Essay: An Effective Peace Movement in our Present Time

The hardest thing that I have ever had to learn personally was that in the end, people don’t matter, prices do. After having worked with countless organizations in the women’s movement in Bogotá, Colombia this was a stark, ugly realization seeing that most people in the non-profit sector of developing countries rely on mechanisms which are either difficult to enforce or carry no policy weight to pave the way for positive social change. Some of these mechanisms are similar to those used in the first world, such as massive demonstrations in an attempt at peaceful resistance, forums created to discuss options for social change, education campaigns and a heavy reliance on the law, often times international or domestic human-rights law.

My classes at the University of Cambridge the following year reaffirmed what had merely been observations in Colombia. I attended Cambridge in hopes that I could effect policy change at the global level. My classes were a breeding ground for foreign policy makers at the E.U., World Bank, United Nations and the I.M.F. Therefore, it was an extremely difficult lesson to learn and to witness, (in my own exasperation I might add) that in the end, the bottom line always went back to the cost of social justice, not the reasons for it. My experience in Colombia and the United Kingdom taught me that under the current neoclassical economic system, there would always be an incentive for poverty, exploitation and war, no matter how good the law sounded or how much noise we made on the ground. I realized that real revolution would only come when the whole paradigm had been turned on its head and human beings could not be sacrificed anymore for the sake of economic efficiency. However, until this happened, movements which had the luxury of being peaceful in working towards social change had a huge responsibility to match their growing indignation with more strategic solutions for a just world.

Therefore an effective peace movement is a pragmatic one. One that realizes that emotional appeals for a heightened sense of humanity and merely the exposure of human rights abuses is not enough. An effective peace movement learns the language of the oppressor and can hurt them where they actually care, their pockets. A commitment to massive mobilization should always be met with a commitment to change the economic order by refusing to buy into a system that continues to perpetuate gross social inequalities and human degradation. Our open disdain must always be matched with our will to make personal sacrifices in our own first-world consumption habits and our ability to offer viable and sustainable solutions to complex social and economic problems. The first world today has to make a choice. The first choice is to peacefully and strategically reject the economic system that keeps most of the world, including ourselves, in abject poverty and misery. The alternative choice is to succumb to continual acts of “terrorism,” which, despite their origins, will continually be legitimated by the victims of our oppression and at the same time be the only recourse in which these victims of the current system have in order to have their issues addressed.

A day in my first two months here in Brazil...

November 5, 2005
12:34 pm
Vitoria, Brazil

The last thing that I ever want to do on a Saturday morning is get up and clean. However, today is K's birthday, and for her sake, I responded immediately when she said, “So, do you want to just divide up the cleaning responsibilities like we did last week?” At the same time, to make it seem less like an imperative she added, “well, that is, if you want to. I mean, if you don’t want to that’s okay, I’ll do all of it.” I was afraid that this was happen. Last week, to celebrate the first day of rain that I had experienced here in Vitoria and a strange bout of PMS hormones, I threw myself into a cleaning binge that began with my room because all of the sudden, I needed my life to be temporarily organized. I guess K was quickly encouraged that she had somehow reformed me because when she woke up this morning, within 15 minutes, she was already dividing up cleaning duties in the house.

So today, I conceded to what I did last week which was sweep and mop the floors and clean the kitchen thinking that I’d be compliant for her birthday. However, this wasn’t good enough for her because the whole time she cleaned the bathroom, she kept making comments about how dirty it was and this and that. I sat in the dining room on my computer, imagining us fighting about it, about all the things I would say. Then I stopped and realized that I wouldn’t because it was her birthday, because some things said were irreparable and that this too, shall pass. Cohabitation with a clean freak is good for me, it keeps me tempered.

Last night, I fell into a pretty nasty S relapse as my mind, body and heart worked hard to cleanse out the nasty residue of hope that lay deep within me. It was an awful time to do this though because K’s not-so-surprising surprise party at Licia’s house was last night and so I had to attend and all of our work colleagues and friends were there. So, even though I was exhausted and just wanted to stay at home and self-cleanse aka cry, I dragged myself out of the house and to this party and tried to look as alive as possible. However, lucky for me, the last show of “America,” a popular Brazilian soap opera was playing last night and all the teachers who showed up holed themselves into Licia’s bedroom while it was going on. I holed myself up right along with them so I didn’t really have to talk to anybody.

It was nice and relatively tormenting to be suffering from love and watch all these tragedies on love and loss be resolved on television but it was better than having to sit around and talk about nothing and look charming. Yet, somewhere between the initiation of reconciliation and resolution of the last episode of the novela, I realized too that I had decided to move on with my life, and that meant, I had no choice but to survive my broken heart. No matter how alone or misunderstood that meant that I was going to be, I had to survive, I had to move on, no matter what that ever meant in reference for him and what was in store for him. I realized the best thing for me, in terms of survival, was just to never know. I thought I was strong enough to be happy for his happiness, even if that meant a permanent state of happiness with another person. But I’m not. The strongest that I can manage to be is to not know. It only works if I don’t know. Christ, what exactly do I need to forget? Is this where I turn fundamentalist something to numb all the pain?

Suddenly, I felt very alone and far removed last night cramped in a bedroom in the middle of nowhere with ten Brazilian women, from 18 to 45, hanging onto every last word of a Brazilian soap opera of love, tragedy, love and resilience. What was I doing here alone again? Far removed from anything that was really mine. Nobody could ever understand the things that I had been through in the last few years, the crisis, the reconciliation, the pain, the resolve to get through alone and survive. Nobody would ever want to believe me or understand it within the context of my amazing life of experiences, adventure and privilege. It wasn’t worse than hunger, death, rape or disease. It was my own private and invisible hell that either I had or had been created for me. Nothing made me so special to believe that it was any different or worse than anybody else’s. The only thing that made it special was that it was mine and it made my loss of an asshhole seem so much worse as I lost the one person who perpetually gave me the laughter I needed and had the knowledge, experience and patience to understand me.

“Te estas conformando con muy poco.” Milton, a man from Cali that I met yesterday on a blind meeting told me this when he found out that I had a Master’s from Cambridge and was now working in a Brazilian kindergarten teaching English to babies. “No, but I can’t be tied down to anything serious right now,” I explained convincingly to him and myself. And I knew this was partially true. When I really think about it, it is true, where the hell else would I be right now? What would I be doing? It’s better to be lost and barely committed than to be lost and obligated to something that makes you wonder about all the other possibilities in your life all day long.

Yesterday when I sat with Milton at the bookstore, thinking about how the prospects of him and I of ever dating were actually way slimmer than I had previously imagined, I learned a lot about Brazilian society from the perspective of a Colombian ex-patriate who had been living in Brazil for ten years. “Brazilian people will do anything to avoid conflict, even amongst the best of friends…” he said. “Brazilian people are open, but superficially, it’s very rare that they open themselves up completely to you and they don’t flake on plans, they just make plans that they have no intentions of going through with…[Mariana] Brazilian women are only interested in la farandula, because they are only worth as beautiful as they are, if they know anything about geography, it’s only because they’re rich and they’ve traveled abroad, they’ve got a really European attitude about the world.” Milton was from Cali and was a Math professor at the public university, UFES in Vitoria. I met him through the owner of the bookstore, who I had met a few weeks ago when K and I had come with Sandra for ice cream at the ice cream shop next door. Minerva, the owner, was happy to lend herself as a matchmaker and was thrilled when we finally met to have coffee at her store. She had no idea that I knew that it was not doing to “give for sure” as the Brazilians say. Yet, it was a nice conversation and it was nice to converse with a Colombian man in his language, even if it was a little broken up with Portuguese. “You’re definitely going to lose your Spanish Tina, it’s inevitable.” I vowed to fight that as much as I could.

In the supermarket today, I ran into the mom’s of one of the kids at school. She was French and her husband was Spanish (from Spain) and we had a nice long chat in the middle of the supermarket for at least half an hour about our perspectives about Vitoria and its upper-class society. “You would never imagine some of the things that have happened to us here. You have to be careful, everyone knows each other and most of the time, even though they smile to your face, they are all ready to backstab you.” She also reiterated what I had already observed at Leonardo, that the rich in this little town were all obsessed with money and had little time for their children. And she added that many of the mothers had miserable lives because they were rich and bored and their husbands cheated on them all the time. I laughed as I thought about what Donald, a high-school teacher at Leonardo from Wisconsin had said about the women who came to school to pick up the children. Most of them were the baba’s or the hired nannies paid to take care of the kids twenty-four seven, “but if they’re in gym clothes, they’re definitely the moms.” How cliché, a town of bored, rich housewives with fake boobs.

