Manos. Entonces el nuevo colegio va a ser el de Jan, Jobi y Andi en Las Manos. Además Pana Kids se va a ir allí tambien y talvez LIFE, para que estén los niños juntos aunque sea en diferentes colegios.

John y Aliados - (gente clave: John, el profe, Ruben, otros profesores, Ana, Irene, Carolina)->

Dicen que todo es mentira. Que la gente se está inventandose muchos chismes, que el vendería el colegio pero solo a una institución educativa o un grupo de maestros. Que AMA va a seguir y que no importa si muchos niños se van.

AMA se va a mudar a otro lugar, que tambien era un hotel, que según John es buenísimo y segín Sabina son solo cuartos de block sin ventanas ni jardín (yo no he ido a verlo, creo que voy más tarde).

y yo... que pienso?

pues... no estoy muy segura. Pero cada vez me parece mejor Las Manos. Se que el email de Phillippa fue una cagada, pero el único que dice que John ha manejado bien el colegio es John. Todos los papas están enojados de los maestros malos y el lugar chafa. Pero no se... no se nada jajajaja

los quiero mucho.

Free Fall into Atitlan

Hola a todos,

I was doing some random gmail search a few moments ago, and came upon this piece of writing I sent us all early last year. I read it, and I liked some parts a lot, surprisingly.
Let me know what you think...

Time has passed since our lives' paths diverged. Since that moment we've been making our own trails.

To those we know, we're lost. To our own perception, off somewhere in the wilderness of the place we think we know: our modern world.

It's like we all began to run when we last saw each other. A full speed race forward, through the same forest, in a similar direction.

We lose our breathes and slow down to a stop.

We turn around to see the ground we just covered, and do our best to hold still. And there, dizzy from running we imagine, look for, even listen for the people who are closest to what we consider our soul.

We wonder how far away the others have gone, and how close they may be.

As our senses adapt back to stillness, our breathing persists, our dilated pupils take in more light , our sweat sensitizes our skin.a

We hear silence amidst the movement of the trees' leaves and a distant singing bird.

This gaze in silence allows us to know the place we've stopped to the best of our ability. And at that moment our imagination asks questions about the others.

Where are you all? How far away have you ventured from me? How close is where you are to where I am? How fast are you running and can you stop?

Then you move on to imagine them having a similar moment somewhere nearby, but out of sight. Out of sight but still on the tree-covered rolling hills into which we were released the day we said goodbye to Guate.

You feel like yelling to break their silence.

You imagine how fast their hearts are beating, how they've made out from the run, what's on their minds and what's going on in their brains.

I imagine you each bursting through the door of your family house, your dorm or residence, and turning onto the road that connects you with what you occupy your hours with.

All around you, the real, the real, the real. Your world pumps with to do's, worries, introspections, anticipations, deadlines, self-images, images of others, things you look forward to. Your world is permeated by snippets of your best friends in your mind, in people you meet. Your world is attacked by pictures of the outside world of politics, economic catastrophes, mind-numbing shards of a broken civilization we euphemize as "social problems."

These things all float in and out of your awareness, engulfing you with what collectively fills your conscious mind in your everyday life.

Real, real, real, you mold your image of the real, the everyday the outside world with everything you arbitrarily label as real. A way of acting, a way of working, a way of being social, a way of buying groceries, a way of making money, a way of planning your next steps. For me, the irony is that the more real all of this feels, the more unsure you feel about its nature, the more unsure you are of its concrete existence. The more you question its validity, its natural qualities, its humanness.

Oh my, we begin to find how incredibly odd real things are. How incredibly arbitrary, how incredibly contingent the way things happen to be in our lives and in the world.

In light of this, we see how potentially boundless our lives are, but while rejoicing in this feeling of freedom we're reminded of how easy it is to fall into complacency.

It's startling how etched in stone our past and future lives' general trajectory can feel at times.

This street we walk down that makes up this real world is there. Cement, stop signs, some trees, people walking buy, the local businesses. It's there and it doesn't change. The laws that govern how it works are understood in our heads. Their details are formed in our heads. We create this real world in which the tall buildings seem to topple over us from both sides, and the demands of the everyday seem to surround us as if in the air. We ourselves beg reality to suffocate us.

