Saturday, January 31, 2009

na'guara! chivacoa es demasiado chevere!

guau!

where to begin...

well, as i said before, i left caracas last week and now i´m living in a town called chivacoa with an adorable and welcoming host family that consists of three brothers, their mamacita doña nelly and a really comfortable happy home.

this is most of the crew including extended family and friends on my first night. they threw a little party and we had cuba libres and i got to know everyone. it was a really great welcome and i feel super lucky to be here

the only downside to living here is that it´s a two-hour commute from barquisimeto, which is where i´m doing all my research and where most of the kids i meet and am working with are living. i´m actually travelling between two different states, so i think that´s pretty cool.


this is the view from the back of a ranchera, which is a kind of ancient station wagon taxi that i take to get back and forth.
i take 2 taxis and a bus to get to UPEL in the morning, which is the university i´ve been hanging out at, and then i head back to my little town around 5 or so.

i´ve met a ton of different people, mostly students and their families, and every single one of them has a different opinion and unique perspective on the revolution. it gets confusing sometimes, some days i don´t know what to think at all and it gets really overwhelming, but i just can´t help but notice a lot of really positive things that this proceso has created for the people in the two towns i´m living in right now.


this is a park that the revolution helped build in chivacoa. someone who hates the government was taking me around, and even he mentioned that before chavez came into power the mayor of chivacoa would have never thought to do such a nice thing for the community.


this is my super cool host cousin, wilneys, playing in the park. note the red yellow and blue playground equipment. pretty much anything that chavez´s gov´t has ever done is wrapped in those three colors. it´s everywhere.

i´ve heard a lot of serious criticisms here too. for instance, since the mayor that chavez backed took over this town, their direct bus route into the city has been cancelled, and the crime rate has risen so much that all of the cantinas have closed so people don´t go out at night. but, that mayor´s term just ended and now they have someone new, so we´ll have to wait and see what happens with this guy.


this is un partido de futbol at dusk in chivacoa, and it was really beautiful to watch. unfortunately this picture´s too small to be able to tell

meanwhile, in barquisimeto i´ve been spending a lot of time at the Universidad Pedagogica Estado de Lara, which is the university everyone goes to if they want to be a teacher, and i´ve met a whole lot of interesting characters


this is just a few of us hangin out at our friend paul´s apartment, watching friends and eating chinese food...

evergreen set up an intercambio here where we´re all living with kids studying to be english teachers. it´s a great chance for both hosts and guests to get a lot of language practice, and it works out perfectly for my group´s focus, which revolves around the evolution in education, student movements, and arte.

this is a really intense student mural at UPEL


this graffiti isn´t venezuelan, and i didn´t take this picture, i got it from the leftist mural blog in my blog list, but i thought it was really relevant to the public art/graffiti that´s everywhere here in VZ, and was a part of the inspiration for my project
it says, roughly, "if the press is corrupt, let the walls talk"

i met an amazing girl named nanu who is an artist and a student, and she has told me about some of the great things that chavez has done to support the arts in his country.

he has created free universities where you can major in artes plasticos, which i think translates into something like fine arts in the states. he took a beautiful military cartel building and fixed it up and turned it into the art center for UCLA, which is another free university here. there are also free art workshops being offered year round at an art high school, with tons of different options that are open to absolutely everyone. it even includes courses in indigenous crafts
that´s not all! but i´ll get into the rest later, maybe

anyway, she invited me to stay with her on last night so we could take it easy in barquisimeto and go out to the bars and a party.

we went to the UCLA art building and just happened upon a huge event where people from all over venezuela performed dances native to their state and it was beautiful


this dance was a really weird mixture of halloween, may day, llanero music, and weaving. they dance in circles weaving in and out until the entire pole is wrapped up in a pattern, and then they dance in reverse until all the ribbons are free. the guy in the center is dressed up as a pinata



the last two pictures are from a dance where someone ends up dying in a fight in the beginning, and it shows a woman mourning him and then slowly beginning to dance again, and in the end the body is carried away on the shoulders of all of the men

the performances really inspired us and i was ready to go out and do some dancing myself, so we headed out to a fiesta with an enormous bottle of rum and had a great time out in some beautiful little mountainside patio-posada/home, or, i don´t really know what it was, pero fue muy calidad!

the next morning i was up early to go to a socialist workshop out in a town in the middle of nowhere called coco e´ mono with nanu and her papa, but i´ll save that for another post because i have to get up early tomorrow. i think it was the most important experience i´ve had here yet.
tomorrow is wilney´s birthday, so there will be a fiesta, and i´m going to mt. sorte con unos amigos and my host brother, jean carlos. mt. sorte is a mountain where the locals practice brujeria, which is kind of like voodoo, and i´m really excited. kind of scared too, because apparently if you´re not baptized and you go there, a demon will enter your body
so, i´ll have to just wait and see what happens with that...

