Category: Americas
‘I’ve had cholera. You?’
It really is a lot of fun telling people that. The looks in return are hilarious. Until the conversation shifts towards a detailed description of sample collection.
I’ve read Love in the Time of Cholera twice. It’s among my favorite books.
The first time was in the early winter of 1992, when I lived in a small one-room cabin in the woods near Athens, Ohio. At the time I was preparing for a road trip three friends and I were about to take, driving my friend Bob O’s 1975 International Harvester Scout from southern Ohio to Nicaragua. When he bought it for two hundred dollars six months before our late June departure date, it was barely running.
That winter also included research into and writing about a new cholera pandemic that began early the previous year in Peru and which was gradually creeping its way north towards Central America.
By June we were prepared with fully recharged immune systems. We had several booster shots, drank polio juice dispensed from the university clinic, and took our anti-malarials. On the road we were extremely careful with what we ate. We drank and brushed our teeth with only bottled water.
During a seven-hour wait on the border between El Salvador and Honduras, Breyer was the first to get sick. Nausea, some vomiting, diarrhea. I was the first to make fun of her.
It hit me the next afternoon as we were approaching San Marcos de Colon, a Honduran town just eleven kilometers from the Nicaraguan border. We were running late, the border closed at five, so we were forced to spend the night. I could barely walk. Bob O dragged me a few blocks to a small privately operated clinic run by a young Brazilian doctor who, as it happened, was extensively involved in Honduras’ national anti-cholera campaign. And she wasn’t amused. I don’t recall her precise words, but they went something like this:
“I’ve been working my ass off to keep cholera out of this town and you greasy gringos bring it here.”
Cholera causes heavy and quick dehydration. It’s easily cured, but if not treated quickly, it can and does kill. It’s the worst form of diarrhea imaginable, unrelenting. The dizziness is profound, and I’ve never felt that parched or helpless.
We were quarantined for the next thirty-six hours, the first twenty of which where fairly unpleasant. The doctor immediately began treating us as if we had the bacteria swimming inside us, but we still had to provide samples which would be sent to the health institute’s main lab in the capital Tegucigalpa.
We were laying on brand new cholera beds, the kind with precut holes designed to fit virtually any ass size, when she handed us small glass containers. They reminded me of baby food jars. “Here,” she said.
When you’ve lost all control of that bodily function, capturing your own spouting fountain of cholera juice in a recycled baby food jar isn’t easy. It’s also a mess. I really don’t wish it upon anyone. Not even George W. Bush.
We were also advised to not, under any circumstances, tell anyone that we contracted cholera – not in Honduras, not in Nicaragua. The campaigns were effective, the doctor told us, but they’ve also spread considerable fear. People would flood the clinics demanding medicines. Terrified mobs could form to run us out of town. “This has happened,” she said.
Near Teustepe, Nicaragua. What struck me here was that I'd seen very similar scenes in rural Appalachia.
During our unintended stay, we met Mary, a Texan who was born-again a dozen years earlier and who had been coming to San Marcos for the past nine years to help with the clinic.
“I heard there were some sick communists in town,” she said, after storming into our room to introduce herself. I wasn’t feeling particularly talkative.
“Who are you and what the fuck are you doing here?” was all I could manage.
She smiled. “Every American who passes through here is a communist. But that’s okay. Jesus will forgive you.”
I wanted to tell her that Jesus was a communist but I was too distracted with positioning myself just right over the hole in the bed.
Over the next few days she rambled on about lots of things, among them, that a capful of Clorox bleach can cure just about everything. Her anti-communist rants were particularly amusing. “Seventy percent of Mexico is communist,” she said. “Most of Guatemala and El Salvador, half of Honduras.”
For the rest of the summer we called her The Church Lady. We didn’t see eye-to-eye on one thing, but I did grow to like her. We had conversations fun enough to make my vomiting and diarrhea slightly less unbearable. I jotted quite a bit of them into my notebooks. She later inspired a few haiku. Here’s one:
Says she – “I was blessed
Jesus set me up real good
With cheap real estate”
With lots of time to kill, we tracked down the root of our affliction to a small roadside restaurant in the mountains just south of Guatemala City. Breyer and I each had a salad which was obviously washed in contaminated water. Bob O and Jeannine did not.
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Aside:
Bob O’s car got us there, but it never left Nicaragua. He decided to sell it to a friend, Pedro, a former contra squad leader who would later become mayor of Teustepe, our sister city. One afternoon, Pedro and some friends drove into the countryside for what I think was to be a hunting trip. Along the way a spark ignited and the car, loaded with guns and ammo, exploded. No one was hurt.
I traveled overland on my way back north that summer –the other three chose to fly– selecting slightly different routes. Hoping to at least partly avoid the mass confusion, delays and bribes inherent in each border crossing, I chose a less-traveled one from Nicaragua back into Honduras via Esteli and Ocotal.
I got up early, hopped on a pre-dawn bus, and was first in line when the Nicaraguans opened their side of the border at 8 a.m. Soon after waving good bye, I walked the four hundred or so meters to the Honduran gate, which wouldn’t be open until 9. So I spent an hour, with no shade, sitting on the thick line you see separating countries on maps.
