Back in Seattle...
Hey everyone. So the first round of English classes finished in Costa Rica about a week and a half ago, with five students having completed the basic English course. There isn't a whole lot of other news about Costa Rica. I swear at some point I will go through my photo album and try to add some pictures here. If you're connected with me on Facebook, I already posted a mountain of pictures there. (Was that Spanglish?)
Coming back has been an interesting experience. I still had some bites from the rainforest dwellers that I wanted to get checked out while I was here, and one of my friends--who was gracious enough to open her door for me--freaked out about the bites and decided she couldn't stand even a minute possibility of parasites living in her apartment. Understandable, I suppose, but now I am basically living out of my car. I've seen the inside of a couple of motels and I've stayed a few nights now with an old friend of mine from the Jobs with Justice days.
I never could stay in one place anyway.
Calls to Costa Rica and computer operating systems are still in Spanish. Everything else is in English. It's funny how quickly your second language can slip away while your mother tongue always stays fixed in your mind. My translation work for El Centro de la Raza is going at a snail's pace. I would like to just get it done but I am too busy procrastinating; I'm supposed to be studying for Saturday's English GRE test, and so of course everything in the world seems more interesting, which is probably why I finally got around to this blog post. When I actually start "studying," I guess I'll probably finish the translation. And life goes on.
I managed to pick up a day of work last week for an interesting political campaign. The legislature of Washington state, from what I understand, has approved a tax on candy and soft drinks to help save health care and education. It's worth about $300 million to the state budget, according to one source. So naturally, national and state companies put together a campaign to block this bill. I was able to work with one of several organizations trying to save the bill. I saw it as a microcosm of the daily struggle between the financial interests of large companies and governmental entities tying to balance their budgets. While I was working on the campaign, I also got to find out a little bit more about the organizing going on behind I-1098, the "Tax the Rich" campaign. It seems like a lot of people are very excited about this prospect. Filmmaker and Seattle historian Shaun Scott has remarked that similar campaigns have already happened in Washington several times before, most notably in the 1930s, 1970s and 1980s. It will be interesting to see if, in light of recent financial events, we are actually able to pull it off this time without facing some type of major catastrophe.
I wonder how much of the state budget goes to cleaning up candy wrappers and soda bottles from our sidewalks, streets and highways? One thing I have noticed since coming back here is that we produce, as part of our daily routine, a considerably greater amount of waste than they do in Colonia Libertad. Sure, we don't burn our plastic--most of it winds up in our rivers, lakes and streams and eventually finds its way to the ocean--but we do use a lot of it. That, and styrofoam, and all sorts of labels and decals and wrappers and clothing tags and bumper stickers and a whole host of other things that you just don't find in a place like Colonia Libertad. Of course, we're not comparing apples to apples here; this is a bustling metropolis, and Colonia Libertad is a community of less than 500 people. Still, if you added up enough Colonia Libertads to equal the population of a city the size of Seattle, I'm pretty sure the Colonia Libertads of the world would be producing less trash than Seattle, and that's something to think about.
Well, before I get into another discussion about how nobody really wants to be poor and a lot of people think they're poor but really aren't as poor as the people who have no resources to fall back on even when they're cash poor, I think I'll leave it there and go find some coffee somewhere. And yes, I will BEG the barista to not put a plastic lid on my cup.
From Seattle,
Chaim Eliyah
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