Ay, Servicio... ("bathroom" or "service", you be the translator)

It's been a while... haven't had access for a while because I have been in Costa Rica. Missing out on the US Social Forum felt like a big deal for me because I so want to make more connections and feel the tides change, but you need to lucha where you are, I tried to do my best (?) in C.R. The reason I went was questionable in the first place, I'm not gonna lie (as say the teens I was with). I lead a four week homestay/community service program for youth with Global Routes. A bunch of rich, mostly white, teenagers trooping down to Central Am. to speak Spanish and live with rural folks. I have done this before and it's always questionable. There's the basic idea that these kids and these programs run on- which is 'let's go to someother country and help the poor people' and they are promoted as cross-cultural and development experiences and they cost a buttload. It's majority white folks on the programs and often heavy on the female participants. It's basic imperialist wack-ness, and I can't justify the business aspect of it. What I have been thinking about is the community building/ solidarity aspect of it and when I took the job again this summer (again, admittedly, been out of work for a while and needed the plata and to avoid rent for a month and in the spirit of transparency, get a free trip) I thought I'd try to salvage some of my belief system and inject some of those ideas into the group of kids we took down there.

It's been interesting. I feel like I'm often searching for a way to live what I believe in a critical way. Being out of work, desperate for a job, having ideas about how I want the world to be, yet still not being 100% with my own lifestyle and then taking this job. I definatley feel like I was walking a thin line by leading this trip. In any case Global Routes has some good management practices if nothing else, they do care about their workers, pay them well and do a lot of community building within the staff members which I appreciate. They have a good group of leaders who care about youth, although many of us fall into a 'type': lots of teachers and environmentalists, buddhists, yoga folk- almost entirely white, but at least concious about it. At staff training we were able to have open talks about gender and sexuality, although the race/class conversations were more tender.

In any case, I had a male co-leader and we took 18, 14-17 year olds to visit the cloudforest (vaya Quetzales! walkingsticks, colibri, other tourists) and then to the valley of San Isidro el General (over which a giant Jesus statue presides along with a sign that translates to "In this valley, Jesus is the General"), where we stayed in a rural, coffee growing community called Santa Marta de Cajon. We lived with families and, although Costa Rica is seen as the 'economic miracle' of Central America, all had folks living in the U.S. (mostly New Jersey) sending home remittances so that people could add to their meager coffee/pineapple/construction earnings. It was odd to be far enough up into the mountains that only 2 busses a day would reach, but see most of the community with large houses and all plenty of tv's, cell phones, dvd players, etc. All sent from or bought with U.S. money.

So many communities like that are all over Central America, many of them void of men who are working in the U.S. to augment income. I heard similar stories that I've heard from Mexicans, Hondurans, Ecuadorians back in Chicago of crossing 'mojado' and paying coyotes shit tons of money to get them North. Costa Rica is the last of the Central American countries to not have passed CAFTA. They have a referendum coming up in October and folks were easy to talk about it. We saw plenty of "NO TLC !" (Trato de Libre Commercio- free trade agreement) spray painted on the walls in some of the small farm communities and the obligatory "SI TLC!" on printed banners hanging off of the barbed wire enclosed manufacturing plants near the capital. The farmers know their gonna get fucked if it passes, it was interesting to share stories of what I've learned in Mexico and the Zapatista struggle with some of the people we stayed with, many people were unfamiliar with NAFTA's affects on migration and Mexico.

It was good to be able to bring these ideas to the students. I think some of them got more of an idea of connections between economy and immigration. We had them read 'To Hell With Good Intentions' at one point, and some of them were thinking a lot about why people live the way they do, culturally and politically.

We also had plenty of conversations about machismo, both among the U.S. students and the community members. The gender roles are so traditionally defined where we were living. Women really didn't leave the house much, cooking, cleaning and the men were out working, chilling. Many of the houses even have an outside room. Its a room attached to the house but with a seperate door and lock, you can't get into the house itself from that room. Some people told me that the room used to be used for strangers who would pass through needing a place to stay for the night, they could stay and the members inside the house would be safe from harm... but others told me it was the boys room. The boys could stay outside and roam as they wished, come home late, bring home women and it wouldn't bother anyone. The girls, of course, were locked up, safe, in the house. There were plenty of double standards, I was often criticized for how I was leading by community members, whereas no one would comment to the male leader. Funky and pressure-full, but in the end okay, I think. There were definatley some good friendships built both within the group and between group and community, and some questioning of development and relationships between U.S. and other countries and that is what I wanted to encourage.

I'm back in the U.S. now, getting ready to head to Revolutionland for a few weeks of learning and then back to the freakout of trying to find work. Summer is a time for not working....

pura vida