'Pijineando' with Stalin

Pull the iron curtain on this one. It's a wrap. The C.E.B. Alvaro Contreras computer lab goes online tomorrow, the last formal day of classes, and in go two air conditioning machines next week.

It won't look like much. But unlike the completely refinished facility down the street, it will have computers. When Rodrigo and I met with the superintendent to get information about the district, we discovered that of the seven computer labs promised by the government's Proyecto Aprende since 2005, only one was installed.

Director Cano, Rodrigo, and I were personally stuck in this bureaucratic machine trying to buy internet Tuesday and Wednesday. So Director Cano took us to his favorite bars yesterday and the day before to botar bolas, joder botellas, or pijinear, depending on your chosen slang term for 'slamming some back' (although Rodrigo swears there is no true English equivalent). Nine rounds Tuesday and eight rounds yesterday makes pijineando with Edgardo Cano sound more like a boxing match than a few drinks on a weekday afternoon.

Once he shouted down an Indian chief. Another time he beat his father-in-law up when the unfortunate man thought to strike his wife. In a Panamanian military school, he walked around with half his mustache shaved for three months to earn the right to wear it. To avoid getting kicked out, he found a well-connected thug to break his best friend out of prison, where they had ended up for verbally assaulting a black policeman. He goes to strip clubs and divulges the unsavory details of his teachers' sex lives, like the divorce following the discovery of his third grade teacher in bed with a black man. He kicks at sick strays to ward them off and lambastes the mariachis for their poor voices...

...but on his softer side goes over and feeds the pathetic animals scraps from his meal, and pays the mariachis anyway because they're very poor fathers of his students. Had Edgardo Cano not told Rodrigo and I it would be "perfectly fine" to approach his students older than fourteen, and was surprised we hadn't, I would have few reservations about his character. Maybe it's more beers than he can handle, machismo, or the fact girls are sexually active much younger here. More likely it's cultural up to a point, and you have to accept the fact that the only open school in the district is kept running by a very complicated compassionate toughguy sleazebag.

"An all-out prick," summarized one of the SHH interns who only had the pleasure of his distracted handshake and growled pleasantries. Not exactly, sister. He is forcing his staff to teach through the strike, including his eighth-grade teacher who is in the awkward position of being the president of the large teacher's union that called the stoppage.

So much for black-and-white. As I read over these posts I realize that coming down here you need to grow up all over again. You learn the culture as you ride the school buses. At first the world is horrifying, then a magical place of good and evil, and now my Honduran 'soul' (as Tian would put it) has caught up to my American perspective. There's both good and bad and sometimes these contradictions are wrapped up in conflicted individuals. In the absence of a functioning civil society to provide for children and punish the criminally insane, you have wider latitude here to do greater goods and worse evils. For that, you have your Stalins.

Time to go back to the future.