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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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IS THAT TIMOTHY LEARY OUTSIDE THERE? I believe that the statute of limitations has long expired and that anyone who might think badly of me or be shocked at reading this remembrance already thinks badly of me and knows that I have strayed from the beaten path and been crazy enough to have done any number of risky and on-the-edge things in my life.   The seventies were a bit of a wide open period for many of my generation, and often involved experimenting with drugs.   Growing up in a small town with little outlets for youthful entertainment exacerbated the situation.   I don’t advocate the use of drugs (never did – I was just an experimenter) and have long since learned that there are much bigger and better highs available – love and sex are just two examples.   But, as they say:   Ahhhh, youth… There are mistakes that all parents make, at least once in their life.   For my parents, it was going away and leaving me, at 17 years of age, alone i...
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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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