Desafios

Un desafio me enfrentaba.

No era uno sino varios, pero todos de la misma pinta.

Una, dos, tres oportunidades de ser el que quería y quiero ser.

Una, dos, tres oportunidades perdidas para siempre en el viento del pasado.

El mismo desafio me enfrenta vez tras vez en estos días, viejo amigo, llamándome lo que soy--cobarde.

Agobiado me siento bajo las oportunidades perdidas y fallas cometidas, y me pregunto sí es posible, ¿regresar?

The Beatles

I broke down and bought one of the new digitally remastered Beatles albums yesterday. At one point I had all their music, but CD's got scratched, cassettes were discarded, and my record player is in my parent's garage (a problem that must soon be remedied). I have a few of their albums on my computer, but I'm pretty far from having a complete collection.

I decided to get the White Album, the Beatles only double album, a welcome departure from Magical Mystery Tour, but not quite as good as subsequent albums, in my opinion.

I played the CD in the car on the way home. In a weird way it was like seeing an old friend for the first time in years. The first track I listened to was Birthday, a vamped up, cheesy ,and happy-go-lucky birthday song. The very next song is Yer Blues, which opens with John Lennon proclaiming, "Yes I'm lonely. Wanna die." The sort of natural high inspired by Birthday is wiped away in the first five seconds of Yer Blues. The contrast between these first two tracks was striking and immediately apparent. According to some it's the kind of contrast that helped make the Beatles great. Paul's "yeah-yeah-yeah's" and John's "wanna die's" represent the inevitable highs and lows, good times and bad that paint our lives.

It's funny what stands out when listening with 27 year old ears, as opposed to teenager ears. Sad songs seem sadder given a deeper contextual backdrop. Happy songs are richer and more alive than they ever were growing up. I realized that no song is written in a vacuum. Instead they are dressed in the pain, beauty, disappointment, and fears of the song writer. An early death of a parent, abandonment, ecstasy, the birth and death of a friendship. These things lie hiding behind the words and notes. The more the listener experiences in his or her own life the more these things begin to peek out into the open.

And in the end . . .

My wife picked me up at the Portland Airport after approximately 24 hours of flying in the air and sleeping on the floor in strange airports. As we drove home, happy to finally be together again, we decided we were both hungry and in the mood for something . . . healthy. Not a burger, or ten dollars worth of french fries. Something clean tasting and delicious. I immediately thought of the many juice stands in Peru, where a dollar or less can get you a tall glass full of fresh squeezed orange juice, or papaya with pineapple if you're in the mood. Unfortunately the signs on the freeway continued to point us towards Wendy's, Carl's Jr., and McDonalds, not a juice stand in sight.

I guess you really don't appreciate what you have until it's gone.

Of course, a fresh squeezed glass of juice for only 30 cents also represents a great injustice, and in many ways the imbalance that exists in our world. A woman once sold me a glass of cebada for 15 cents. It was so delicious that I paid her quadruple, a whopping 60 cents. Her eyes lit up and she immediately rejected my offer, insisting that she couldn't possibly accept so much money. I explained that it was a tip, and with gratitude in her heart she finally accepted. Who would have guessed that 45 cents could literally make someone's day, and maybe even their week.

The more I learned and observed in Peru the more I realized that we shouldn't feel sorry for people just because they're poor. I watched kids play in the dirt with homemade toys. They smiled and laughed and genuinely enjoyed themselves, even without plastic army men or toys that light up and talk.

We don't necessarily need to get upset about the fact that some people can't afford the new Nike running shoes, or a trip to the Bahamas. The thing that we should really be upset about, and be working constantly to overcome, is that fact that some people can't afford even the most basic education and health care. I worked with kids who had big dreams for their future, but at just 15 years old (or younger) they were forced to leave school to find a job.

Reflejando . . .

I was originally presented with the choice of working in Lima, the capital of Peru and home to over 9 million people, or Chiclayo, a town that I had literally never heard of. I decided right away on Chiclayo for a hodge-podge of reasons. I think I was under the impression that going to a smaller, more out of the way city would give me a chance to get to know the "real" Peru. This of course was a ridiculous assumption since there's really no such thing as a "real Peru. Peru, like any other country really, is full of a wide range of realities, none more authentic or true than the other.

What is life like in Oregon, for example? That would depend on if we're talking about the dairy farmer in Woodburn, the banker in downtown Portland, or the transient (or law student) in Eugene. Each represents in their own special way what Oregon is about.

I've spent the last 24 hours in Lima, and the one thing that I've enjoyed is not standing out. In Chiclayo people stared, mostly because of my height and giant shoes. On Monday I went and did some house visits in the rural areas of Chiclayo. At one point a young boy came out of his adobe home, looked up at me and said to himself in disbelief, "¿Tan grande?" as if to say, "people come in that size?!"

But in Lima I'm just another guy. There are enough tourists and caucasian Peruvians to blend in and go unnoticed, which is nice.

I'm currently sitting in the airport, waiting to make the last leg of my trip here in Peru. I'm headed to Cusco where I will learn a bit about what Nexos does there, and get to see Machu Picchu. I've got the full range of emotions brewing. I'm excited for Cusco, but more than anxious to get home to my wife and family. At the same time part of me is sad about leaving Chiclayo and the people I met there. In review, that's excited, anxious, and sad.

I'm about to board, I'll post more tonight.

