In Which Claudia Goes on a Long Journey and Falls Off a Horse and Leaves her Camera Under a Tree and Finds it Again

This spring, I did some workshops with a group of jovenes in a community outside of Cuenca called Sayausí. Last week, I was invited to go with the priest from there and a couple of teenagers to go visit a remote community in the mountains, out of the reach of telephone service, running water or anything outside of the most basic electricity. There was a wedding and a baptism, and a meeting to talk about building a road. We went on horseback, which was interesting considering that I once went on a trail ride in, um 1994. Despite one or two moments where I was cantoring across a meadow in which I felt like I was in Lord of the Rings, riding the horse without any idea what I was doing was hard. And coming back, going down steep slippery rocks, the horse jumped and I leaned forward and over I went, right over his head. Fortunately I clung to his neck and didn´t hit anything. When I got back to the road, I had to make a pit stop in the woods to use the bathroom (bear with me here, its relevant to the storyline) which I did in a hurry because we were trying to leave. I had to rush back to my office to check in on a taller I planned, where I discovered that my much beloved camera was not with me. It took me a second to piece it all together, but I knew that it had fallen off my belt loop in the middle of Cajas National Park when I was squatted under a tree. So this morning, I bribed my friend Pablo, with a promise of pancakes after, to go out into the mountains. A quick trip by bus out there and back again. I didn´t want to think about how irresponsible and horrible I was going to feel if the camera wasn´t there. But it had to be. It took us two hours to find a bus out to Cajas, every second I was looking up at the clouds hanging over the mountains and imagining little water droplets condensing inside the plastic bag that held my camera. It was ridiculous taking a forty minute bus ride out in the wilderness to look for a camera under one particular tree. But we got a bus and it dropped us off right in front of the tree in question.

And there it was, lying right where I left it. It worked and everything. If it sounds too incredible to believe, I should mention that Cajas is a spooky often deserted place, and there are millions of corners in which things that fall could sit undisturbed for all time. Pablo and I rode back to Cuenca in a pickup truck and watched the mist covered hills go by, and give way first to high green slopes and then the hustle of Sayausí.

Now, I´m leaving out the real part, which was the visit to the community. The women cooking dusk til dawn for all the people that rode in for the fiesta, the smell of smoke from the wood fire on the floor. The incredible succession of food I was offered because I was a guest who came with the padrecito, the aguitas of cinammon and herbs that they gave us to warm us up, the grinding poverty that the community lives in, the stunning rugged land, the problem posed by a toilet unconnected to any sort of plumbing that at least 15 people had used. I want to say more, but I´m processing everything I saw, everything that everyone said to me, the people who were extraordinarily warm, the ones who were more guarded, how much of an outsider I felt, how much of a gringo I felt. How I ate chicken, beef, rice, yucca, guinea pig, potatoes, eggs, habas, everything fresh, everything made from scratch.

So more when I can.

Tony, Tony, Tony

The Sopranos is coming to an end shortly and I´m not going to see it, but will wait til I can buy the entire season, and spend one sordid, darkened weekend, soaking it all up.

The actor gave an interview on the end of the saga.

"Nursing coffee from a foam cup, he shares nearly an hour in agreeable give-and-take, only drawing the line when one too many questions delves into his acting technique: "Oh, please! Who gives a (crap)!" he scoffs. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be abrupt.""

What a freaking nice guy. A friend of mine who shared my passion for the New Jersey family once found herself in an elevator with James Gandolfini on the west side of Manhattan. She commented favorable on his banter with a third person in the elevator. Obviously part of the appeal of the character is the nice guy warring with the bad man, inside.

How I´m Feeling

For so many months I had nothing to do, and I was busy running around finding places I could plug in, and within a series of weeks all of that work came to fruition and I found myself resolutely overcomitted. It´s good, but not sustainable, for me, or for the folks I working with.
I tried to do the human knot in my jovenes group saturday and couldn´t help them get out of it. We spent like ten minutes standing there looking confused, them totally unenthused and finally I was like, do you kids want to do something else?

I found out afterwards there´s a solution to the human knot, a technique to helping people solve it, in the one manual we have that I didn´t think to consult. When they issued me my duct tape the U. S. Peace Corps forgot to mention the solution to the human knot.

(The Peace Corps doesn´t really issue us duct tape. I had to buy mine.)

I´m happy to have stuff to do, but now worried about not doing it well enough, not being so focused on one thing because I am doing too much, not doing things sustainably, having everyone depend on me too much. Losing patience with people and demotivating them instead of motivating them. That kind of thing.

Go Tarheels!

From the New Hampshire Democratic Primary Presidential Debate Transcript

John Edwards:

"But what this global war on terror bumper sticker -- political slogan, that's all it is, all it's ever been -- was intended to do was for George Bush to use it to justify everything he does: the ongoing war in Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, spying on Americans, torture. None of those things are OK. They are not the United States of America."

I don´t know man. I like Obama, but if Edwards keeps saying stuff like that, he´s gonna get my vote.

Just saying.

Gym

I started working out three weeks ago. I re-joined the gym in my neighborhood and have been alternating shoulders/back, pecs, and legs. I´m often the only woman in the gym. And we are in Latin America where, even more than in the States, the gym is a male environ. This leads to lots of interactions that I take way more personally than I should. Why is the trainer having me work out with little four lb pink weights, for example? Or why is that man trying to help me unload these weights when its perfectly obvious I can do it myself? Why did that guy saludar a my male friend and not saludar a me. There is an art to being nice to girls who are (trying to) pump iron that walks the delicate line between being helpful to someone who may only have a vague idea what they are doing, and being a paternalistic jerk. But after one particular work out, where I didn´t feel good at all afterwards, and I hated everyone in the gym, I sternly told myself, like my shrink used to say, "well you just have to keep going until it gets more comfortable."