Table Manners

Previously, in my piece that I published under the title "The Aftermath" I mentioned a few years ago how ironic it was that people were so obsessed with eating etiquette and how that bothered me. On my personal website on May 21, 2006, I revisited the topic a little more in-depth from an experience that I had earlier in that day that just made me pissed off enough to write about it all over again.

TABLE MANNERS

One of my biggest pet peeves in life are table manners. How to hold a fork and a knife. Which knife or fork is for what plate. Don't touch your food, no elbows on the table, don't slouch. Honestly, WHO GIVES A FUCK????

Unfortunately, rich, powerful people who are usually white, from Europe or European ancestry or are trying to identify themselves with them do. It's funny, the first time I ever was corrected and told that my method of eating (by pushing my food with my finger on my fork) was incorrect or as she referred to as "disgusting" was when I was in Buenos Aires, low and behold the land of the "non-Latino Latinos." (That was of course before their economy too, went to shit.) And don't even get me started on the dining hall at St Edmund's College in Cambridge University and the comments about the "proper way" of eating (which to me doesn't make any sense to push the food with your knife on the back of the fork seeing as your fork is geometrically designed as a shovel almost don't you think??)

"Well," a rich girl from Holland said to me once in Cambridge when I brought up the subject, "if I went to China, wouldn't somebody tell me that eating with a knife and fork was wierd?" "No," I said. They would think it was different but they would never minimize it and think you were uncivilized which is a courtesy I'm afraid which is not offered the other way around. In fact, seeing as Asian people, and especially in China with the opening of the markets have internalized this notion that everything in the western world is better, "white makes right" they would probably look at a white European and feel the need to correct themselves.

I need to stop this. Especially because I started doing it and I get so overcome with bougie guilt everytime I become conscious of it. I allowed myself to be corrected. Yet, sometimes, I touch my food on sporadic intervals just to resist. Because everytime I see people eat "properly" with a knife and fork, I get so fucking mad and indignant that all these rules exist on how to eat when there are little to none effective rules about who gets to eat and how it's much more important to hold a fork a certain way than it is to let millions of people starve and be malnourished everyday on a daily basis. It's not "who gets to eat" but "how to eat" that really matters.

So please, somebody help me because maybe I’m wrong and am just totally ignorant to the rules of the allowing part of alimentation. When I’m at the night market and a child who is obviously impoverished and starving asks me to buy them a hotdog for two reales and I buy it for her because in my world, it’s less than a dollar to do this nothing favor to me that is survival for her, when is it acceptable for me to say no when all of the sudden, you are surrounded by a group of children who, some appear to be worse off than the first child you bought the hotdog for? Or, when I’m coming out of the bakery with my bread and chicken which I bought to eat by myself, for myself to make my gourmet bougie food at home, contemplating the many ways I can eat it so as not to waste it, what do I do when I see two starving little girls lingering outside looking longingly inside? You see, it’s much more complicated than it sounds. Assuming to buy or automatically exercising my power of buying and giving them food would be pretentious and self-righteous without all the proper information. They could be related to a worker inside. At this point I don’t really know why they are lingering there. I have an assumption but I’m not sure and this bothers me. I wait for the girl to ask. And if she does ask, (which she ended up doing,) and I buy for her, will the establishment get mad that I’m encouraging the poor to linger and “haggle” privileged patrons? I end up buying two coxinhas and a bottle of water and handing it to her on my way out, relieved to see that the bakery had given her a lunchbox of free lunch, free. She says “thank you” and I say nothing because the only rule I know about giving in a situation like this is that no “thank you’s” should be exchanged. I’m not a savior. The exchange should be discreet and I should not feel good about it. I have not done a good deed, because feeling good about giving her a mere two coxinhas and water which is nothing would be belittling her suffering and the suffering of most of the world that shares her plight. But, that’s why this bothers me, should I have gone to the grocery store nearby and bought her fresh, healthy foods? I could have. But you see, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what the rule was.

It’s times like these when I absolutely hate life. I curse the fact that I didn’t grow up in a developing country where the poor and the rich were so demographically integrated. In America, I could pretend it all away from my suburb and did not have to build the psychological barrier that people in developing countries build to protect themselves from the daily, in-your-face, reality that most of the people in their country are poor and millions of people are starving. Therefore I could have better mechanisms which would allow me to go home and live my daily life, eat my bougie food and sleep in my warm bed without getting angry at people who were unconsciously or consciously, using their knife and fork “correctly.”

September 10, 2006/Present

Okay, wow, an actual blog posted on September 10, actually written on September 10. I think I’m relatively updated now. I’ve posted what I needed to most of the day today as I sat home in my apartment trying to recover from a cold. Everything is out of order but it was literally cathartic vomiting, one piece after another. I can’t believe I found half the things that I did on my hard drive. Pieces from the past that I allowed to be buried there, deep into my DOCUMENTS folder. Pieces that should have never been forgotten because forgetting about them was like self-denial. I mean, if I was fine now, why go back to the parts of me that seemed too complicated to revisit. Too long to even recount to my friends and family so I would constantly seem like a random mess of ideas and feelings with no origin. “Wait, so why did she turn into such a flaky bitch when she came back from England?” Because I was depressed you see. “So, why did she scream at me when I wanted to leave the light on all night at our hotel?” Because I was imagining people displaced from the war with no electricity or food in the dark. “So she actually thought about suicide?” Yes. I was in pain. “Over poverty?!?!?” Sure and indifference and the fact that that’s just how it is and even though it affects me in ways I can’t even understand, I just have to deal. “So, why can’t she sleep at night sometimes?” Because I wonder still, what has become of me and all of my experiences. Sometimes it takes time to sit back and look into the past and choose what explanations you want to give and when the right time it is to give them. I’m sure when I have more of it figured out, I will hole myself into my room on another sick/rainy/weekend day and unleash another set of self-revelations. When I’m ready.

For the first time in over one year, I’m starting to feel alive again and I thank God that the process was so painstakingly slow, that at times that I had no real sense of self-awareness. Stunned from the culmination of personal experiences and tragedies, I fled to Brazil and here, I just went through the motions, I didn’t think, I didn’t know what was going on, I was just doing. I worked and lived mindlessly for the first time in my whole adult-life it seems. Being a kindergarten teacher was perfect. Somehow in my mind, I knew this would help me, heal me, I mean, it’s not like swimming with the dolphins or anything but working with children brought me right down to the fundamental basics. Holed up in a gated school all day long for ten hours, I didn’t have to think about poverty or the opposing worlds or politics or economics or anything, except when I had the little time that I did to read or watch the news or when I was absolutely starved for intellectual stimulation beyond Brown Bear, Brown Bear What do you See? I got caught up in the monotony of my grueling schedule, too busy cleaning up vomit, wiping up snot, playing board games with four year olds, cutting out animal shapes, creating lesson plans and organizing a class full of 20 little five year olds. When I came home, I cried out my frustrations, my loneliness, whatever residual pain or heartache that was still bottled up within me, alone. Good lord, I still cry. But it’s different now, the storm has passed. I had long conversations with God and myself. Hablé a todas las paredes en mi casa. I’ve accepted and strangely enough, there is serenity. Sometimes, when you know that it’s just you and God now, time and solitude can make all the difference.

