If you’re trying to be cool you’ve already missed the boat; the fire inside to have courage is the thing itself.
So is that if and only if or exclusive or?
What other picture could go here but Teddy and Muir
Cool courage
So it goes
It’s hard to do official-ish things in Guatemala. I hazard the guess (literally) that lots of developing countries are that way. There are mountains of paperwork and steps and it’s actually really hard to find any information about anything unless you know somebody. The paperwork is tough: it needs to be done in ink with signatures of you, a notary, and your great great step-mother’s uncle, while the steps usually consume one or more whole days–in the capitol city, which takes a day or two to get to from anywhere else in the country. And deadlines. The world ends if you don’t meet a deadline (they’re usually not met).
Why? I think it’s like a Volcano ice cream bowl from Coldstone: Oreos mashed in with strawberries and chocolate syrup and bananas in vanilla ice cream: there’s a lot goin’ on that makes it what it is.
I’m sure that a significant ingredient is technology, namely how it’s kinda here but not really. There’s online banking but when you make any transaction more significant than a withdraw or deposit, it is first and foremost written and signed in pen in a Book of Acts. Also, there’s an enormous amount of corruption all around. I’ve talked with a lot of Guatemalans about this stuff, they agree and quite benevolently explain that that’s simply how things are here. It’s just hard to do stuff here.
How does a country become this or change away from this? Were the Mayans like this? Where the Spanish Catholics or Evangelical missionaries like this? My word, were WE once like this (possibly not, but I don’t know)? And the North America indigenous?
Gear change: a girl in the sponsorship program is graduating from high school this year and has the desire to keep studying, the aptitude to swing in the big leagues and the heart to actually do good things there. That’s a rare combo. She has a heart that’s not been muted and dumbed and a mind that’s survived a normally crippling secondary “education.” An absolutely necessary condition for this country to climb out of the mud will be for the few-and-far-between individuals like her to reach for the stars.
But you know what? That won’t happen. If she does manage to keep studying, it’ll be Saturday classes at one of a few local university micro-branches that remarkably effectively board up the mind wherever the secondary education failed to do so. There are only a few good quality learning universities here and only rich people enroll. All the mountainous paperwork and myriad steps aren’t so bad when you can hire three or four lawyers to make sure things work out.
This girl, Ana, won’t ever know what it’s like to reach for the stars, to follow her heart and creativity and imagination, to have the world tell her “go for it and see what happens.” She’ll end up graduating from high school in October and going straight to work in the education system, with absolutely inadequate training to address the problems and struggles the students face, teaching the same poor curriculum that she herself only barely escaped.
Because that’s the way things are here, and it makes my blood boil.
Flying
It would be so much cooler with an engine and wings and cockpit and one of those awesome bush-pilot headsets, but this one time a while ago sneakers-and-shorts-shod on a dock at sunset was good enough.
Brag: this is a self portrait.
Forgetfulness
Sometimes I forget that for work I get to ride a dirtbike around on a crazy old rocky highway through mountains between towns to hang out with poor kids and give them school supplies. Did I mention that’s actually for work?
There’s always stuff to whine about here, but for now I settle for beer with my crackers and cheese.
And it just so happens that there’s a store just down the street that sells Guatemalan beer and Guatemalan corn chips. Not good old crackers and cheese, but close enough and maybe better really.
And yes, when Profe Jorge and I ride around on the motorcycle we do sorta look like a couple of Mormons. They call us milk and chocolate.
Music success
If Google shows a music group Wikipedia page before the official page, is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Fat pastors
In a poor town in a developing country, something’s just not right about a fat pastor.
Old pics
So a few years ago I got this brand new Lenovo laptop and decided that windows is for chumps, I’m going Ubuntu all the way.
So I installed Ubuntu, dual booting with Vista.
Then I decided that’s for chumps, real ballers nix Vista and use powerful Linux for EVERYTHING.
That’s where I found out why real ballers are real ballers (and why I wasn’t quite baller)…
This is Wes, one of the mechanics at the bike shop I worked at.
Nice shades breh.