MEANWHILE, back in olympia, yet another pair of cop cars get trashed after a concert. this is a great way to get live music banned on campus, just like last year
and, it might be a step towards justifying (in the eyes of the jefes) the evergreen police getting their own rifles, which is disturbing.
on a related note, torches were apparently thrown at a separate set of police cars in olympia on the 18th in response to police violence. and i think that´s pretty cool



oh also, this is semi-related and i can´t believe i almost forgot...
on friday classes were cancelled at UPEL because some hooligans threw a bunch of tear gas bombs to hold up student and administrative elections. they haven´t had an election in over a year and a half because of it. the school is considered muy anarquista because there are so many colectivos de estudiantes here with really radical opposing positions

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

marcha para la enmienda

a few days ago, just before leaving caracas, i got the chance to participate in a chavista rally and see the man in person


there was a sea of people dressed in red, all marching in support of different causes and representing different government groups.


i´ve heard from a lot of people, including people there, that they pretty much had to go if the government had helped them out in the past, or were in the process of supporting them, or they would be dropped


buses are sent out to all states to collect people that have been positively affected by chavez´s government, because a lot of them wouldn´t be able to afford to come out on their own


that´s not to say that most of the people there didn´t want to be there, because i think that they did. a lot of people were going wild with little horns, firecrackers, carrying people on their shoulders, it didn´t look like anyone was forced to be there



we made a poster to explain why we were there, to get people to stop glaring at us gring@s, and it ended up working really well


it says ¨united states citizens against the empire¨
venezuelans all throughout the march were asking to have their picture taken with us after that, and it was a great feeling to be so welcome



in the end, some venezuelans in the crowd found a marker and helped us make a second poster and pushed us to the front of the crowd when chavez came on to speak.
so i ended up about 20 feet away from him, but even so, i left pretty quickly because there were so many sweaty people pressed against me and chavez was rambling as usual


i think he´s looking right at me in this one^

i expected this moment to be much more powerful than it was. i think being here and being surrounded by propaganda and vocal political citizens at all times has made the government here, including seeing and hearing the president speak in person, an overwhelmingly ordinary part of every day life. i don´t know if i´ll ever be so close to someone so powerful ever again, but it felt natural

on that note, i want to take a moment to think about my own new president. while i know that a shift in practice and real change occuring is unlikely in the long run,
i really appreciate the shift in mentality that he represents.
i read this article yesterday: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/world/middleeast/28arabiya.html?_r=2&hp

and it made me really happy. it´s really simple, but the line about leading by listening and not dictating was so refreshing. of course i am waiting to see what will unfold, but right now i feel a sense of relief that obama´s picture is to the left of that article about my president rather than the disturbing mug of george w. bush. i like witnessing the beginning of his term from so far away, it´s helping to put a lot of things into perspective.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

just a test

i finally got my pictures onto the internet. i´m staying with an incredibly awesome family now in a town called chivacoa, and they gave me my own room with internet and a fan, so hopefully from now on the updates will be a little more regular.

the whole slideshow is here

i´ll start explaining the rest of the pictures tomorrow; but first, this is the view i had upon entering caracas...



it seemed like the plane had entered into some sort of alternative more beautiful dimension while i was sleeping and when i woke up at sunrise we were over an amazing mix of land water and sky that i had never imagined before. anna was sitting in front of me, and she said "whoa! are we in a dali painting or what?"

