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Episode 3: July 25,
2007--From Loren:
This is our last video about
Nicaragua, and as I write these words our last
night slips by cool and breezy in the nearly
vacant hostel we use for the free wireless and
the $1.50 mojitos. Alberto, the bartender smokes
a Cuban cigar and plays pool on the patio. Fraz
is writing notes about what he wants to say
in his part of the introduction to this blog;
we have decided to split it up into two parts
-mine and his. So much has happened in our six
weeks in Nicaragua that it justifies two perspectives.
It is mostly because we see things a little
differently. Not in any bad way. We just organize
what we see into different representations of
our shared experience.
My experience in Nicaragua has
been nothing less than incredible. Our experience
with La Clinica Xochilt has both enriched me
and worn me out.
Our devoted group, whose focus
has been to improve a women’s health clinic
in El Viejo is off to a good start. And the
video blogging experience has been perfectly
complementary to this project. The camera has
been a powerful symbol, representing something
different to the various Nicaraguans I have
recorded. Not that they’ve never seen
one before. Even in Jiquilillo, the most rural
place I visited, the local children who attended
class at the progressive tourism hostel we stayed
at knew how to operate my digital camera.
The camera is much more than
novelty, or typical tourist gear. The camera
is the vehicle to convey the image, the face,
the message of the poor. While working with
the some of the poorest in Nicaragua at the
clinic, I understood that the photo, especially
the still image, was something that could be
put on a poster and distributed en masse around
the rural villages, which is a vital method
of communication and education is not very different
to what we are doing with the video blog.
Working on the videos has really
only distilled my entire experience. The entirety
of my experience is far richer and more detailed.
Some of the stories that we have explored are
incomplete and need proper attention, but I
know that they won’t be forgotten and
I know that other journalists are focusing their
cameras on the right places.
So… I feel ok about leaving,
but like anybody who has left something incomplete
I feel I need to stay and see things through.
Like the completion of the clinic’s exam
room, the cauterizer, and especially the story
of the sugar cane workers. We move on to our
other obligations though in Oaxaca, Mexico,
where international solidarity is desperately
needed.
My experience in Nicaragua is
far from over. As you’ll see on this page
we have a PayPal donations link
so anybody can donate directly to the clinic.
I also plan on returning next summer to help
in any way that I can.
Thanks for watching and
reading.
Loren
For the past three weeks our project has blossomed.
The first workshop on domestic violence was
given by Berta (one of the original founders
of the clinic 10 years ago). Twenty-five women
and a couple of men attended. They received
travel reimbursements, free lunch and free pap
smear vouchers.
Simultaneously, Loren was constructing
a ceiling during which the attendees of the
workshops as well as people passing by heard
the construction and enthusiastically offered
their help. It is amazing to witness the excitement
that occurs when a community feels the energy
flowing into a community project.
While our project has been exciting
and bustling, we have also run into financial
and personal crisis. The electro-surgical unit
we purchased to assist the clinic in their attempt
to create a holistic cervical cancer prevention
and treatment center, turned out to stretch
our budget beyond that which we had received
in grants from the Katherine Wasserman Davis
Foundation and Lewis & Clark College.
We had to work hard on a fundraising
campaign, which included attending the Nicaragua
Network’s solidarity conference in Managua.
The conference hosted international groups that
have been working in solidarity with Nicaraguan
communities since 1979, when the revolutionary
Sandinista government took over Nicaragua. Thus
far, we have been able to raise about half of
the necessary funds including a good amount
out of our own pockets.
The crisis concerning the sugar
cane workers of this region has also become
much more apparent in the last couple of weeks.
Much like the Banana workers
who were exposed to Nemegon in the 1980s, sugar
cane workers are dying due to unknown chemicals
being used for its cultivation and processing.
There is a short documentary by the Miami Herald
concerning the sugar cane workers of Chichigalpa,
a small town that we pass through daily on our
way to the Clinic in El Viejo. Check out the
video and read the article http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/fieldsofdeath/index.html.
In El Salvador, our next destination,
the people have been protesting the government’s
attempts to privatize water. The privatization
of water can be detrimental to a poor family
who relies on a government-subsidized water
for survival.
Water was privatized in Bolivia
three years ago and much of the country’s
poor could no longer afford the leap in prices
imposed by the French company that bought the
rights. National riots turned into an entire
siege of the capital city La Paz and two presidents
were forced to resign. Last week, in El Salvador
huge protests provoked police retaliation that
turned violent as the president deemed the protesters
terrorists and, subsequently beaten and arrested.
The situation is much clearer
when experienced in person versus hearing about
it back home in the States. This issue that
links the banana and sugar cane worker’s
plight to the privatization of water in El Salvador
is the deeply ingrained greed that has plagued
Latin America since Spanish Colonialism.
The poor are consistently at
the whim of those with money, and those with
money are most often foreigners who treat the
people of Nicaragua (and the rest of Latin America)
as if they were units of labor and not human
beings struggling for their health and their
family. Those who are sacrificed in the conquest
for money are considered the collateral damage
of a dichotomous international economy, in which
not everyone can survive but is nonetheless
“just.”
The world does not have to be
this way. It is so apparent in Nicaragua that
there is more than enough wealth to create a
sustainable and just planet. The $500 billion
spent on the death of Iraqis is an incomprehensible
use of money after witnessing the restoration
of a clinic, the funding of six months worth
of workshops and 600 exams for women that we
can facilitate with the little money we have
raised.
Last night our neighbors threw
quite the going away party for Loren and me.
There was food, drink, dancing and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey
until the wee-hours of the morning. The whole
neighborhood was incredibly kind to us and we
made some beautiful friends in Leon and El Viejo.
We are off now to El Salvador, Guatemala and
Mexico.
Until then…
Paz y Solidaridad
Frazer
lspeer@mscd.edu
frazer.lanier@gmail.com
To make a Tax-Deductible Donation
to Xochilt Project/Project Sonrisas:
For more information
on Project Sonrisas: http://www.oregonbio.org/news/post/87
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