So I´ve had to make some changes in my plans due to several events, over which I have little control.

Kayte, has been forced to abandon here AFS exchange mid-year, due to rules, and AFS staffers who are a little to harsh and un-understanding to be in charge of an exchange program. With this, she decided to plan the next 8 years of her life out, and left me in a tight spot. No worries though, I always pull through and think of something else.

So, this leaves me trying to organize an effort that I realize I´d been organizing on my own all along. I took a hard look at how things were going, and how things weren´t going, and decided to scratch my whole plan and start over.

I´ve been thinking about jumping ship to Africa after senior year, as opposed to S. America. Uganda seems to be my favorite right now, due to their schools (800$ tuition is my friend). Trying to figure out where I want to go after that. I know I shouldn´t try to plan my life so far ahead when certainly my gustos will change, but I like to feel like I´ve got something to work for.

It´s no fun not having a sense of purpose. That´s what I get for not being religious.

So afterwards, I´m not sure. I´d like to pick up some professional military experience just ´cause, but I don´t want to commit 5 years of my life to the French Foreign Legion, nor do I at all like the prospect of America´s fighting force. Blech. Maybe I´ll be a bush doctor. That actually looks rather appealing. I´m still hopelessly in love with film, however, and I know I´ll always regret not having gone to Chapman or Santa Fe after HS, but maybe I can still work with that. You just don´t here that much about film in Africa.

Cuba´s still on the horizon. Can´t let that island fall into American hands when Castro goes down (and America does have plans-this I have on good intel). Murky water.

We´ll see.

Say hello to everyone back home. That means everyone.

Alex
in Paraguay.

So, After 2 hours at the computer trying to dig out my photos, I decided to give up.

It''s been about a month now, and my compact flash card is sick (poor thing). I have a number of folders in which I save photos on the camera, but one day, one of them decided to join the dark side. Since then, it's been an abyss. I can't shoot fotos in it, and when I select the folder, the camera tells me there are no photos on the card, and won''t let me shut it off. Bleh.

So I go to the computer, and first the pc won''t even recognize that there''s a camera plugged in. Then I switch the camera usb settings from mass storage to ptp. it appears, but I can''t access it.

So today, I go to all the photo shops in town (sweating profusely) and they plug it in and tell me different things, none helpful. The man at kodak told me my camera was using a different format, that''s why it didn''t work with his machine (that''s shit, I've printed there before). Two others, no ideas. The last one came close, but the computer froze up and had to restart windows explorer. Her diagnostic was the best "tu compact flash tiene algo raro" which is of course the truth.

So now I have a rogue compact flash with several hundred of my best photos, and it appears, no way to retrieve them.

Maybe it's possessed, maybe the abyss really is a pathway to the inferno, I don't really know. I will succeed though, someday.

Alexei

After a fantastic month and a half trip from paraguay to perú and back again, here I am in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay.

This journal won´t be so thought out as the others. It´s only here to say that I´ve got about 30 deviations and 10 scraps to upload as soon as I have time to edit them.

look for that before school starts on March 1st.

Damn is it hot here.

Alex
CG

I am in Peru. What opened my eyes wide in Paraguay has become much clearer as I pass my days in Lima.

Lima is a beast of a city. It takes forever to get from place to place, but that´s cool. I like to see the city. The city sits in a valley, or at least a place without hills that surrounded by them. The hills (or cerros) are dangerous because they´re all dirt and rock that has a thing for sliding down from time to time. They are also the poor districts.

I had the fantastic oppurtunity to see these firsthand as I took a trip up one cerro with a team of psychiatrists who work in a small mental health hospital for the area. The houses are built in precarious locations where the slightes push on a rock could bring down first a house, and then a whole neighborhood. These are the little wooden houses too..no brick and cement here.

The reality of the thing stunned me. They can´t inhabit land within the city because that costs money they don´t have, so they´re pushed up into the danger of the cerros. The cerro I mounted was one chiefly composed of victims of terrorism in the region not to many years back. The mental health issue is a big deal, but we encountered a lot of resistance (people not wanting to talk to us, not coming down from their houses).

This is all such a big deal. I never could´ve understood any of this back home, seeing pictures, watching documentaries, any of it. You have to stare a man in the eyes to understand this reality. And in those eyes--they´re not empty, but they´re not full of joy. You see his distress with his condition, and that he knows that despite his hardest efforts, his daughter who he loves so much is never going to get out of this place. This mountain of dust and rocks that yearn to see him fail.

Evo Morales is now the president elect of Bolivia. He´s allied himself with Chavez (and Humala--wtf?). We might see some change ahead, but as I´ve said and continue to do, change needs to be something radically new. Peruvians don´t like to be fucked around from outside, but man, they need to pick up their own.

I have work to do. Come Join me.

How things change in 12 hours. I'm no longer heading to the chaco, as planned. It seems all the nuns and priests headed home for christmas. Instead, the plan has been finalized to go to peru! Me encata peru. What a fascinating place.

So here's the deal. I have to go through the AFS beurocratic meatgrinder for the next few days for leaving the country, but after that, it's omnibus to Lima (with a stop in Buenos Aires or La Paz (If it's BA, I'll do everything I can to take a spin over to Rosario to see Kayte)). Ah Peru. Cash is going to be short though. Anyone who wants to donate a dollar, algunos centavos, um real, un sol, po sa guaranies, un peso, a euro, anything, please do.

Things have changed for me. My first month here was something else. I took to the change by overhauling my whole worldview and my take on politics and social welfare. Then I settled in for a while. I saw the poverty, it moved me, but then it became part of the landscape. This I, we, cannot let happen. I took another trip last week to an indigeonous colony called Akaraymi, about an hour away. Here I worked with some priests setting up a co op with the indigeonous people. The most humbling experience for me, was when I went out one evening in the pickup truck with one of the missionaries to a little hut in the middle of nowhere where a man lived with his family of seven or eight. How so many people fit into his casita, I don't know, but we came, drank terere, talked, then started building a new hut near the other. Really, what a humbling experience to help build a man's house, using nails, and pieces of a tree you cut down that morning. The poetic beauty astounds me and I was moved.

I came back home and had to think for a while. After that, I had an excellent conversation with my host mother about the work that needs to be done in the world. My work. We sipped yerba mate until three in the morning.

I began penning the next email to kayte, expressing my thoughts. What we need to do; how we need to organize the people so when things get rough, there will be something ready to step up and show the world the way things really are. Kayte and I are going to make a splash if we do that together, and I hope we do. She's a pretty cool person, albeit xhundred miles away in Rosario.

I hope Peru will open my eyes more. It's a different culture, with more poverty and more injustice. I look at the changing of the times in Bolivia, where it looks like the new president will be something of a socialist, looking to nationalize the gas reserves and drive america out. I look at the ready to fight attitude of venezuela, working with Cuba to fight for the people. I look at Cuba, a lone beacon of something we've fought to supress in the tropics. I look at an aging Castro, the charismatic leader who won't last too much longer. I look at the US, ready to claim his throne a day after he is no more. I look at Venezuela, ready to defend their friend it that troubling circumstance. I drop to a knee and offer Cuba my sword. I will not permit imperialism in my adopted home. The people here are ready to fight, but they need a strong voice. It is how it is and how it has been. Che was that voice, but american warriors, fighting for freedom, killed the man, securing the fate of the working man.

I will not be the next Che. I don't want to be. I want to start something new, to construct what needs to be. This is my work, and there is no world superpower who will stop the downtrodden of this continent from saying what they need to say. I just need a bit more time.

I will keep, with luck, a concise journal of my experience in Peru. That I might never forget what I see.

Good night, and off to Peru I go.