We snap back into our minds from this muse… As we walk down the streets our conscious mind becomes too conscious of the presence of its unconscious, and we lose weight, and float up, high. Higher, higher above your street and towards the south. Your town or city gets further away. You feel the coolness of a cloud envelope you as you lose sight of the surface of the earth. You smell no trace of the refuse of our modern mode of production up here. You are in solitude, free from "reality." Your inner body bursts with a sunshine as you're relived of that weight and its intricate detailed distortion of your human-ness.

You blast out of the clouds, you look back. The sun. As you move through empty atmosphere, the sun beats upon you. So far from the shelter of your tall buildings, your homes, the bodies of your lovers, the still trees, your blankets, your grocery store.

So far from all that has made you what you are; all that's sealed within the emotion you know as comfort.

Before your rational mind has time to catch up with your wandering will, you fall.

Screaming from the inside out you lose the height you gained in a freefall. You fall, you fall, you fall.

A plane of primal blue approaches you in space, you approach it. You plunge into the waters of Lake Atitlan.

The waters that presenced your childhood match the wavelengths of the liquid in your system. The water takes you in and pads your landing. You float up to the surface slowly, observing the hundreds of bubbles. Your lack of air leads to anxiety. You reach the surface, breathe in, and look around. While you lie on your back, you feel you're as close to a home you'll ever be, as close to freedom as ever, the home base where you once said goodbye to with everything to lose, and the world to gain.

You're far from your puzzling "reality." You ask yourself, "how to speak of my "real" life and "real" world while aware of its dumbfounding contradictions, irrationality, its unsustainability, its insubstantiality. An array of "uns" and "ins" can be useful when you try to wrap your mind around your "reality."

Words that dissolve into the purity of the vivid blue sky. You lie on your back; a floating masterpiece of flesh, bones, organs, hair, skin and clothing. Your peripheral acknowledges four inverted volcanoes and a circle of mountains. Your ears hear silence, the hum of your own body, in sync with the tides of the lake. You begin to backstroke towards the shore.

You close your eyes, spin your chest towards the earth, and paddle your feet until you feel one dig into the muddy sand. You shift your weight, into it and your body emerges, wading through the water. You're back in your waters, back , striding thorough the waters of your culture, your home base, your childhood, your makeup.

On your next step, you feel your home's familiar floor beneath your feet. Your right foot is next, soon your body is clothed, your backpack is on, you look up, down the street, directly into the big building you once knew you had to walk to.

You close your eyes, regain presence, feel a smile creep across your face, and pick up your pace, that stride by stride develops into a sprint… The most intentional sprint you've every run.

luck

some people might call it luck, but after all, i dont think luck has anything to do with it. Luck is just an excuse for when something happens at the right time. its all about timing, and perseption. where you are and who you are is exactly where and who you are to be. control...control is an illusion we have, and something we would like to have in hand, but we don't. nothing is in control, everything is a whirlpool of mysterys and fantasies, beliefs ideas, thoughts, and movements and we just need to let loose...im acoustumbed to talk in ploural always saying we, but dont take it wrong, im not giving out some sort of universal truth here, its just ideas i want to share :)...plus i dont even believe in a universal truth it wouldnt be right to have it. back to luck...maybe it gets anoying but im not gana care, Pana, and our situation of upbringing, is sooooo, sooo, did i say so yet? different and unique from so many places in the world. we were pretty much, a first or ok, second generation if we count our parents as the first. being that, a second generation, is HUGE, who influenced us? who were our teachers? who brainwashed us? how and, was it on purpouse? on purpouse by whom. destiny is a nice idea, i believe we create our destiny, our paths arent made for us, yet its a controversy, couse if we have no control how can we create our own destiny? fact is we have no purpous of extance, but we have the idea that creates the illusion of freewill that makes us think that we do have control, and there by we make desitions everyday that stear us in a certain direction. a direction that i have no idea where it is. ive been meating all these people lately, theyre about my age, have jobs, are comming up in the workers comunity, making money, but with no ambition for discovery. maybe im wrong, but my theory is, theyre a lost generation with a social structure already built for them, not to think but to act, let the others think. i consider myself to be in the thinkers position, and i dont need the approval of a paper or mass to view me as such and "respect" me so that i can manipulate that, after all i believe in live and let live...

hurra to us =) i think we've come along way already, and the great thing is i cant see the end of any of our roads yet, at the contrary we are just at the start...

much love to yall thought it'd be cool to post something... = )