new books

i feel like a real researcher now because i used the library loan service. people sent books from one city to another just for me and my work. i mean, wow.

i'll post my notes from them when i can.

the books are High Risk/High Gain, by Alan Weiss (a hard to find account of pc training in the 60's) and Sahib, by Carl Pope (about a couple who served in India doing family planning).

thank you, library loan.

Marnie Mueller's Green Fires

i borrowed this one along time ago from an RPCV from a long time ago. He lives in New orleans and we've met a few times. he's agreed to talk with me about his time served soon.

he lent me two books, actually. the other was Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins. He served in Ecuador before he became this hitman (true story) and tells little of his time there, so i put it down for now.

and i was surprised to find, in Mueller's work of fiction, lots of truth about PC. Here are the quotes i wanted to hold on to:

"I could tell immediately that you were Peace Corps. You are neither tourist nor native. You are Peace Corps!" (28) - the crafty padre Baez says this to the protaganist, Annie, when they meet

"My nerves were so frayed and my beliefs so shattered that it took all my energy to get through the most minor encounter." (41) - Annie, on her second year in country

"What happened to me? That was the question i asked myself all the time. Kai said it was criminal of my government to send us down there, twenty-year-olds without training into a foreign culture to do the work even experts could expect to fail at." (41) - Annie, reflecting on her german-born husband Kai's thoughts on PC

"My father beleived in circles because 'no one's better than anyone else in a circle...'" (42)

"I wasn't like the majority of volunteers, i kept telling myself, novices, from privileged backgrounds, with their liberal arts educations, who were either overwhelmed after a few months and left their neighborhoods to become English teachers of middle class boys and girls, or retreated deeply into their neoghborhoods and settled into a pattern of drinking and smoking dope, sleeping through the day, and locking themselves off from their communities." (42)

"My president had asked me to serve my country, not to take it for granted.

Then shortly after we;d arrived in country, he'd been killed. We had walked through Quito still stunned by the events...Jon's President Nixon could never elicit such passion from either PCVs or the people of this country." (129-30) - and we felt the same about Bushie

"I believe that no matter what you people see you forget it when ou arrive at your home. Is that so?" (134) - indeginous Mingo, on US visitors to the amazon

"'Why did i come? why do i stay?'...

'What i answer is, i dont think you norte americanos know. i think in your gringo naivete you have faith but no knowledge." (142) - MIngo, on gringo help. he nailed me there.

"'You'll send me somthing from america to remember you by?' maria said.

How i once hated that question! when i felt as though my total value was determined by what i could send from america." (308)

its mysteries

"I realized then what seems obvious now: another culture would not reveal its mysteries to me at a mere wave of my hand. One has to prepare oneself thoroughly for such an encounter."

-Ryszard Kapuscinski, "The Open World"

aside

I really hate to admit it but I have ben inspired by good writing. Its this comps thing, a bunch of essays clipped together. And it has made me, and this hasn’t happened in a long time, it has made me wangt to write a little something, which is what you (whoever you are) are reading now.

It is a sad time here at the American Can. In the last weeks I’m heard a whole collection of sad stories from people I know here and it makes me think this place is more real than I knew. I mean if you don’t know anybody, the stories of the people who live around you in an apartment complex, its easy to imagine you live alone, that only you’re apartment is occupied and everyone else you see is passing through. Even the people you see leaving the apartments next to yours and locking the doors behind htem were just there for a few minutes. They don’t live there.

Now I am acutely aware of more people, more occupied apartments. One person told me, she stays home all day. It’s depression, she said. Another, an old friend actually, tells me her grandfather, who lives here, was in an accident a few months back and is not recovering well. Just this morning a man said his back, injured years ago, was now hurting so bad he couldn’t get out of bed some days and he has fallen out of the shower twice due to losing feeling inhis legs. He admitted depression too. A just this evening someone told me she was hoping for a new job elsewhere but ended up her in New Orleans. She said she was trying to be happy about it but was sure everyone could see through it.

What to make of this, I don’t know. Lots of sad people here, and there could be many more. This whole place could be under a depression, like a spell. I wouldn’t be surprised. We’ve felt it too.