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__________________
Yes, that’s right.
C is for Cholera
in the Blogging From A to Z Challenge 2012.
Check out more participants here.
My explanation for this is here.
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Piran Café will be inaugurating a free monthly newsletter in May. It’ll be loaded with travel tips and wine reviews, updates on CC licensed free-to-use photos, musings on my obsessions of the day, plus an exclusive FREE giveaway EACH month available to subscribers ONLY. Giveaway No. 1: Sign up now and you’ll be automatically entered to win a FREE major publishing house travel guide of your choice. Drawing is on 1 May, so do it now!
Like this:
10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free – WaPo
Lots of things are easy to gloss over when you’re not really paying attention.
Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.
via 10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free – The Washington Post.
An idea whose time has come: Give Guantánamo Back to Cuba
Yeah, I know, don’t hold your breath.
Jonathan M. Hansen provides a short history lesson on how the U.S. came to essentially own Guantanamo in Give Guantánamo Back to Cuba in today’s NY Times and provides an interesting point of comparison:
How did this look from Cuba’s perspective? Well, imagine that at the end of the American Revolution the French had decided to remain here. Imagine that the French had refused to allow Washington and his army to attend the armistice at Yorktown. Imagine that they had denied the Continental Congress a seat at the Treaty of Paris, prohibited expropriation of Tory property, occupied New York Harbor, dispatched troops to quash Shays’ and other rebellions and then immigrated to the colonies in droves, snatching up the most valuable land.
Photo archives I – Iguana in Ontario, 1999
Well, not exactly. The iguana was actually shot in Santa Rosa National Park on Costa Rica’s northwest Pacific coast in April 1999. The wooded area is on a small island in Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park, shot about three months later. The roll of film was shuffled between camera bags in the interim, finally resulting in this entirely unplanned double exposure. I probably couldn’t have planned it if I tried.
This is one of several dozen slides shot during the 90s that I recently scanned, with which I hope to jar some memories for a longer mini-memoir/notebook project. Santa Rosa was the first place I ever saw howler monkeys in the wild, Algonquin provided the first up-close-and-personal encounter with a moose. Howlers are indeed insanely loud and moose ridiculously ugly.
Santa Rosa National Park: [wiki] [from a CR national parks site]
Algonquin Provincial Park: [official site]
Susana Baca Named Peru’s Minister of Culture
Some happy news, via Luaka Bop:
Susana Baca Named Peru’s Minister of Culture « LUAKA BOP.
As was probably the case for many, the first song I heard by Baca was Maria Lando, from the David Byrne/Luaka Bop compilation, The Soul of Black Peru; love at first listen.
Gallery of Cuban television sets
Beautiful gallery of these prized possessions, shot by Simone Lueck.
No Shutdown, But a Lot of Sellouts
So, the Democratic Party continues its rightward drift. No surprise, but still disappointing.
From John Nichols in The Nation:
If you had asked Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman or John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter or even Bill Clinton what Democrats would defend in a fight over the future of government, there’s no real question that funding for housing, public transportation, community development programs and safe air travel would be high on the list.
Yet, in order to achieve the Friday night deal that averted a government shutdown—for a week and, potentially, longer if an anticipated agreement is cobbled together and agreed to—all of those programs took serious hits.
And to summarize:
In other words, precisely the sort of programs that Democrats used to defend were slashed.
Nesting Great Green Macaws
From the intro to this short doc shot by my old friend Drew Irwin in Costa Rica’s La Selva Biological Station:
Experts have been puzzled about why the birds do not nest in the Sarapiquí region, where the habitat seems entirely appropriate. This species is considered highly endangered (CITES I), with only about 50 breeding pairs in Costa Rica and a total population of about 7,500 individuals.
In March 2010, La Selva invited Drew Irwin and his crew to La Selva to document the unusual occurrence of this pair Great Green Macaws nesting in the Sarapiqui region — the first time in the 40 year history of the biological station.
Check out the morning courtship sequence. As we all know, there’s nothing quite like morning courtship.
For redemption, how much time is enough time?
A few months back I told a friend in the US that 2009 was the first year – ever – that no one anywhere in Europe was legally executed. He found the notion difficult to grasp.
He, like a majority of Americas, supports capital punishment. Polls consistently show that more than half of Americans don’t have a problem with the state maintaining the authority to legally fry or lethally inject felons guilty of very serious crimes. It remains an option in 38 states. In 2009, 52 were executed in the US, nearly half of those (24) in Texas. (My old Ohio home was a distant third, with four.)
The view on this side of the Atlantic couldn’t be more different. Forty-eight of Europe’s 50 countries have abolished the death penalty altogether; only Belarus still holds on to the practice along with Latvia, but the latter only for crimes committed during wartime. The divergent views on state-mandated murder is one of the widest of trans-Atlantic chasms, one that won’t be bridged any time soon.
