A Not So Boring Life

THE SHOW MUST GO ON...  I was a soldier stationed on the Japanese island of Okinawa in the early 1970's.  While there, I became involved with and spent most of my spare time in an army-sponsored theater, organizing and acting in amateur theater productions with my friend Tim, an incredibly talented musician and actor who had also gravitated to the theater as a creative escape from the mundane world of the military.  The experience was what later prompted me to begin (although I ended up going through various courses of study before finally getting a degree) my college studies in Theater Design at Penn State University.  This is an edited (yes EDITED, my kind proof readers Maureen and Sherry!) version of just one of the stories from that long ago time.  

COULD I SEE THAT TRAVEL PLAN AGAIN? There seemed to be nothing but interminably rising mountains ahead.  Trees and plants succumbed to the altitude and gave way to rock covered by occasional patches of snow on the higher peaks.  Above was a crystal clear blue sky; not a cloud in sight.  The winding dirt road clung to the side of the mountains, carved out of natural pathways that had existed for centuries.  The mountain dropped off precariously into mile-deep chasms to the right of us, just inches beyond the wheel of our car.  The landscape was made up of gray and brown hues with spots of green where small clumps of grass and moss drew scarce moisture from between the otherwise barren stone.  Stone is what stood out the most; stone in the valleys below, sturdy stone houses with thatch roofs, stone fences and stone corrals, small pyramid shaped piles of stone randomly stacked where fields were cleared, fallen stone to be avoided in the road.

"AN EYE FOR AN EYE MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD BLIND." In 1984 I was living and working in a rural farming cooperative in the north central mountains of Nicaragua.  I was a student, there to learn about the lives of people living in the midst of a revolutionary, left-leaning country and the effects of a civil war financed, in part, by the U.S. government then led by Ronald Reagan.

THE HATFIELDS AND THE MCCOYS I was getting ready for a trip to a project region in the south central Department of Olancho in Honduras, but there was some doubt whether conditions in the zone would allow for a safe journey back along the country roads leading to the isolated communities that were participating in the project.  There was talk of increased violence in the region; not that violence was something unheard of in these rural, frontier environments, but over the last year the level of reported deaths in the department (not by automobile accidents or natural causes) had risen to a point where additional safety considerations and analysis were needed.  The news coming out of the area consisted of a too-often vague and mixed up tale of gang rivalries, drug trafficking wars and/or family feuds.  It all seemed just too jumbled up to make sense.  But, by talking to staff of our local partner organization, I was finally able to piece together at least part of the story:

"WAR!....WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?" (Excerpt from a letter written in 1984 while living in  the rural farming cooperative "La Quinta", situated in the north central mountains of Nicaragua.)  On Tuesday, October 2 nd , the sound of mortar fire in the near distance shattered the normal tranquility of the mountains for most of the day.  At times like these, it’s hard to tell if the heightened sense of tension is coming from inside me or is being transmitted through the air.  Throughout it all life in the cooperative goes on in much of its usual pattern.  It just becomes more cumbersome to work in the fields while carrying a rifle.

DOUBLE-OH I was once recruited as an informant for the Soviet Union.  Well, almost.  If you've ever read any John Le Carré’s celebrated cold-war spy novels, you might have noticed his detailed descriptions of how intelligence service operatives routinely maintained an army of “Joes” –informants providing primarily low-level intelligence, either for pay or for some sense of exotic excitement - sometimes for a disenchantment with their own country’s policies or trajectories.

DO YOU LIKE PIÑA COLADAS? I was sitting at a table in a brightly-lit cafeteria on the outskirts of the city of Guaymas, in the southwest part of the state of Sonora in northwestern Mexico, 242 miles from the U.S./Mexican border.  I was drinking a cold Modelos beer and reading the latest crime novel that I had found in a Mexico city tourist hostel.   I had been in the country for about two months;  sent by  a U.S. based international women’s village banking organization that provides low-amount but incrementally-increased solidarity loans to women so they can invest in small home-based businesses.  Originally hired by the organization to work in their corporate offices outside of Washington D.C., I had been turned into a roving “fireman”.  The day after I packed my bags and flew to 2,000 or so miles from Nicaragua – my residence for the last three years - I walked into their corporate headquarters in the early hours of a Monday, ready to take up my new post and begin the process of

CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND OTHER JOBS At the beginning of 1991, I was asked by some Jesuit friends of the family if I was interested in being a home-schooling tutor for the children of a North American family who had recently arrived in Nicaragua and had contacted the university for help and referrals.  I was between jobs, so what the heck.   I met with the father, an entrepreneur who said he had arrived in Nicaragua with his wife and three boys, aged five, seven and eight, in order to explore the development of a coffee, lumber and “other types” of export business for some unnamed Texas investors.  He was a big man, well-fed and well over 6’5” tall.  His wife was unassuming – a born-again Christian housewife dedicated to the raising of their children and determined to keep her children out of the evil, witchcraft-infected world of public education through home schooling.  The boys were being educated using an accredited fundamentalist Christian study course and they just wanted help t

YES, THEY ARE KNOWN FOR THAT TOO… For about four months, I had been in the city of Osh, second largest city of the ex-soviet and predominantly Muslim country of Kyrgyzstan.  Osh dates back to the 8 th century and was a key stopping and trading location along the ancient Silk Road that connected Central Asian countries from China to the Mediterranean Sea.   I was there on assignment from a U.S. based microenterprise organization, tasked with organizing anywhere from 15 to 20 women from a given village into solidarity groups that would function as a “Village Bank”, receiving and managing a series of small loans invested in individual businesses.

LEAVING HOME I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more No, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more Wel, I wake up in the morning Fold my hands and pray for rain I got a heafull of ideas that are drivin' me insane                                                                                                "Maggie's Farm" - Bob Dylan I left my hometown of Danville, Pennsylvania at about three in the afternoon on August 24, 1971.  It was a Tuesday.  Temperatures had been running around 85-86 degrees the past week.  (Out of curiosity, I just scanned the internet to see what other worldly or earth-changing events might have occurred on that particular day, but came up only with an India vs England cricket match won by India with a margin of 4 wickets and the birth of the Italian actor Pierfrancesco Favino, who played Christopher Columbus in Ben Stiller’s “Night at the Museum”)