Tomorrow, I will walk into school and say hello to my helper, Jeovana. I will ask her about her life and what she did all weekend. She will probably tell me that she hung out with her family and her boyfriend at her family’s beach house and suffered intensely from the cold front that moved through Espritu Santo this long weekend. Devoutly Catholic, she will make another reference to God that I will pick up in my daily speech and overuse. “Alli esta vindo Jefferson. Felicidade de pobre dura pouco. Deus me livre.” (Jefferson’s coming. A poor man’s happiness is shortlived. God save me.) “Pelo amor de deus, ninguem merece este frio…” (For the love of God, nobody deserves this cold) I will wait for her to make another loud declaration to the children to scare them shitless into obeying her. "JESUS ESTA OUVINDO!!! VOCE PODE ME MENTIR A MIM, MAS, JESUS ESTA OUVINDO!!!" (JESUS IS LISTENING!!! JESUS IS LISTENING!!! YOU CAN LIE TO ME BUT JESUS IS LISTENING!!!) she will shout in Portuguese as she shakes the child into submission. I will see Bruna, my brilliant, little Japanese-Brazilian pupil, walk up to the reception plaza where we greet the children, holding her mother Sandra’s hand, half asleep with her bag of toys. (Monday is toy day.) I will greet her and test her out to make sure she, my star pupil has not forgotten any English over the four day weekend. “So, how are you today Bruna? How many toys do you have? What do you have? Wake up Bruna, no sleeping in school.” She will start off in Portuguese until I give her the face that I give when I pretend not to understand, the English will slowly seep out. “I’m fine. Four toys. Dolls. I’m sleepy. You’re crazy.” Then my little blond-hair, blue-eyed German doll student Filipe will run up and give me a big hug and shout. “GOOD MORNING TINA! I’M FINE!! HOW ARE YOU!!!” One after one, the procession of children who expect me to be there everyday and fill in the role of their caretaker will roll in with their individual needs and adorable idiosyncrasies.

During some part of the ten hour day, most likely when I’m playing either a board game or dominoes with my other class of babies, my mind will wander and I will think about the vacation I will take in February to Jamaica, what my next step is, when am I going to take the LSATs, where I will move to next, where I would rather be now, how I could never actually fathom having children and be subjected to such mindless game playing with four year olds just for the simple sake of love. Then, when it’s time for the kids to go home, I will plant big hugs and kisses on them, my last human contact for the day, and thank the lord that the day is over and hope that I haven’t taken it too much for granted or been too discontent because I still can’t imagine disappearing forever, either them or I, from each other’s lives when this is over in December.

This is everyday. This is, has been my life for the past year now, routine. It was my long route to keeping busy while figuring things out. And now, the end is almost near, I am ready to move on and yet still grateful that I am forced to learn patience. It still has meaning. And tomorrow, when I go into school, I will find it. And hopefully, this time, I will go in and cherish that meaning, in the beauty and the simplicity of it all and be inspired enough to write about it.

Colombia

Before you read this, I think you should know that Colombia is the only country, out of the other four that I have lived in which I would consider going back to and make a permanent life there (as long as I could retain the rights of my U.S. Passport of course.) I love Colombia, it is one of the most beautiful countries I have ever been to and the Colombian people took me in as if I were another family, a strange foreign Asian girl who spoke not Mandarin but English and broken Spanish, no questions asked. When I went back there in 2004, I felt so connected to the earth, everything felt so normal and natural, that I felt that I had gone home again. The year I lived there, my eyes and heart were open as I made myself vulnerable, for the first time in my life, to my surroundings, the naivety about my own power allowed me to willingly taking on the pain of all those who were suffering. I had never been so unprepared because my only contact with poverty and war had been intellectual before, which evoked emotion, yet was not powerful enough to have me be completely overwhelmed and taken under as living amongst it did. I had never felt so hopeless and sad in my whole life, seeing, learning and living and hence the pain of the following entries.

Yet, it is the beauty and resolve of their people, the depths and intricacies of the culture, the magic of the earth, not the pain, that will never allow me to forget and always have me going back to Colombia.

Colombia,
país querido, país amado...
Gracias por todo lo que ha hecho para mí.
Me abrió los ojos y el alma
y me suavizó el corazón,
Me mostró el mundo
Y pese de todo su propio sufrimiento,
encontraba siempre el amor
para quererme.

Colombia,
país querido, país amado...
Si pudiera,
Si fuera más,
le quitaría todo su dolor
y haría que nunca
volviera a derramar
ni una otra lágrima.

December 3, 2003

Every Tuesday and Thursday, I haul ass at 8:45 in the morning to catch the 60 on the Transmilenio to get to my French class that is located on the Northern part of the city. The Transmilenio is the city’s fastest public transport system which involves a designated route for large specialized buses which stop in certain stations located all over the city. I think of it more as an above ground subway system, except in big red buses that say, “Transmilenio.” As soon as I step out of the door, I’m usually tired and frustrated from not having had the time to study as much as I would have liked to for the class, dreading the thought of conjugating the imperfect verbs in French, as I go the four blocks to the station, glide past the security and flash my pass through the gate.

I always justify my unfinished French homework by this illusion that I’ll finish it on the 15 minute commute from Station 63 to the Alcala Station where I get off, 77 blocks to the North later. But by the time I’m staring at the glass gates separating me from the platform, I know that this was just wishful thinking to go to bed a little earlier because I know that at 10 to 9 in the morning, the 60, going North will be packed for the rest of the workday. However, like me and the rest of the Colombian’s, an overly packed bus where people are literally crammed and smelling each other’s armpits is never discouraging as I fight my way in and take up two spaces with my huge backpack that the guard didn’t even bother to check, hovering over one of the more fortunate persons who is comfortably seated, hoping that he/she will get off at the next stop.

However, that usually never happens and I’m forced to stand there crammed until my destination, and needless to say, I don’t finish my French homework. Instead, I think about, what would it be like if one of the other Transmilenio’s crashed into this one from behind, like it did about two months ago, killing one of the passengers or what if a bomb exploded on this bus, like it did in November, when two were left on the big red buses and after that, all the security guards were sent to “vigilar” which in Colombia means, stand there and look present. Then I think, I’m bad, I’m almost always late for French class and then I begin to dread Francois, the husband of my professor’s voice, scolding me. Damn it!! I’m always late! At this rate, I’ll never speak French!

At 10:30 am, I’m running out of French class to catch the Transmilenio again. This time I’m going to the university which is on the way, other side of town, in the South, downtown, way past the 63 from which I came from. That ride is about 30 minutes, and I always have to make a transfer at Station 26. The ride is usually as comfortable as the one going to French class. Yesterday, I got on and as I pushed myself through to squeeze myself and my big backpack into a space, I saw a gentleman get up as people made way for someone to sit down. From my experience, this ceremony, where somebody voluntarily gives up a seat on the Transmilenio only happens on a few certain occasions and there are definitely, unspoken rules about this. A) You either have a very young child with you. B) You are visibly crippled. C) You are visibly, very, very old. Or, there also exists a few exceptions that I’ve seen like, “you are not that old but you are visibly a nun.”

Yesterday, I braced myself in brief anticipation as a gentleman sat down with his little baby girl, one seat in front of the one I was hovering over. All I could think was, “That dirty bastard!!! Using a kid to get a seat on the bus!” I was bitter. But the little girl was beautiful. She had brown hair and big brown eyes and two little gold hoop earrings in her tiny ears. Her father, or whoever it was lifted her up so she could grasp the rail and the woman sitting next to them played with her tiny little fingers. She was so cute and peaceful looking. Some baby’s have an aura of good spirits to them. This one did, she brought calm to our little section of the bus. At the next stop, the woman in the seat I was hovering over got off but I decided to give the seat to the gentleman who had given up his seat to the baby and the other gentleman. But in turn, he gave his seat to this other woman who had come on the bus with the baby and the gentleman and had given her package for someone to hold, which is more public transportation etiquette. Sometimes, people won’t give up their seat for you but they will hold your stuff. I was slightly annoyed as I saw the person pass back her package and I glared at the guy who had given her my seat as to say, “Can’t you see that my backpack is way bigger and uncomfortable than her stupid package? I’m in way more need than she is!”

Tuesdays and Thursdays are always like this. The theme is me hauling ass on the Transmilenio for the better part of the morning. Yesterday as I got off of my last ride, I ran off the station platform, past a guard who was actually revising an older gentleman’s backpack before he got on and ran the block to the university to get to my 11:30am class on time. Yesterday was horrible. I got to my class on time but found out that I had failed a midterm I studied really hard for, ended up crying in front of that professor because I was frustrated which was so embarrassing that a girl from my class ended up giving me a ride home because I was in such bad shape, continued crying for the rest of the afternoon until I took a cab to soccor practice which went bad because I had my period and had already tired myself out from crying and running around all morning and thinking about how much I wanted to go home the whole time. When I got home, I was ready to unload all my frustrations to my roommate. “Francy!!! You wouldn’t believe the horrible day I had…Estoy mamada!!!”

“Me too!!” Francy said. “Everything bad happened to me today!!! I’m so depressed about everything!!” And I asked her about what?? What could have possibly happened to her that could be worse than having a bad day and feeling like shit all alone in a foreign country?

