'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.

Gigantic Saturday

We went to the Kremlin-on-Quebrada-Seca last night for the second-best nacatamles we have ever eaten. Not to impeach Doña Micaela's fantastic cooking, but even a one-time visitor to the Teran household must admit that their Nicaraguan nacatamal is the world standard.

On the subject of beating animal flesh into a mealy pulp, the popular televisions show 'Gigantic Saturday' treated us to that once-popular centerpiece of America's fantasy world, "professional wrestling". Before these steroid-enhanced spandex-wearing troglodytes with dyed hair assumed the role of cultural ambassadors, the Miami-based show featured an undocumented widow living in the United States speaking with a lawyer about how to avoid deportation. Unless something was lost in translation, she was concerned that a homoerotic bodybuilder was going to come to her home and suplex her.

Thanks, America. You can just feel the Director laughing at us, demanding an explanation, a silent re-enactment of the Moscow show trials of 1936. Yes, Comrade Stalin. This is our brand of toughness. Artificially-enhanced, staged, and, yeah, just sort of gay overall. You win.

That sounds much like my chessplay against Tian yesterday, who ripped apart a fancy hypermodern opening I tried to play but did not know well. We have found a time-consuming diversion, Tian and I, which is better than rereading my short stack of books for a third time.

An addendum to the new language/new soul idea. I can understand why Tian is so logical, and would like to put in for a Chinese soul. Apparently meiguo, the Mandarin word for America (the United States of... you need to clarify down here), means "beautiful nation". Given the beauty and simple logic of that language, no wonder it crafts a soul so adept at chess.

As far as the high-stakes game, Saturday was not the first time the Director outmatched us. You will have to pardon the Russian Revolution references ad nauseam, but with six weeks of growth on my face (and given our new friend Taylor's criticisms of SHH these days), I feel okay turning this blog into Animal Farm. So Dan was Trotsky on Friday. His urgent desire to open the school up for public internet classes brought the Director's proverbial icepick down on his head. Cano positioned him in a corner and told the rest of us why this was a dangerous idea, how he hadn't been able to get this through the skipper's head, and that if we didn't stop El Boludo, he would kick us out of his school and keep the computers.

I've agreed broadly with the Director the whole time, to slow down and not overestimate the importance of complicated and novel schemes for 'sustainability' and a 'social business model'. I take my fashionable Muhammad Yunus books with a dose of Benedict XVI. I took a little solace in the encylical he wrote midway through our project, doubtlessly with us in mind. "All of humanity is alienated when too much trust is placed in merely human projects, ideologies and false utopias". Better to trust an oldschool caudillo like Cano, the proven method in these parts.

For that, Rodrigo and I played Zinoviev and Kamenev, living to be humiliated another day. Hopefully we fly out before that day comes, because Gigantic Saturday (featuring All-American Jack Swagger, in a blue spandex unitard, thighs bulging out of something even UVA waterpolo would be scandalized to wear) was embarrassing enough.