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PA BOY, THROUGH AND THROUGH On seeing an article about the upcoming regular deer hunting season in Pennsylvania, I was whisked back to my own, not so glamorous (or successful) experience in stalking the white-tailed deer in different places around Danville.   Being a regular old PA boy, I of course was indoctrinated into a sport hunting culture at an early age.   Having a dad who was the local Deputy Game Commissioner and who was known, both affectionately and, at times derisively, as “Birddog Weaver” (we always had at least two German Shorthair dogs trained to sniff and point out wary pheasant hiding in the underbrush of overgrown fields around the area) cemented my expected introduction into sportsmanlike conduct. Unfortunately, I was not, nor would ever be, a natural born hunter.   I had other interests, and while spending hour upon hour looking for adventures in the woods and farmland surrounding Danville was an enjoyable part of childhood, tramping around with a ri...
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The following is the first of a series of "to the world" letters written while on a prolonged experience in Nicaragua in 1984, done as part of an independent university internship.  I would click these letter out on a battered portable manual typewriter and send them up to my sister Rose in the U.S., who would copy and send them out to a network of friends, students and professors.  Put into context, they represent an intense and important part of both my life and the history of Nicaragua during that time. I’m sitting in the living room of my house at about six-thirty in the evening on Sunday the 29 th of April, 1984.  I started to sit down about two hours ago to type this letter, but alas, the gringo’s typewriter is a very popular item in this house. I’m living now in an Esteli neighborhood called “Jose Santos Zelaya”.  The neighborhood is named after a famous Nicaraguan leader which, coincidentally, is also the name of the son of my Nicaraguan host “mot...
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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 cours...
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