i just watched the motorcycle diaries with debbie and pearly. nice that i could do that here. brief comments on the movie: the thing i liked best was the portrayal of alberto. i think that was the only part that really outshone the book. the part i liked least was how heroic they made che. i mean, i know he was heroic. but the movie made it too easy to understand. like i said in an earlier post, the best part of the book for me was seeing che's devious side. i'm canadian: we like our heroes to have faults.

so, the rest of this post might be hard to follow because i have a hard time thinking linearly and thus have a hard time writing linearly. i prefer cyclical thinking (which is maybe why i use so many parentheses: it feels like they help me to say things more simultaneously). sorry.

sometimes i get really frustrated with being here because people get so upset that i am not learning the things they want/expect me to learn. i am not really trying new foods or learning how to cook (i hate cooking!!!) and i ditched hammock-sleeping after about a month. but the things i am learning are really huge. reading the motorcycle diaries, confessions of an economic hitman, and a thousand barrels a second, combined with just being here, in the amazon rainforest, living with the indigenous people of south america, i have been exposed to a lot of knowledge that i don't think i would have gained in the same way under other circumstances. ugh, this is going to be longer than i want to write. i will have to sum it up. basically, i am just learning to reconcile my sometimes-philanthropic leanings with my usually-self-centred-north-american-worldview. regarding my "condor and the eagle" post: i really believe that the right thing for me to be doing right now is learning about indigenous culture, so that alberta (canada, north america, the world) can be healed using some of that wisdom. i think i'm dedicated to that. i really care about alberta and middle-class white folk and i think we are destroying ourselves with our attitudes and our lifestyles. but at the same time, being here, i notice myself avoiding talking with the locals (i imagine this has a good deal to do with my antisocial nature, but does it have to do with perceived notions of class?), expecting that i should get to ride in the front of the vehicle (there's limited space: two or three sit in the cab, while the rest pile into the back.) or get the best cuts of meat at dinnertime. if, for example, there are three people left to eat and only one piece of chicken left, i can come up with any number of reasons that i should be the one to eat it (age, position, gender... skin color has not come up, but only because i have hundreds of years of history teaching me better). this has been huge in helping me understand the first europeans in canada. i sometimes tend to rage out at "white people" for the atrocities we've committed across the globe. living here, i am starting to understand that, even with the best of intentions, people do some crazy things and make some crazy rationalizations when they are hungry, helpless, and ignorant.
the summer i worked for AFL, i learned that in order to take care of others, i need to take care of myself: physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually. but sometimes the way that manifests itself is by me making sure i am fed at the cost of someone else going hungry. what do i do? rawle is one to always make sure everyone else is taken care of, but then, he goes without eating a lot of the time. what's the answer?