I thought of that conversation yesterday when reading and listening to Doing Time, And Doing Good, In La.’s Angola Prison, an NPR story about Wilbert Rideau, a man sentenced to death after he shot and killed a teller during a failed bank robbery. He spent the better part of his 44 years in the notorious Louisiana prison working on the institution’s in-house magazine, doing lots or reading, and doing lots of writing.
Rideau lived on death row at Louisiana State Penitentiary — better known as Angola — from the time he was 19 to the time he was 31. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court abolished the death penalty as it was then practiced, and his sentence was commuted to life in prison.
Problems with his initial trial (check out a wiki synopsis here) led to subsequent retrials, and finally to a reduced charge of manslaughter, for which he was sentenced to 21 years. He had already served 44, so we was freed.
While imprisoned, Rideau won awards for his work, serious journalism that exposed some of the more gruesome aspects of life behind bars. He’s a gifted and thoughtful writer, and recently published a memoir, In the Place of Justice. Check out the excerpts – riveting reading.
But to get the gist of what the capital punishment debate is like in the US, be sure to also check out the comments, particularly on NPRs Facebook page. Some of it is forgiving, but much of it is ludicrous and baffling. Some obviously didn’t even listen to the report but decided to chime in anyway. For most, the idea or the possibility of rehabilitation doesn’t even enter the picture, even for a man who even the Governor conceded was fully rehabilitated. Rideau did take a life. But the 19-year-old boy who went to prison in 1961 was not the same 63-year-old man who was released. In a civilized society, isn’t that enough?
Photos from the Aftermath of Hurricane Mitch
I finally got around to scanning some slides I shot ten years ago when I visited Posoltega, Nicaragua, in April 1999, about six months after storms brought in by Hurricane Mitch devastated the area. The photo above is of a refugee camp set up in Posoltega, in the country’s northwest.
On October 30, 1998, torrential rains brought in by Hurricane Mitch filled the nearby Casitas volcano, forcing the slope, above right, to collapse. It produced a massive river of mud, at some points more than a kilometer wide, that swept through the area, ultimately killing upwards of 3000 people. It annihilated several villages and smaller settlements, and displacing several thousand. [A good Mitch summary on Wiki.]
Below are some scattered notes from the visit (some are still in a stash of stuff back in the US), but first some quick background:
Nicaragua dominated much of the foreign policy debate in the US during the Reagan years, so it was somewhat predictable that Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega’s tirade at the recent Americas summit brought the country back into the headlines. When he was voted out of power in 1990, media attention on the country more or less vanished until Ortega regained the presidency in close elections in 2006. By then, after setting up a mutual immunity deal with the right wing Arnoldo Alemán, who was president from 1997 to 2002, he had long since lost support from most senior Sandinista (FSLN) party partners, who left and formed other parties, taking with them countless party loyalists. During its time in power, the Alemán administration quickly became synonymous with corruption and graft. An opinion poll published during my 1999 visit found that more than half of Nicaraguans viewed him as more corrupt than the former dictator Anastasio Somoza whom the Sandinistas overthrew 20 years earlier, and for whom Alemán worked. (Alemán was charged, eventually convicted and received a 20-year sentence, which was later overturned by the Supreme Court in what most view as part of the deal struck with Ortega.)
So, the widespread tales of corruption I was told by people in Posoltega (and in Managua) didn’t come as a huge shock. At an aid distribution warehouse (pictured above), several of the workers expressed their frustration with the federal government which was doing next to nothing to help the municipality, at the time governed by a Sandinista mayor. Bill Clinton visited the area during a Central American tour in March 1999; just prior to his visit housing construction materials were trucked in, along with 2000 bags of cement, a ‘donation’ from the government. After he left, the materials were hauled away under cover of night.
I spoke at length with Posoltega’s mayor, Felicita Zeledon Rodriguez, who said that after the initial influx of aid in the weeks after the rains finally subsided, nothing had arrived in more than two months. Among the numerous problems she faced was that the aid assistance was being taxed by the Aleman administration. Food was running scarce, she said. “The first harvest is in August, and it’s only April.”
Above is Jose de la Cruz Poveda, 17 at the time, who was one of the refugee camp leaders.
In Posoltega, my translator Tanya and I met Alvaro Montalvan, a reporter for Canal 12, who was investigating reports that much of the international relief aid sent to the stricken areas was actually winding up being sold in various markets in Managua. He and his cameraman were heading to the Port of Corinto to check on the status of 28 cargo containers of relief aid which had arrived on March 19 from Los Angeles, and we joined him. We tracked down the port’s container operations chief, who eventually admitted that seven of those 40-foot containers couldn’t be accounted for. They simply vanished. And in the meantime, as the stocks in Posoltega’s relief center were dwindling rapidly, the containers above were sitting port side for more than a month.
More pics, 18 in all, are in a flickr set here.
I know that there are numerous NGOs working in the region, and that a growing number of travelers are visiting that part of Nicaragua. This is a long since forgotten footnote of the country’s history, and I’d love to hear from anyone who’s visited or worked there over the past decade who can share any updates. I’m extremely interested in learning how people in the area have fared.
