Women of the town laundry, Nicaragua, 1983.
Mexico City
The Kinks are on the radio as we drive along the avenue of the insurgents- "You really got me going now." Climb up two flights of stairs in a bare Art Deco building. Knock, looking for X. X is a baptist pastor who used to share an office in San Salvador with Jesuit priest on an ecumenical education project. X was sent to Puerto Rico for a World Council of Churches meeting. On arrival, he called home to tell his wife he was okay. She told him not to come back. Soldiers had taken the priest away. No they were not in uniform but as they left one said to the other, "ok major". So the pastor came to Mexico, eventually to be joined by his family. Three years later they have a life here. But he wants to go back to El Salvador and I ask him how he can think of going back, meaning where does the courage come from? He misunderstands and talks about planes false papers and the underground. I lamely wish him good luck and ask, "By the way what happened to the preist? " "After some days his body appeared in the dump, burn marks on his eyelids, the mark of the beast."
Chiapas
You can buy anything over the counter in mexico city. We carry medical supplies to the Guatemalen refugee camps. Remote. Sad, tired faces. Pathetic smiles of welcome. The airplane the only contact with civilization and its casual gifts of aid on which they almost survive. All the little boys along the dirt runway hold toy planes made of scraps of wood. Our medicine is all that they have - six full suitcases for 8,000 people. They feel that we, and those like us, are their only hope. Someone to tell their story to the outside world.
Nicaragua
The day we go up to the Honduran border is the day they commemorate Sandino's death. Racing through managua streets in Sandino Day dawn. Fireworks at 5 a.m. Hope and hard work. Reconstruction. New houses mushroon slowly out of blasted ground. Fonsecas tomb is guarded by a kid in sneakers with a Cheka machine-gun. Fields of fresh rice. Girl driving donkey cart. Small boy on horseback driving a cow across the highway. Siren river, onion fields, tobacco coops. Flowering leafless fruit tress. We're following the army to the Honduran border. Crowded ancient buses. A car with Salvadoran plates. Tobacco fields are raided, therfore constantly guarded. Ironically, Nicaragua reminds me of Israel in a certain sense - being surrounded by enemies. Everything is militarized and everyone is aware of the need for self defense. We pass an army barracks that looks like a farm. A shot down Somoza aircraft is planted on a hilltop flying the FSLN banner on its tail. Banner in a rural village says, "as Nicaragua has children who love her she will always be free." Women carry firewood on shoulders up the hill. Palms and pines on denuded hills. Battered buses with fantastic paint jobs, jammed with people. People cling to the roof racks, hang from the doors and the windows hoping they won't have to get off and push. Hot roads, diesel clouds - the whole third world perfumed with diesel. A fat man sleeps in the back of a pick-up, feet dangling over the bumper. Rugged budhy hills full of the smell of coffee. Occaisional pause for the crossing of beautiful milky white half-Brahma cattle. Around the bend and there it is - a chain across the road, a custom house and a garrison of half a dozen militia. Thirty metres away a few Hondurans watch with suspicion and strut around like John Wayne. Their look outs hiding on the hill top watch us through field glasses while I watch them with mine.
The main spokesman for the Nicaraguan garrison at the border is a short plump pleasant guy with a bad leg. I ask him, "what happens when you have tofight?" For he walked with a severe limp and had trouble getting around. He says, "Sandinistas don't run anyway."
Women of the town laundry, Nicaragua, 1983.
Later we have car trouble - limp into military truck depot. Barbed wire gates glint in the moonlight. A hundred tired soldiers stretched out on the grass. Tired from a month on the cotton fields. We sing. They sing. Men and women, all young. Guitars and guns. Ballistic music blows open every heart. Passion bursts like rockets. Cotton bales bursting at the seams. Dignity and poems bursting out of parched poverty trance - broken forever.
Brilliant green birds over the lava hole. Volcanoes stand around like the gods of old, pumping incense of the earth into the tropical sky. Down on the beach, horses canter through the surf as warm as bath water. Emerald birds against flaming hills. Dry thunder and hot sky. Dust hangs in the air behing the feet of a passer by. Scent of lilac in the dense night. Laughter from a passing jeep. I lean back against the cool wall. Too much heat. This northen body can't sleep. Returning to Toronto from Nicaragua is like coming from colour to black and white.