“I had a horrible day at work.” She began. “I had to do all these stupid horrible errands which all went bad and had to wait and wait. I had such a stomach ache the whole time then I had to go to a doctor’s appointment and wait and wait. On top of that, I’m really depressed about what happened in Bogota today...” I had no idea what she was talking about. In my mind, what had happened in Bogota today was that I was late for French, overly-hormonal, overwhelmed by my situation and had totally blown my stupid International Law midterm and had a nervous breakdown in the university in front of my professor and anyone else who saw me and thought that I was crazy.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She looked at me in disbelief. “Didn’t you hear? They blew up a Transmilenio today at 12pm. Nobody died but three other bombs were found on three different buses. God!! The situation is getting really bad.”

“Really? Where?” I asked.

“Four stations, in the South, the middle and all the way in the North.”

I saw the burnt bus on the news. The other bombs had been found and detonated safely. People were evacuated on time and what is not new is that it was “officially” linked to the FARC. However, this time, instead of your usual random gentleman, they detained two women who were suspected to have carried the packages on the bus.

*******************************

This was an essay that I wrote in Colombia in a series of short pieces that I sent home to friends about certain events that happened in my daily life there. It’s a political anecdote really. Not that it delves deep into political issues, it’s just that at the time, I wrote it deliberately to be read by a foreign, American audience. When you write things down that are meant to be read, you fashion them to flow in a certain way that will have meaning to your designated audience. The facts may be all real but there is a sensationalistic quality to it that is not authentic. In Colombia, there is no need to be sensationalistic, the reality is absurd enough for any outsider. I’m sure that for Francy, the bombings on the Transmilenio impacted her quite differently than it impacted me. Her feeling of sadness and mourning for her country was real as was expressed to me, but her situation as a Colombian citizen where this was continuously real did not make it poignant enough for her to contemplate in a written piece. For a gringa like me, this type of adversity made me more cognizant. For Francy, continual adversity made her Colombian. At least, this was my romanticized perspective.

Different things affect different people in different ways and it all depends on not only what you’ve seen and what you’ve experienced, but your constitution as well. If you are trained on exquisite cuisine, you will starve on bread and water. If you are trained on nothing, you will survive on virtually anything. I was an exquisite cuisine type of girl. Not that I had been overly isolated or sheltered my entire life, (if that was the case, I would have never applied for the Fulbright to go to Colombia,) but my constitution was so pathetically weak. How I hated my body for being ill all the time, for being hospitalized twice while I was in Colombia, for fainting in public places, for wanting to die because I could not take the nauseating contradictions anymore. No more starving children begging outside of fancy restaurants please. I didn’t understand how the other foreigners I knew were not having the same problem that I was having. How they could so easily go out and live the good life on their American dollars. For a while I convinced myself that it was because I was more “moral” than they, that I cared more, but I realize now that I was just extremely sensitive and weak. In retrospect, now it seems totally natural that I would suffer from such psychosomatic symptoms.

July 26, 2003
2:10 am

I’m back in Bogota again and it is nothing less than depressing. After four days in the purity of nature and wilderness it’s hard to come back to this big, dirty superficial, depressing city full of poverty and misery. After being in the Amazons, the level of pollution and contamination in the city seems to be overbearing. I also realized something about poverty. It’s one thing to be poor in the sense that you don’t have a lot of money or maybe you don’t have any money. For example, the communities along the Amazon River are poor in that sense. They don’t have high living standards whatsoever. There is no running water, the Amazon River is the life source for them there is no electricity or bathroom. However, the jungle makes them rich. The jungle gives them all the riches they need, food, life and they are happy. However, poverty in the city is equal to misery, indignation and death where people do not have access to the barest of essentials and to depend on other humans for survival is a basic death sentence. Being in the Amazon jungle was the first time this whole year that I felt at absolute peace. Coming back, I realize how much I hate this city with all its deadly contradictions. I see how much I hate this world and how hard it is for me to live in it. I want to go back to the jungle. I want to live there long enough to the point where the mosquitos don’t bite me anymore and I can walk around barefoot just like the indigenous people. I come back to the city and all I can feel is sadness and I retreat back into my fake city mode, where I live like they live and force myself to smile at all the same superficial bullshit. I close myself into the denial of how much I hate this place and the people who inhabit it, just so I can go through the day unnoticed and unbothered. In the communities in the Amazons, you don’t feel sadness. Poverty is everywhere but you don’t feel sadness at all. You feel community. In the city, all I can feel is death and indifference, and that type of human pollution is as pungent as the contamination from all of the cars on the septima and all of the trash and waste that is left out in the streets.

*******************************

To enjoy life for me seemed unfathomable in such a circumstance. I hardly ever wanted to go out at night, I suffered from massive guilt the whole time I was there. It’s not fair that I can go home and sleep in my bed and eat whenever I want. It’s not fair that we’re just a bunch of fat fucks in the U.S., eating all the time when so many people who are starving here are children and pre-adolescent teenagers. They are not just starving but they are physically dirty, some of them swaying through the streets with a dazed look in their eyes as if they themselves were perplexed by their own circumstance. Have you ever seen a pre-adolescent, covered in dirt from head to toe sleep right in the middle of a city sidewalk during the middle of the day as if he were dreaming at home in his bed? People stepped right over him in passing. “Me regalas una monedita?” Francy would walk into the bakery and let the children pick something out to eat, from outside of course. It was all we could do. That’s the worse part, the realization that it is all that you can do. You can give a coin to every other beggar on the street until you are dead broke, you can cook massive amounts of lentils and rice and hand out plates to those who might be hungry but in the end you realize, there is nothing more that you can do for these people who live and die on the streets. At the end of the day, they are resigned to their fates and a plate of lentils is not going to change that. For me who seemed to have no defenses for anything, it was the most draining experience, to come home everyday after having been outside, doing all of my vueltas. I used to take long, long naps. My Colombian friends all laughed at me for it. “It’s nappy time for the gringa now!”

At the same time, to be overcome by my circumstance was so un-Colombian of me. From the outset, it seemed like all of Colombia loved the “rumba.” On the weekends, the Seventh Avenue would be packed with university students, drinking and partying with their friends in virtually every dive, nook and cranny. The congestion of people would make the normally disastrous Bogota traffic so much worse as you inched your way up Seventh Avenue. They drank, they partied, they gathered with their closest friends and families. They raged and loved passionately, sometimes pathetically for an outsider. “Tina, I made a boyfriend last night when the class and I went out dancing.” My friend Natalia said to me once. “It was during a song and we were dancing.”

It wasn’t that they were unaffected, they just weren’t so paralyzed to the point that they were useless. And even the women in the NGO I worked with did not allow social tragedy after social tragedy, catastrophe after catastrophe, to prevent them from eating good food, getting manicures and pedicures and living in nice homes. I think that is the most admirable thing about Colombians. Even in the most dire of circumstances, they still remember to live. It’s not cliché to say that in Colombia, you never know when your time is up.

Transaction Costs of Unprotected Sex in NYS (an e-mail to my professor at Cambridge)

Before I became a kindergarten teacher in Brazil, I worked in HIV Prevention on Buffalo's West Side. Before I worked in HIV Prevention, I spent a little less than a year getting my Master's at Cambridge University. (For all those interested in applying, click on this following webpage for a deeper insight to Cambridge University life. http://www.bluestretch.com/StEds/20040404_Bar/index.htm) Anyway, that was a very academically enlightening year, I learned all about totally banal and boring theories on Institutional Development and here I pay homage to the GOD of the theory of Transaction Costs, Ronald Coase. For those of you who are normal and not die-hard dorks at heart, Ronald Coase was a man who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for suggesting that the market was imperfect because due to the fact that we live in a dog-eat-dog world and people are always trying to milk you for everything you have, they might not be honest when making a sale. (Yes folks, be inspired, he won the NOBEL PRIZE for this.) Ronald Coase explains this using the example that when selling a used car, a salesman almost always has an incentive to lie about how fucked up the car he's selling actually is. Almost a year later, in the midst of condom outreach in the street and bad personal experiences, I realized, "BY JOVE, transaction costs make all the sense in the world, not just in terms of selling or buying used cars but also in LIFE!!!" I felt so brilliant and inspired that the following is a cut and paste of the e-mail that I immediately sent to one of my Development Professors in Cambridge. (By the way, she never wrote me back, I'm sure she had her reasons, but I still think this example is much more useful than the used-car example to teach transaction costs to young, impressionable and horny university students. Besides, everyone in Cambridge rides a bike.)