Did I go this morning, when I was awake at 6:45? No I did not. But I have hopes for tomorrow.

I´m It

I got tagged by Jordancito at Pigeontoes. He wrote about five reasons he blogs, but I´m hoping that he isn´t expecting me to come up with five things to say about why this page exists. I´m hoping its sufficient to say that I do it because it seems like a good thing to do and leave it at that.

Five People I Miss at Home.
Not the Top Five. Not the Only Five. Just Five, among many, many others.

Karen. Karen and I eat Vietnamese and Thai food in Hell´s Kitchen. We drink white wine in her house in Washington Heights. (She can´t come to my house because she is horribly allergic to my cat.) We talk about how silly it is that everyone feels the need to get married and have children. We talk about our families. We complain about work. Karen also lived in South America, long before I did and made me want to do the same thing. Karen lifts weights three days a week, at least and can squat more than most folks I know. She also has fabulous long curly black hair.

Angela. Angela was witness to my first halting attempts to learn Spanish. When we worked together at the Medical Center in Washington Heights, we used to go eat Dominican food three or four times a week and complain about our office. I feel my stomach bloat up when I think about those heaping plates of yellow rice. She always has beautiful silver jewelry and her husband Benjamen, (also someone I miss) throw lovely dinner parties.

Laure. Laure writes pithy commentary on film and hockey. She always has excellent shoes, and the best color lipstick. Laure thought she could escape from New York, and successfully stayed away for almost nine years, but now she is on her second stint. We fought over a boy in 1989, a very silly boy, we both repented of it later, but of course at the time, it was terrible painful.

Marcus. Marcus was one of my chief inspirations for doing the Peace Corps. I´m still haunted by his stories of Cameroon, and the first conversation I had with him, he was peering at a map of Africa, explaining to me how he wanted to be there and not in North Carolina. He is one of those people to have gotten married and just had a baby, little Vaughan, who I hope to meet at Christmas. Marcus and I shared many New Year´s Eve´s together, one time we fought for five hours to ring in the New Year. I recall that I went down in Round 6, at about five in the morning.

El. Elliot is an artist. He has a gigantic loft in Los Angeles and a solo show in New York. He lived in Rome and dated a beautiful Italian pop singer. But Elliot is also the salt of North Carolina red earth. Elliot and I used to warm up Stouffer´s Corn Pudding in his parent´s kitchen in North Carolina. El still has a southern accent and sings me James Taylor and Patsy Cline.

I tag Emily, Erik, and Laure. Give me five answer. You can pick the question.

La Gringuita

Last year when I was preparing to come to Ecuador I wrote for the following in preparation for Peace Corps service.

"No matter how much I prepare, I suspect that the impact of a transition of this magnitude will be huge. With respect to my own cultural background, I presume that being a North American will have an enormous impact on how people interact with me. I’m a fair-skinned, single woman in her thirties. For better and worse, I will surely encounter people with stereotypes about white women from the United States. It will be important to try to not take anything too seriously, especially at the beginning. Communicating respect and openness to people in my community with help me establish my own uniqueness."

Um. Yeah. This, as you might imagine turned out to be the understatement of the decade. This is my life here. As a norteamericana, I realize that I am always under a certain level of scrutiny. What do I think about Bush? What do I think about Iraq? What do I think about Hollywood? Why are they building that wretched wall on the Texas border? How much do I pay for my apartment? What do my parents think about me being here? Where on earth are all the children I should have at age 34?

And, I came in trying to have a tough skin, especially where the image of the United States in the world. I can´t defend that vast majority of US foreign policy, especially in Latin America, much less in the Middle East these days. I can´t defend that fact that right has been systematically chipping away at the safety net in my country for twenty years and that no one in the states has any guarantee of being seen by a doctor unless they cash on hand or an insurance card. I wouldn´t presume to argue with my friends who grew up on the left in various countries in and whose families or they themselves were persecuted by regimes that were either tacitly or explicitely supported by the United States. I came prepared to absorb some of the shock of criticism of mi tierra.

It gets complicated though. On at least two occasions, I´ve still gotten my back up about blanket criticisms of the United States. Not because there aren´t legitimate critiques to be made, but it gets under my skin when people make across the board statements about how it must feel to be norteameriana, or how things came to be this way, because invariably people from outside the States do not get that part. Be it bad or good, I find myself wanting to have the last word on how things came to be this way and what must be done about it. I don´t get bent out of shape when people criticize my country. I get bent out of shape when people think they understand how we got to be this way.

James Baldwin said it better, and think this is from The Fire Next Time.

"I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."

I grew up in a resolutely Democratic home and was raised with the attending ideology: the US has made some errors from time to time (Vietnam, Jim Crow, genocide of the the Indians, what have you) but we have been working on all of that and are on a resolutely upwards paths towards being a force for good in the world. The good things would include the Constitution, the 14th amendment, the New Deal, storming the beach at Normandy, and Stonewall, to name a couple. And I want all of it to be true. But like all myths, I am confronted all the time with evidence that its not. And people here who look at me appraisingly and say, now what exactly do you make of the war in Iraq, are ultimately not the ones who have to live with the disonnance. Its people from the United States who have to live with the ambivalence, the reality that for all its potential, the U.S. has been responsible for some dreadful things both at home and in the world and what means for us who benefit and stand to lose the most from it. The potential exists that instead of being a flawed system which a lot of the time works for a lot of people, its a rotten system, designed to only work for those with money, education, and access to power.

I´m still mulling over a lot of this stuff, but will say close this bit with another James Baldwin quote, though its still not the one I was looking for.

"American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. "

"We Are One Signature Away From Ending The Iraq War"

Wow. Finally some good news.