A Not So Boring Life

HERE! HAVE SOME PISCO. IT WILL RELAX YOU! We drove for several hours in a convoy of four-wheel drive vehicles on narrow and winding dirt paths – a sheer cliff rising to the left and a sharp drop just off the right tire.   We were in the mountains in the Huancavelica province of Peru, in altitudes ranging from of 3,700 meters (@12,140 feet) above sea level to up to 5,000 meters in the highest mountains.   Cold, treeless and rocky terrain; thin oxygen that had several travelers sucking on portable tanks from time-to-time.   (Me?   I was a heavy smoker at the time, so my lungs were used to having less oxygen. J )  We were in a hurry, as our destination was still in front of us and it was getting on into the afternoon.   We had been delayed by a long spoken mayor in an earlier stop, who insisted that we wait while they went out to pull a poor indigent man and boy off the streets so that we could present them with some blankets.  Protests on our part did not let us avoid the awkward

I only met a true Mafioso once in my life. In the early 1990´s, I responded to an advertisement in the Nicaraguan newspaper ‘La Prensa’.   An international student exchange organization was being set up in the country:   interested parties were to apply in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Managua.   Jobs were scarce in the country, and the lobby was filled with hopeful applicants.   An older German man, fluent in Spanish, was holding the interviews.   I was hired on the spot as the manager of one aspect of the soon-to-be-founded company: a Cross-Cultural “PenPal” scheme, wherein students from Nicaraguan high schools would write letters to students in high schools from around the world, establishing friendships and getting a glimpse into diverse cultures.   It sounded great and fit right into my university education in cross-cultural communication. In the economy of the day,   I was happy to have a job. There were two other things going on with the overall pa