THE TRANSACTION COSTS OF UNPROTECTED SEX IN NYS (And no, I do not work for the "True Love Waits" Campaign. I'm definitely an advocate of pre-during-and post-marital sex or sex in general without ever getting married. Just take precautions mofos!)

In New York State, it's up to you to know your partner. Now, if you are anything like myself, I go for single men who are usually beautiful but not honest and live to get laid. Most likely, they are commitment shy and that means that planning for a rendezvous of "safe" unprotected sex (where you both get tested and are sure they are not with anyone else in the time that it takes to test and get the results back and the results are negative.) And, I'm not talking about men who I just meet either. S ome of these men I've known for years. Then again, it's not just these men because another phenomena that we're seeing in my field is a lot of women getting HIV from their husbands or vice versa. But to keep it simple, I'll just talk about what I'm familiar with.

When I consider unprotected sex with these men, I realize that like a used salesman, they are going to tell me whatever I want to hear, basically sell themselves on not necessarily how great they are, but more, how great they would be for me. By this point, I'm also pretty smitten by the beautiful physique and many other physical attributes that you would look for in superficial inspection of a used car, strength, perceived speed and stamina, etc Usually, this is not the point where they tell me that they've noticed a discolored discharge for the past couple of weeks or that it burns every time they urinate or that they are HIV positive. They tell me exactly what I want to hear, and sometimes, in moments of weakness or need, I buy it. The male market for this heterosexual female is quite imperfect and the information quite asymmetrical but then again, working in this field, I really should know better.

Unprotected sex for heterosexual females who have no desire to get pregnant any time soon such as myself can automatically imply 25$ a pop for the morning after pill. Maybe it's a lump sum we pay for each casual encounter. Now, it helps to be emotionally vacuous because it's harder to attach a price to an emotion so we'll just disregard that little factor here. However, if you go to get tested afterwards, you're looking at time away from your job (because most clinics, free or pay only operate during working hours) and whatever you have to pay to get your results. Don't forget the one to two weeks of continuous thought over whether or not you at best have gonorrhea or chlamydia (since they're bacterial and can be totally cured if caught early) or if you indeed are going to one day go crazy and blind from syphilis or come back a couple of months later with viral warts in your cervix (which actually may not be detected at the time of the test. It's best to take your player with
you to get tested to see what else might be detectable on him so you know what you've put yourself at risk for. But then again, this is more time and energy on your part.) Now, if you do end up contracting chlamydia or something else which can be undetectable in women for years and have skipped the formality of getting tested, there might also be an additional price of infertility if that means anything to you.

Basically, in the game of unprotected sex, especially for heterosexual females, the transaction costs are high and in the end, somebody most definitely gets fucked.

BACKGROUND:

Just a background, I'm currently working as a Community Educator of HIV/STD prevention in a non-profit agency to the Latino Community of Buffalo, NY. One part of my HIV/STD 101 presentation includes a section of Article 27-F of New York States HIV/AIDS confidentiality laws who has as its primary purpose to protect individuals from HIV/AIDS from discrimination and therefore encouraging them to get tested and know their status. Although this law is consistent with our society's extensive culture of a very free and democratic notion of "personal responsibility" it is also controversial because is places the complete onus on knowing or finding out someone's status on the individual.
For example, if I was a HIV tester and someone tested positive, even if I gave them options for confidential partner notification (which by the way is not legally binding in this case) it would be completely up to the individual to reveal their own status to their ex or current partner. I, as a human health worker would not be able to say anything to their partner without facing huge fines or possible incarceration, even if I knew that person was being deliberately put at risk for a variety of reason s which could be fear of shame and abandonment by the person infected, or in the worst case scenario which happens as well, there are people who say "well, now that I know that I have HIV, I'm bringing as many people down with me." (There may be an exception for physicians who have treated particular married couples for an extensive period of time.) There are currently no criminal penalties for deliberate infection of people with HIV on the books in New York State. For example, in
1997 ago in Chautaqua County, New York, a gentleman named Nushawn Williams was found to be deliberately infecting women with HIV. He was thrown in jail inevitably but what most people do not know is that the charges were for statutory rape and nothing along the lines of involuntary manslaughter.
Confidential partner notification is a program in which a person who tests positive for an STD or HIV can accede to a confidential letter being sent to identified ex-partners which basically says "We have reason to believe that you've been exposed to X disease and therefore you should get tested." However, like I said, this is totally dependent on the goodwill of the person who tested positive. Therefore, you have the onus when you engage in risky behaviors of knowing your partners status. I tell people, I can give you all the condoms and bleach kits in the world but it's up to you to put them on or use them.
A STD test costs anywhere from 400$ to free in a state subsidized facility but if you get tested for free, you are looking at minimum, three hours of your working day taken out. The morning after pill costs 25$ at Planned Parenthood.

Itaunas, Brazil (written April 19, 2006)

I love to dance. Especially, merengue, salsa, bachata, hip-hop, reggaeton. Put either of the mentioned above on and I don’t care what part of the world I’m in, how intoxicated I might or might not be, or where I am, (buying juice in the middle of the market in Cayenne, walking through the night-market with Nancy in Taipei, virtually anywhere), I’ll totally stop what I’m doing and with whatever in hand, I will start throwing up my arms, moving my ass and if I know the lyrics, singing them out loud because yes, I get that joyful. (If I would have had a different life than the one I have now, I would have loved to be in music videos or a Laker Girl, a childhood fantasy of mine.)

Therefore, when the opportunity arose for me to go to Itaunas, Brazil, the capital of the Brazilian dance Forro I immediately accepted. I asked very few questions and conceded to an instant mini-road trip during Easter Holiday last weekend. “Tudo bem!” I said to my two co-worker/friends when they asked if I might be interested in sharing a hostel room with them. I had really no idea what I was getting myself into, how much money I would actually be spending or where I was going. Ask me to point out Itaunas on a map and I still haven’t the first clue. All I know is that it is about three to five hours away from Vitoria, still within the state of Espiritu Santu and to get into Itaunas, we went over what seemed to be, for several miles, a long, bumpy dirt road in the dark in the middle of nowhere.

We had left in the morning but got into Itaunas at night due to an extended lunch on Ju’s parents farm on the way there. I hate arriving anywhere at night. It’s like you lose a day because you have no idea what your surroundings really look like. Not like there was that much to it anyway. The “city” of Itaunas was literally about three blocks by three blocks and I’m generously including the main plaza which is surrounded by dirt roads as one of these blocks. The basic land marks of Itaunas are; a somewhat big tree trunk which has been knocked over on the grass slightly off center in the main plaza, a small blue church and a restaurant next to the Forro do Coco “nightclub” called Mc Dunas, which was complete with two golden arches, (a word play and tribute to the famous Itaunas sand dune that you have to scale to arrive at the nearby beach.) Also, it was during the ride there that I found out that Itaunas was party central for college students all around Brazil, where people slept until the afternoon, went to the beach during the later day and then danced Forro all night. Arriving there, I realized exactly how much in the middle of nowhere it was, which is fine, but in a place like this, you had better love Forro or you will quickly be bored out of your mind. Not even the beautiful sand dune, the river or the wickedly fun beach with all its glorious waves will sustain you for a significant period of time if you do not really like Forro. Everywhere you go, you can’t escape it, at the beach, or in the main plaza, it’s just Forro, Forro, Forro.

Okay, so I didn’t really like Forro. The steps of Forro are quite similar to merengue except for the fact that a lot of the time, you dance on your toes for some strange reason. The first night we got there, I took a nice long nap before being awoken to go out. (Going out requires quite the physiological preparation for someone who needs her sleep so badly.) Granted, there were things I loved when dancing Forro, like the feeling of being plutonically pressed up and swung around against a randomly nice-smelling and good-looking stranger, dancing barefoot since hardly anything was paved, just smooth dirt and sand everywhere, being reminded of dancing all the partner dances that I really love, salsa, merengue and bachata. Yet, what killed it for me was the music. I didn’t like it. It was all live with an accordion so it ended up sounding like some strange perversion of Colombian vallenato mixed with Brazilian angst. It just wasn’t lively or upbeat to me and precisely because I had been spoiled with too many other amazing experiences of salsa, merengue and bachata in too many other countries that I couldn’t open my mind enough to not compare negatively.