Evidencia

The other day I was reading a Smith Institute report on Juvenile Justice in England and Wales. The forward said something that I thought was interesting:

It is almost 10 years since the Attorney General of the US, Janet Reno, submitted an independent, scholarly report to the US Congress entitled Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising (1997). When I read that report shortly after it was published, I immediately sensed a sea change in the way democracies would talk about crime prevention. No longer would we focus just on ideology. Evidence would soon take a much larger role in the debate.

This struck me because so much of what we do, especially in the world of criminal justice, is based on abstract ideologies, theories, or even raw emotion. We are angry and outraged when someone commits a crime, we paint them as someone outside of society and often throw them in prison where they are supposed to learn a lesson. And certainly there are crimes that merit this kind of punishment. But the great mistake in the American justice system is failing to realize that nearly everyone who is put in jail will some day be released. Ignoring the needs of those who break the law (drug rehabilitation, education, etc.) has been proven to lead to an increasing number of repeat offenders.

We can continue to build more and more prisons, or we can get smart about the way we do things, focus on the evidence at hand, continue to collect more evidence in the future, and do what's best for society as a whole.

More to come soon . . .

Art Classes

One of my newest projects here in Peru is an Art/Drawing class with some of the kids involved in our program. These kids are mostly from rough backgrounds, and they have some history with the law. They've also expressed some interest in art, graffiti, drawing, or some combination of the three.

The classes are supposed to go about an hour and a half, or two hours at most. I always assume that the boys are bored because we're working on pretty basic concepts, and frankly drawing cubes in two point perspective isn't exactly mind-blowing fun. So today after about an hour and a half I wrote their homework on the board and told them to copy it down. I told everyone that class was basically over, but they were welcome to stick around and draw if they wanted. I started to pick up my things, thinking that the boys would welcome my invitation to leave. But they didn't. In fact, they stayed another hour and a half, drawing diligently, page after page, totally focused on the creative process.

I told my sister when I came here that traveling has a weird way of making you grateful for things you never knew you should be grateful for. My example at the time was city parks. My home town is full of places where you can go to run around in the grass, play frisbee or a game of soccer, baseball, whatever. Growing up I never thought to myself, 'golly, I'm sure grateful for these parks!' But you live a few months in a place with no real parks and suddenly you learn to appreciate what you had.

Well, I'm starting to realize how lucky I was to grow up with art classes. These kids are 14, 15, 16 years old, mostly having dropped out of school, and those who are still in school will never get to take an art class. This was especially obviously during class today, when five adolescent boys worked diligently for three straight hours on their drawings. It was like they were starving for some sort of creative output. Even having basic materials like clean paper and pencils seemed like such a privilege to them, and they asked permission every time they needed a new sheet.

In High School I was awkward. Puberty was brutal to me, I couldn't talk to girls, or even get up the courage to look them in the eye. And while I have plenty unpleasant memories from high school, the one place I always felt safe and comfortable was in the art room. Sure there were some weirdos there, in fact, we were all weirdos. And I guess what I never appreciated at the time, but I'm starting to see as a real blessing, was the endless supply of inspiration, materials, and new possibilities.

One of the kids in my art class here is a really good artist, despite having no training whatsoever. I don't have much time left in Peru, but I'm hoping to work with him and get him enrolled in an art school. He lives in a really rough part of town, and it might be his ticket to developing a real career and leaving the slums some day.

Episode I, 2.0

Growing up I was never much of a Star Trek fan, but I had something of an unhealthy addiction to all things Star Wars. I was still buying action figures when I was in high school. I had a long time subscription to the Star Wars Insider Magazine. I enjoyed going to comic book stores and thought the people who worked there were kind of cool (ok ok, I was right about that one). Luckily Episode I came out during my freshman year of high school and it sucked just bad enough for my interest in the Star Wars Universe to wane. I say "luckily" because I was well on my way to one day getting married in a Boba Fett costume. Episode II was worse, and frankly I had a hard time getting through it in one sitting. Things kind of came together in Episode III as several of the actors decided that it might be a good idea to show some emotion once in a while, and we got to see Anakin finally let loose. But really by that time it was too little too late. I'd moved on, seen other movies. It had been years since I'd read the Star Wars Insider, and I was totally fine with that.

After seeing the new Star Trek movie, which was awesome by the way, I started to wonder again why Star Wars had to go and make three lousy prequels. I found myself getting angry at my old friend Star Wars. That's why I have decided to constructively funnel my anger into reconstructing the three prequels with new actors, story lines, and action figure spin off series. Feel free to participate with suggestions and feedback.

EPISODE I, TITLE TBD

Ground Rules:

1. Anakin Skywalker will never ever ever, ever ever be called Annie by anyone for any reason. Ever.

2. The Jedi Council was one of the worst groups of characters ever assembled in the history of modern cinema. Apparently their job was to sit in a circle, occasionally look inquisitively at each other, and say extremely boring things. The new Jedi Council will be a two parts X-Men, one parts Super Friends (with Samuel L. Jackson and Lawrence Fishburn playing the Wonder Twins-type characters), and one part Young Guns:

Basically, if you want to be on the Jedi Council you need to have some sort of personality. Even Aquaman, arguably the most worthless Super Friend of all, had personality. It's not asking that much, really.

3. Anakin Skywalker cannot start out as a child. There are two very important reasons for this. First, kids can't act. Second, kids are not interesting. They play with blocks, watch cartoons, and laugh hysterically at words like "poo" and "toot." If we're going to watch the development of subsequent fall of Darth Vader, can we please just skip the prepubescent stage?

4. Qui Gon doesn't get to be in the remake as punishment for sucking so bad at everything he did in the original.

More to come soon . . .