For the record Wes also got the ultimate compliment from the local grom squad: “sweet kicks man.”
Nuff said.
I wonder if he’s still styling the white Tarmac.
This was my daily morning bus trip to UW. Shot with a camera phone out the back window of the bus towards Bellevue, and towards the sunrise (dur).
Complex Analysis. This was one of my favorite classes ever. The prof was legitimately crazy, absolutely brilliant, really scary at first, and more than any (but one) prof I’ve had he truly really cared about us students despite having to teach us little piddly raisins easy stuff compared to type of wild and deep things in math he deals with daily. And being a crazy old codger he somehow was one of the only profs I’ve had who really treated everybody equal. And in a bar fight this guy would lay fools out (did I mention he’s an ex-Navy-fighter-pilot?).
Old phone pictures are like Cliff notes for chapters of life, aren’t they?
Conclusion: always have a phone with at least a decently good camera.
The heart of the Polaroid camera lives on.
Belly feel win
There’s this kid in the office who spends a lot of time trying to bug me. Any way he can make fun of english or white people or my accent or my hair, it’s all free game, lets try to get under dave’s skin.
I resist. I smile and laugh. Always.
But the other day, I fought back.
He walked over and asked me to connect the internet, throwing in one or two of the spanishly-butchered english words and a slimy “yyYYYYeeeaahh.”
But I interrupted. I softly put my hand on his belly. He stopped talking. I took my hand off and he kept talking, so I put my hand on his belly again, more firmly (but still softly).
He stopped talking and sputtered some bad words in spanish.
Yes ladies and gentlemen, this day I won.
Motorcycles
Motorcycle wrenching fun, motorcycle flying fun, motorcycle from here to there and back fun
The best motorcycle for the one is the worst motorcycle for the other is the alright motorcycle for the other.
Cliché solution #1: the best motorcycle is the one that you are riding
Cliché solution #2: the best motorcycle is the one that makes you think about God
Prerequisites
1. Understand english
2. Understand spanish
3. Understand soccer
4. Know FC Barcelona
Penny farthing bicycle racing
I really, really have got to do this someday.
Note that the guys with beards are about to lap the guys without beards. Just saying.
from evandalevillagefair.com
Families
Two of the families that have children in the sponsorship program, the Lorenzo León family and the Rodríguez Méndez family. One of the families doesn’t have a father, and one of them has basically nothing and not really enough money for food. The other family has a little bit more than nothing, and still not really enough for food.
Also, I’d forgotten how white I am. Dang.
May festival: part three
Here’s the wrap up May Festival (La Féria de Barillas) pictures. So many great photo opportunities, and way more importantly I’m starting to learn how to not bring along my camera sometimes. In the Féria the town showed all it’s colors, the ones I like and the ones I don’t like. So many parts of Mayan heritage and equally so much trying-to-be-western, so many fat men who’ve never ridden a horse wearing cowboy clothes and so many malnourished children in expensive parades. So many smiles, too.
I’m somewhere between right and judgmental gringo and wrong.
Hungry slaves
Ok, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking in the past few months, and lots of accelerated thinking in the past few days. Here’s the mind dump.
You can’t erradicate slavery in the world until people aren’t hungry. If a country is hungry there are going to be slaves.
You can’t get rid of hunger until women are actually worth something in rural villages, until a baby girl is worth just as much as a baby boy.
You can’t realize a world where women are worth what men are worth until you fix the old and deeply etched culture of each rural village that lives in every old man and old woman, every local healer and little child. Yes, cultures need to be corrected–but not that alone, they need to correct themselves. The fire has to come from within.
You can’t fix hunger by sending food, not even by planefuls and boatfuls. That makes it worse. After a bad week have four beers and a whisky, feel horrible and sad and so have another drink. You’ll just have a worse hangover the next day because of the extra drink. Well, ok, that analogy doesn’t make a ton of sense. But really the future cannot look like countries sending food to other countries, and every step that way is a step away from what the future can look like.
And like Norman Borlaug would say, you can’t build a peaceful world on empty stomachs.
(from a month or two ago, I got lazy and didn’t final-draft-edit it)