Furthermore, between all the nice smelling and hot men were the other men who didn’t necessarily smell bad, but would take any unintended pressage due to a momentary loss of balance as the perfect pretext to start intertwining our fingers or permanently placing his head and everything else against mine. Or maybe that’s just how you dance Forro. I don’t know. Honestly, I didn’t invest too much energy into it to find out. But there is this one step in Forro where you apparently grind yourself against the male’s leg for like an hour before he takes the next step. It took me cutting off two guys mid-dance quite abruptly, to realize finally that it was just, part of Forro. I gave it two hours until 3:30am until I told my friends that I would just go back to the room by myself and go to bed.

Since I figured out almost immediately that I wasn’t totally enthralled with Forro, I realized I would be in trouble. So, not wanting to be too much of a bother, I told my friends that I would just take the first bus back home to Vitoria. However, I should have just scaled the three blocks of dirt roads or looked around to realize that low and behold, there were no buses going out of Itaunas. Good lord, I thought, I’m trapped. This is a state I absolutely hate to be in, at the complete will of other peoples schedule’s, kindness and rides. For the rest of the time there, I chose to go to sleep early every night instead of going out to Forro with my friends.) I also spent a lot of time eating and going to the beach (which is something I could have done just as easily in Vitoria and with a lot less mosquitos). If there is one thing that makes me happy in any situation, it’s eating and I always manage to do plenty of it. Especially if I’m bored with nothing better to do and I’m not getting any. I offered my unused condoms to Ju and Lu. (Not that I expected to jump on the first hot-blooded Brazilian Forro king, I just feel that as an ex-HIV Community Educator in HIV Prevention, it’s always better to be prepared. Furthermore in my own experience, it saves time and is a lot better than holding up the whole process to send the man out to the nearest gas station which in a nothing town like Itaunas where there were no gas stations, would have put the whole affair to a complete stop.)

At the same time, I put my effort in and saw it as an opportunity. I knew it would be good for me to be forced to get out of my own self-absorbed, tragic world and socialize with people that didn’t necessarily have a lot in common with me . Ju and Gis are girls from work who I’ve hung out with on a few separate occasions outside of work. Yet in all honesty, hanging out with Ju, Gis and Ju’s friend Lu in Itaunas was like hanging out with the Brazilian Mean Girls. Not that they are at all bitches but they are all Capixaba’s, meaning that they have spent the majority of their lives in Vitoria and therefore their primary concerns are being beautiful and finding a man. Gis has already gotten her boobs done and Lu talks incessantly about how imperfect her body is, what she would like to change, and Ju talks incessantly about her boyfriends, her ex-boyfriends and her soon to be boyfriends. They were thrilled that I could teach them the word “amigovio” because the expression in English, “the guy that I’m seeing or fucking at the moment” was just a little too much for them to remember and would atrapalha every time they tried to tell a story about this person in their lives. These conversations are seemingly endless sometimes and I can’t help it, after a while I let myself get bored and disengaged because I’m a freak and I’d rather be talking about how I think that Bush’s re-election and the Hamas coming to power in Israel force people to contend with all sides of modern electoral democracy. Sometimes it’s hard when you have nothing to share and you are just really uninterested. There were moments when all that I longed for was physical solitude. What’s to become of me if I’ve become this intolerant to basic, basic things?

Yet, in the end, and I’m sure most people already know this, there is a lot of value in socializing with people who you don’t have much in common with and being able to not only accept them for who they are but love and appreciate them for all their amazing qualities as well. One night while Lu was waiting for Ju in the hostel room to go out to Forro, (Gis was staying in another hostel room with her amigovio and Ju went out for the moment,) I sat down and talked to Lu about why I was having a difficult time when I seemingly shouldn’t. I was pretty frank. “Lu, you have to understand that it’s hard for me to accept certain things as an outsider in your society. I’m totally aware that I have no right to judge or criticize but please be patient with me, I’m just extremely sensitive and it’s difficult for me to see and deal things that I never saw or experienced when I was growing up, things such as such huge contrasts between the different worlds that people live here in Brazil or the rest of the world for that fact.”

Lu is slightly younger and everyone calls her “Pat” (pronounced Pat.chee in the Portuguese accent) because of the fact that she is extremely high-maintenance and spends laborious amounts of time getting ready to go out whether it be to the beach or the free breakfast that is included in our hostel first thing in the morning, (I almost screamed at her on the first day when it was 10am in the morning and the free breakfast was technically ending and she was still sitting on the bed trying to pick out what earrings to wear.) She took what I was saying more than well. In fact, she was extremely kind, sincere and funny as I expressed all the things that made it difficult to enjoy life sometimes in Brazil. (I couldn’t help but fall into my tragic, self-righteous bitch mode!) But she was great, very sweet, intelligent and willing to help me through what I was feeling. We had a great conversation about our perspectives on our lives and the perceptions that we had which stemmed from our different experiences growing up in our different worlds. This greatly put me at ease and I decompressed a little. They went out that night and I prayed that I could make peace with them and myself by the time my little vacation was over. And then of course, I went right to bed.

On the way back to Vitoria, Gis’s amigovio ended up coming with us instead of the big rent-a-bus that he had taken with his brother and a group of university students to get to Itaunas. (Gis had slept in his room the whole time.) He drove Gis’s car back. I sat in the middle of Ju and Lu in the back seat, holding onto a pillow, trying to fall asleep. Gis kept reaching over while he was driving and kissing his arm and head. It took me a little less than an hour to banish the thought of “How sad that this is what she’s settling for and even sadder that this is her car and he’s the one driving it…must all male validation derive from even the most insidious forms of female domination????” and switch to “Tina, shut the fuck up, she’s 32, she has three kids, two who are teenagers and has found a man who doesn’t seem to mind that, makes her feel loved and definitely appreciates the most recent investment that she worked so hard to put into her body.”

It might never be my life but that’s okay. She’s happy and that’s all that should matter. We all know where we stand and the important thing is to at least respect each other and each other’s decisions. Gis told me once when I was considering quitting my job because I was having problems with the administration, “you know Tina, I have three kids, I need that job, if Brunella (our boss) told me to eat this napkin holder I’d have to start breaking the pieces and swallowing…” (it sounded much funnier in Portuguese. Actually, Gis is hilarious besides being nurturing, wise and kind.) So that’s it, that’s her and her life and she’s accepted and found peace with it. I’ll be gone in less than a year and for all my solitude, depression and struggle for me, all of it is mine and my life. We’ve all had our struggles, our pain and it’s all valid. And even though they might be found in quite separate and distinct realities it is really almost comical that they should all converge and meld in this crazy little party town of Forro and sand dunes in Itaunas, Brazil.

The Aftermath/September 10, 2004 (from my memoirs)

2-16-04
6:01 pm
Cambridge

I think I should probably keep track of the days that I want to kill myself. Today was one of them. The trigger was Peter Nolan’s lecture this morning. He basically put into words my thoughts the past few formative years. I was relieved by what he said yet disturbed, here he was, the director of Development Studies in Cambridge, finally saying something quasi-relevant about poverty and confirming all my thoughts and ideas and personal battles, reigniting the spark in me. All the many months of pacification just came to a startling halt and I came home crying, thinking about nothing but suicide and just how pointless everything was, all the irrelevant discourse and mumbo jumbo that makes Cambridge so self-righteous and self-validating. I wrote him a long e-mail when I got home, basically thanking him for reinstilling what little, well virtually non of the faith I have in this fucked up place. It was such a self-revealing cry for help that I immediately regretted it later and now. Then I had an anxiety attack and just wanted to die. I ended up calling home and my father had to talk to me for almost two hours to calm me down. But relief was temporary because shortly after and even now, I’m having trouble breathing and my head feels constricted. I lied down for ten minutes thinking, if this is my life I want to die. If I’m going to be continuously tormented like this, physiologically, then I want to die. I felt hopeless, there really is nothing that I can do. ME QUERIA MORIR!! With the e-mail, I put myself in a position, where if he doesn’t read it (since he’s so busy, he’s my friend’s supervisor and she says he never reads e-mails) I’ll feel unheard but if he does read it, I’ll feel overexposed. I don’t know which one is worse. All I know is that I feel terrible but I need to get some work done.