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

uh! ah! chavez no se va!

i haven't been here long but every moment so far has surpassed every possible expectation i could have had.
the people here are incredible- smart, political, progressive, proactive, positive, confident, hopeful, and really eager to talk with us and share their experiences. we are also being guided around by charles hardy for the first week here, who wrote an amazing book about his experiences in caracas, and he is so insanely hooked up that we are sometimes experiencing more things in one day than i would have expected from the whole trip.

on our very first day here we were invited to witness and participate in a sort of procession/celebration in a town called mareche where 45 landless families were granted a huge lot of redistributed land. one of the families involved had lived on the land for generations and it had been bought out from them by some rich dude and it was never used, but they were kicked off because they didn't have the legal title. with the land redistribution act in the new constitution, they are taking (buying them from their current owners) "latifundios", which are large unused plots of land, and giving them to groups of people in need with the agreement that they will farm the land.

there was a big march, a chain cutting celebration, and then a bunch of people spoke and threw a party afterward. it was amazing!


this is the land that they were given

on the second day we went to some museums in caracas. i saw a stuffed dodo bird in the museo de ciencias.


it blew my mind... apparently they went extinct in the 1600s so it probably wasn't real, because other than that the museum was kind of ghetto.

these remind me of cabellas



at el museo de bellas artes there was an incredibly beautiful installation/sculpture called cubo de nylon by jesus soto, a venezuelan artist

andrew, there in the back, is a separate art form unto himself

then eva golinger came to where we were staying and spoke to us. eva golinger is an american/venezuelan citizen/ex-immigration lawyer and the author of the chavez code, bush vs. chavez, and most recently, la telarana imperial.

she's been uncovering all sorts of disturbing plans that the US government has to take down venezuela (which so far have failed, obviously, but are still in the works and going stronger than ever even with obama at the reigns) through the freedom of information act and she's a leading expert on all of this stuff and buddy-buddy with chavez now.

we met with banmujer, an amazing women's bank/feminist education and economic resource
we went to the bolivarian university and hung out with nelson, the head of the student political groups, and he took me and a couple other people to TV avila, which is this awesome media school/recording studio/tv station, that's all government funded but completely autonomous and young and fun and progressive
we went to the ministry of education and finally out to the bars.

then! we went to barlovento, which is a coastal town and we learned how to make chocolate on a cacao plantation


and went to an afro-venezuelan university where they spoke to us about the ammendment being voted on feb 15th.
the ammendment is to allow people in political office unlimited terms. so, every six years they come up for re-election, and every three years they can be voted out of office with a referendum.


nelson asked us to write out our opinions on the ammendment, and a few of us sent them to the ministry of education's magazine called moral y luces to be published.
chavez reads the magazine, so it's only a matter of time before he reads all about me and my solidarity and i become famous here

and today we went to the beach and the water was warm and there were pina coladas and cuba libres all around.
now i'm back in caracas, and i'm heading to barquisimeto in a couple days.


that's a lot of stuff for 5 days, i imagine things will start to slow down once we leave caracas and split up. i'm leaving out most of it because this is getting super long and it's pretty late here, but my next entry will be pictures that will hopefully show the rest.

my friend anna and i have come up with an idea that i'm really excited about...
as a way to bring the revolution and its ideals (peoples' power, the nation is a school) back home with us we're starting a mural project. we're going to make some portable murals to hang around campus and downtown and hopefully organize a way to find a wall downtown also. the murals here are amazing



i saw one on my first day that had a girl crying, it was all gray and it said "every day 30,000 people die due to capitalism"

even though i have loved every second of this, and i'm pretty sure it's the best country in the world, i miss my familia and amigos back home a little bit and i hope everyone's enjoying their winter 8-)

zamora vive vive! la lucha sigue sigue!

Thursday, January 15, 2009

new blawg 2009

hello everyone! thanks for coming!

well, welll
i haven't ever had one of these things that wasn't just full of self-obsessed neurotic teenage drama queen rants, but hopefully i'll still be able to fill it up...

so, i am heading out to venezuela tomorrow with a ton of awesome kids and a couple pretty amazing faculty and i'm all packed to go and super excited.

i've been studying the political happenings down there for the past three months with the evergreen program called 'venezuela: building social and economic justice' and i can't wait to finally be a part of the bolivarian revolution, or at least a witness to it in action.

i'll be taking a ton of pictures while i'm down there, so stay posted!



viva la revolucion! viva para la victoria y la verdad, 2009! y viva mis amigos!


love,
saroca