I had called home crying and crying, as I used to do in Colombia when I couldn’t take the stench of the misery of my environment anymore. “DAD!!! THE WORLD IS SO UNFAIR, SO FUCKED UP!!!” He lectured me for two hours until he was the one yelling at me and I was quiet. “YOU’RE AMONGST THE DEAD TINA!! WHEN THOSE CORPORATIONS EXPLOIT PEOPLE AND THEN SAY THEY THEY’RE HELPING THEM, YOU KNOW THAT’S JUST BULL!!” After two hours of this, I got quiet and stopped thinking about death. He saved me for that moment and two days later when I crawled out of my panic attack, when I could function again and stopped crying, I wrote in my journal how happy I was to be alive. As I mistakenly divulged this fact to an admirer later on a date in my gift of being facetious about everything, he laughed and said, “So, basically, you were out-Songed.”

******

Actually, I don’t believe that I am truly, that tragic. I’m just extremely sensitive and responsive to my surroundings. I let many things that are beyond my control just get to me and I love to over-think everything. Give me enough time and material and I can easily put myself in a state of despair. I guess it was inevitable for me to be suicidal after going to Cambridge directly from my Fulbright experience in Colombia. No Sylvia Plath here. If you stick me in a developing country of civil conflict and set off bombs in my immediate environment that is filled with poverty and wounded people, then I’ll probably feel sad, depressed and scared.

If immediately after you put me in a situation where I am literally passing by a castle every day on my way to class and where the biggest local concerns seem so trite (I actually witnessed two locals stop in their track on the way to the store and begin fretting about dog shit that was left on the ground), then I’ll probably feel a little disoriented, out-of-place and frustrated. This is especially if the sole motivation for going to Cambridge had been to “work within the system,” and find ways I could create regional development in situations of armed conflict so I could better the lives of those who suffered most, the displaced and all others who are socially expendable in times of war or economic growth, pretty much most of my surrounding neighbors in my previous experience. It’s hard to have witnessed so vividly how the two worlds lived and did not collide at any juncture. Coincide but not collide.

By the time I got to Cambridge, I was so angry, I raged. At first I couldn’t deal with it and I lashed out at everyone around me, I wanted everyone to be as miserable as I had been made to be, as desperate. Everyday I woke up and wanted to shout “PEOPLE ARE DYING YOU FUCKERS!!! DO SOMETHING!!!” But, it didn’t seem like anyone at Cambridge could get it. People were happy to be at one of the most prestigious institutions in the world and live off that prestige. Cambridge was an easy personality-gap filler. If you were incomplete or had some void within you as a person before, having gone or worked at Cambridge gave you something to ride on for the rest of your life.

It wasn’t just comfortable, it was surreal, dreamlike. Get up, go to class, stop by the market in the centre, pick up some freshly made bread, go to a café and get a latte, walk by the river, watch the people punting, visit the quaint little shops, go the pub at night, study somewhere in between. Hear every single Western European language that is spoken in the streets. However, once in a while, a real beggar would punctuate the peaceful serenity of our daily lives. The contrast wasn’t quite as fierce as it was in Colombia, where displaced families with cardboard billboards advertising their tragedies camped outside of the grand shopping malls of Bogota. However, once in a while, the homeless made their presence and their points very well known in the midst of the Cambridge hustle and bustle. One time, as I sat outside of Starbucks, a tall homeless man screamed out to the passing extras, exasperated, “I HAVE NEVER SEEN SUCH IGNORANT PEOPLE IN MY ENTIRE LIFE!!!” I’m right there with you buddy. In the immediate tourist, university sector of Cambridge, beggars appeared few and far between but I think there must have been some police-approved beggars and crazy people which were allowed to infiltrate because I noticed that during the day, only a very minute few would have the audacity to ask any of us civilized people for money. “Could you spare some spare change please?”

“Me regalas una moneda?” “No papi, no tengo.” I’ve said that more than once to little boys on the streets in Bogota. In Cambridge, I said nothing, it was difficult for me to understand their poverty, after seeing poverty in such a different context a year earlier. I was so confused, so mixed up. Wait, but you’re white and you speak English and live in England. You didn’t see your village slaughtered, you probably just don’t get along with your parents and ran away. Get off the drugs already. Paula, my best friend at Cambridge from Colombia who studied management had said once “estos son pobres porque quieren ser pobres.” We didn’t understand. We put human suffering on a hierarchy with the attitude that those on the bottom would eventually “get over it” if they really wanted to. At the same time, I was never extremist in the other direction either. If it was cold at night, like Cambridge can be quite often, I felt pain for those who slept in the streets and thanked God for my bed, my room and all my privileges. Yet I also always wondered if even the homeless had access to the National Health Service.

It must be universal that the beggars come out at night, or maybe they just become more audacious because I remember being asked more often for food or money at night time. It’s hard to determine who you help and who you don’t. Like playing God for a minute. In Cambridge, I gave only when the weather was very cold and I knew the night would be difficult. And of course I gave in situations where I was scared. That’s as far as my empathy could go, especially on such a bad exchange rate between the dollar and the pound. Once, a woman my age dragged a child of around the age of five through the centre asking for money to feed her child. I was so angry over the child’s exploitation that I gave her nothing and punished them both. But what can you do? It’s funny how some cultures obsess over eating etiquette but have no rules for when to give money to the poor. It’s not who can eat its how you eat.

I had virtually no friends. I met loads of people and made many, many acquaintances, as a child does on her first day of school, but I could talk to nobody about my grief, my sadness, my anger. It was worse because I walked around angry to find that people were seemingly not indignant or paralyzed by anything. After cognitively living less than an hour away from paramilitary social cleansing for a little more than a year, how could I not want to smack the grin off of every idealistic, human-rights loving European living in Cambridge University? Almost immediately, my resentment grew into a lasting bitterness that would permanently affect my social outlook towards people, especially Europeans, especially the English for the rest of my stay in Cambridge until now. Besides the occasional beggar or homeless person, the only other reminder of the absurd isolation of our lives in Cambridge was a small stencil like graffiti which had been sprayed on the side of Trinity College that said “I woke up on the wrong side of capitalism.” It reminded me of the graffiti on a building at the intersection of the Seventh Avenue with 67 Street in Bogota which was also a stenciled graffiti. However, that one read “Quien cuenta?” (Who counts?) over a bar code.

Is it naïve to say that I was so hopeful and naïve when I left for England? So full of inflated hope.

Being an expat, (ex-pat?) a letter and response to a friend/September 8, 2006

on a completely unrelated note, is the ex-pat lifestyle really what
americans aspire for? is living in a less developed country or the
3rd/developing world "making" it? is being able to be bi-continental
in a culture you didn't come from and isn't within your heritage,
which is romantized the way to go?

there is just something really disturbing about this notion that i'm
not able to fully articulate. i just know that when people in the
states talk about "living abroad" (and i'm not talking about europe. i
mean the Philippines or Africa or the Middle East... ) they mostly
romanticize this notion. they want to spend half their year in the
states and then milk their american dollar living on a beach or
somewhere... isn't this very colonial? i'm not even talking about the
people that work abroad (for either years or a short period of time)
-- those seem to fall into a sort of sub or different category.

but, largely, this seems like mostly just me that's perturbed by this.
i've been reading more and more articles lately (it started with ny
magazine or something) about moving to buenos aires to live it up like
an expat. which really disgust me. yes, you have access to a better
standard of living, access to a higher class than you would here,
especially in the major cities, where you struggle to stay... but
isn't there something inherently wrong about this? or, maybe it's just
me with the guilty conscience, me with the 1st world and immigrant
guilt. doesn't me having a little more mean someone is having a little
less?

does this justify my corporate job? my comfy job, fairly comfy
lifestyle? my bougouie tastes? no. does it make me a better person for
feeling this way? i don't think so. but, somehow, i don't think i'd be
so comfortable blowing my american cash living the high life in saudi
arabia in a gated community while so many people are starving. and
then does this make your politics "better", more "righteous"?

i'm babbling. and this is mostly just a rant from a girl that has
grown up in the states and has spent very little time abroad.

**********************

Serena, I promised you a blog in response to this blog that you put up
a few days ago. With all the good intentions in my heart, I wanted it
to be well thought out and coherent, except that it's almost ten
o'clock on a Friday night and I have a horrible head cold which
totally prevents me from thinking straight since I can't currently
breath right now. Anyway, I'm going to try to keep this as short and
concise as possible. You deserve more but it's the least I can do
right now from letting a response turn into mindless dribble.

"is being able to be bi-continental in a culture you didn't come from
and isn't within your heritage, which is romantized the way to go?"

Depends on what you're looking for I guess. Sex or a relationship
with someone who would not give you the time of day in your own
country? The thrill of making people feel small by making yourself
seem so cultured and cool? Affording nice things when everyone else
around you is poor and starving? (I've done this. However, depending
on the person, this catches up to you and there does come a point
where this is not morally sustainable. I've written extensively about
this in personal memoirs, where it was hard for me to go out every
weekend because the displaced people from the war had to be cleared
from the streets by the police and were not allowed to enter the nice
areas. Yet, this is more of a foreigner issue than a country issue.
Seeing abject poverty for the first time was harder for me as a
foreigner than it was for my Colombian friends because I had never
seen anything like it before and psychologically was unaccustomed to
placing that reality within the context of my own. Although it was
right in my face, somehow, the reality of it was incomprehensible to
me for a while. However, it did hit me and then came the
post-traumatic stress that I suffered when I went back to the states
to be further exacerbated by my Cambridge experience almost
immediately after.)

In terms of legitimacy, I think you will always be an outsider no
matter how much you romanticize and fantasize and lust after whatever
aspect of a culture. Even if you feel a strong connection with a
certain place, where being in that place feels completely natural and
expressing yourself in that language feels just as natural, you will
always be perceived as an outsider, especially if you are of a
different race which will always hinder your assimilation experience.
However, I think a lot of it depends on who you are, how secure you
are and to what extent you are willing to tolerate or ignore the
constant and daily reminders of your own foreignness and self-imposed
dislacement.

Living abroad sounds extremely glamorous but the reality can be just
as monotonous and boring as any reality at home. Sometimes, to pass
the day here in Brazil when I am bored out of my mind and fantasizing
about the fantastic lives of my friends who have real jobs and careers
living in big cities, going out more, having more sex, having more
friends, I cling onto my original purpose which I made clear to myself
before I landed. I'm going to learn Portuguese and have a Brazil
living experience to see what it would be like because the idea sounds
really neat to me. So learning Portuguese was inevitable but so many
parts of my Brazil experience haven't been so neat. It's really
highlighted the difference between traveling and living. To work in
Brazil at a Brazilian job amongst the Brazilian work culture meant
that I turned myself into another exploited Brazilian worker bee which
was a lot easier previously fantasized about then actually done.

So you might be asking, why aren't I having more sex? Because I'm
lazy and I'm not interested right now. That's the shittiest and best
answer I can give. I came to Brazil under some pretty extrenuous
personal circumstances, to put it lightly, "to find myself." It
wasn't like I made a proclamation of celebacy before I came, I just
decided that I would not go out of my way to find love or anyone. If
it happened, it would happen naturally and I would not capitalize on
my foreign-ness, my Asian-ness or my whatever-ness just to get laid.
Furthermore, I'm having a love-hate relationship with the Brazilian
culture right now and there have been few guys, though many Brazilian
men are hot, who have caught my attention or my interest for an
extended period of time. I'm quite the recluse here and the only
reason that I can be like this is because this is my fifth time living
abroad so my solitude does not frighten me. I actually like the fact
that I've learned to be comfortable with my own skin here. It's not
the ideal way to live, but in a way, it's also solidified my
independence a bit and frees me up to only hang out and be with people
that I really want to be with which when I think about it, is not that
many people.

Depending on who you are, you can live various types of ex-pat
lifestyles. The one that you've described throughout your blog is
more of what I would like to call American-embassy ex-pat lifestyle,
the one where sure, you live in the country, however, there are so
many arbitrary restrictions on what you can and can't do that you
might as well have stayed at home. Like, people who work in the
embassy can't get on buses and have to get driven around by certain
people and stay in certain areas. You find them in the Irish Pub in
fancy sector of Bogota, Colombia, hitting on a certain type of woman
who is foreigner hunting and drooling over the foreign white man's
big, throbbing opportunity to get a green card. (It's not a
judgement. Go ahead girl, do what you've got to do to get out of a
country of massacres, kidnapping and war.) But you don't have to
fret Serena because a pompous ass is as a pompous ass does everywhere in the world and in a country of high security problems like, Colombia and I can imagine, for those who live in the gated communities of Saudi Arabia, those people and lifestyles are the first to be targeted for attacks by the abject poor who really have nothing to lose. When I lived in Bogota, a guy blew himself up with a U.S. military grenade thirty blocks from my house because he was trying to threaten some military people to hook himself up with some money.

Which brings me to political legitimacy and righteousness. The
biggest lesson that I've had to learn by living abroad is that what I
think is right, my first world conceptions of democracy and "freedom"
and whatever notions I have of a fair and just society does not fit
everywhere. To an extent, I think that you have to live abroad to
realize that. To realize that, given the opportunity to choose, many
people may indeed choose what you perceive to be an unequal, bogus
lifestyle but works perfectly well for them. For example, this
Brazilian breast implant controversy. Sure, we can go into the
intellectual feminist debate about how Brazilian women have bought
into their own oppression, that it's the man that's perpetuating all
of this, that they are helpless victims of a globalized propaganda
machine created by the white man to convince women that they are
worthless if they don't risk their lives to put silicone in their
tits, but given all that information and "education," I have a strange
and funny sensation that they might choose to do so anyway and you
know what, to me that is sad and it sucks but at the same time, it's
the most democratic thing in the world, this choice that they've made
to do that to themselves. And hey, more power to them if that's what
makes them happy. I mean yes, it infuriates me on many intellectual
levels, but I need to respect the fact that I am a guest in someone
else's home so I need to respect their rules and the way that they do
things. I've lived the first quarter of my life working towards some
obscure revolution so believe me, this is the hardest reality in my
whole concept of being to accept but I'm learning. That's why I'm
here. To keep learning and to keep practicing that to really accept
that there are people with different ideas and objectives than my own
and recognize them at the very least for the fact that they are human
and because of that suffer or have suffered for one thing or another.
Trust me, I hate this diplomatic shit and recognizing that everyone
has feelings goes against every natural fiber in my body and makes all
my jokes bland but it's really true. Let me just get up a little
higher on my soapbox and say this, the only thing I think that I've
learned about being revolutionary and really loving people is that I
needed to let go of the me in all of this. If we are going into
debates about real topics that have real consequences on real people,
such as poverty or how people "should" live in certain places we
should really think about why we're having these debates. If we
approach these debates with righteousness then we've automatically
lost because not losing face and being right is somehow more important
than the actual people and consequences at hand. And trust me, I am a
fragile, insecure, human being. I'm working at this but still have
about a five percent success rate. But at least I can say now that
people's feelings are important.

Oh, and by the way, so let's just take your scenario for a minute.
Person X lives the expat lifestyle abroad in his gated community in
Buenos Aires or Saudi Arabia and says you're stupid because you don't
live there and just because you've read that the poor are being
socially cleansed doesn't mean it really exists because person X
hasn't seen it before. Okay, so you see what I'm getting at? To make
it a little clearer. Just because I lived a year in Colombia during a
military state when bombs went off near my being doesn't mean that I
have any idea what it must be like to really be Colombian, to have the
reality of no exit hanging over your head, to be under continuous
threat of kidnapping, to know someone you love be kidnapped when all
you want to do is just enjoy your beautiful country and all the
amazing things that it has to offer and all that you want to do is to
enjoy life like the "rest of the world" and have the freedom to go from
point a to point b without having constantly to worry about whether
you will get there dead or alive etc etc. On an intellectual level, I
can cite statistics from the Gini Index on the inequality of income or
land distribution but I will never be able to tell you what it's like
to have my village slaughtered or have my family raped and killed to
be forced to live in a big city and beg for food everyday to survive
knowing that there will never be justice for those people that I love
and that I am completely invisible in a place that I cannot leave.
Which brings me to the point. Nobody has any right to be righteous
because all that shit is real and valid, no matter what side you're on
or what side you've taken.

That's all. My brain is mush now. I hope some of this has made
sense. Oh, and if it doesn't you know me and my bottom line. The
world is totally fucked. Humanity is fucked. But, we should still be
nice when we can be.

Love you.