Pina Palmera

I am suspicious of all do gooding.  I find that it is often the case the person who rounds up the needy to represent them gains much more than the needy themselves.  I see United Way executives spending more time at conferences in Europe than they do building programs to help others.
 So when I was invited to Pina Palmera to see their operation in the Mexican town of Zipolite (where I was staying) I had some reservations.  Was there a religious component? The answer was no. OK good. Did they have a traveling executive board? No again. Were they familiar with the Paris Four Seasons Hotel?  No. OK good.  Pina Palmera acts as an advocacy and education group for the handicapped in Mexico.  As I have said before, Mexico is in many ways similar to Canada in the 60s.  It is common for families to hide away a handicapped child and keep them outside of the social realm for their entire lives.  The folks at the Pina Palmera centre work to integrate the handicapped into the general population by giving them skills and a sense of genuine worth.

During my visit I saw people performing all of lifes normal tasks, cleaning,cooking, making objects to sell and generally working.  The centre sends people to other communities to teach inclusion and acceptance for the handicapped. They also provide physical rehab and volunteer doctors visit to do what volunteer doctors do.

My visit to the Pina Palmera Centre was short and I don't pretend to know more than one can from a short visit but I was impressed. The thing I liked most was that I have known about this place for years and yet I didn't. That is because they go about their work quietly and patiently and they do not seek any merit points or accolades.  I am impressed.
They as always are broke and here is the bite. You can donate at HSBC, Plaza Potchutla. Oaxaca,Sucursal: 0842.  Account # 4032851404 key 630040328514043.

OK enough of my do gooding.  I will return to my regular musings next week.

Comedy in Mexico

I was having a sentimental moment in a cafe I enjoy. The waiter is deaf and the floor is a shade of cement that could use paint. Mama sits at a table and does business while the kids play with their toys. Their toys are bottle caps and two spent disposable lighters.

The scene was pleasant and comfortable. Then two guys put a table in the sand and a stool on the table. It looked like a comedy sketch in the works. They began to remove palm fronds from a large coconut tree.

Now we had a table in the sand and a stool on a table and a machete. All the elements for  a good comedy sketch. I thought about the options. Stool falls, table breaks, machete causes the comedy to become more serious.
But life does not adhere to the lines written by comic actors staging plays in their heads.
I lean back in my chair to await the hilarious conclusion of the efforts of these hapless working guys. Then my chair crumbles into dust and I hit the floor.  The guy with the machete laughs at the stupid gringo as  machete hits a branch. The branch unleashed 6 very large bats that flew into the  the face of  the guy on the stool. Women with brooms start to ineffectually swat at bats the size of wombats with wings. The guy on the stool is now on the ground and the machete flies slow motion into the bedlam.
We all dust ourselves off. Dignity disintegrated but humour clearly in good shape as the deaf waiter walks over to me and in perfect english says, "will that be all sir?." I had never heard him speak english before.

Thankfully for me there are no pictures today.

VAGABOND PICNIC: drug war

VAGABOND PICNIC: drug war

Oaxaca

At the entrance to Potchutla you pass under a dangling streetlight. I suspect that long ago an over height truck considered this street light to be an unneccesary obstacle to the proper flow of traffic. It's component parts hang from frayed wires waiting for the opportune moment to submit to the laws of rust and gravity.
Potchutla is a classic supply town. A place where you go to buy 2 miles of barbed wire, 300 kilos of rice, get your tooth pulled and try to get the hell out before the christian evangelists get you. It is a place that I suspect only exists during business hours. I would not be surprised to know that the town vanished at sunset. I am here looking for a car part. No luck with the part but lucky to get out of town early. They can't all be picture perfect mountain towns with atmospheric zocalo and trees filled with phosphorescent butterflies. No there must be the towns for utility as well. Potchutla is such a town.
I am back in Mexico.  It is a country with well known problems. I drove through Taumalipas.  The locals have taken to stopping long haul buses, removing the occupants and killing them after what I assume was an ordeal. I stopped in a town where the bodies of 177 bus passengers were found on a farm. It seemed a normal place. My next stop was Veracruz. I arrived the day the entire police force was fired. When you fire a Mexican policeman his government cheque stops but it is unlikely his gun and uniform are returned to the state.
  Even with my jaundiced eye I continue to encounter a wonderful people here. There is a saying that the mafia use to gain cooperation. "Quiere plata o quiere plomo." Would you like silver or lead. Earlier I wrote an article called "drug war" on this blog. It stands. The people who live and work endure through this difficult time. They welcome me into their homes and we fight and argue. As ever the Christian evangelists are preying on the disorder they find so convenient.
Mexican History Lesson. After the earthquake of 1968 in Mexico city many of the churches were destroyed. In the rubble it was found that the slaves the priests used to build their monuments to imperialism had stashed Mayan and Aztec icons. The natives were standing in front of the statue of the Virgin and paying homage to the Mayan god. No god is good but it is interesting that they endure.

VAGABOND PICNIC: VAGABOND PICNIC: Paris, Living in a Dead Mans House

VAGABOND PICNIC: VAGABOND PICNIC: Paris, Living in a Dead Mans House

VAGABOND PICNIC: Paris, Living in a Dead Mans House

VAGABOND PICNIC: Paris, Living in a Dead Mans House

Paris, Living in a Dead Mans House

 Paris, Living in a Dead Mans House.
No that is not metaphor, I am in Paris, living in a dead mans house. I fold out the fold out couch and sleep amongst the dusty detritus of another mans recently abandoned life. Boxes containing the gathered personal history of a holocaust survivor attempt to interrupt my sleep.  Today I took a moving mans load across Paris on the metro. I felt a bit like one of the men in Polanskis first film, "Two Men and a Wardrobe".  Hobbled by goods too large for public transit in a city too large to care as we cajoled our goods via our only possible conveyance.

I came here to visit a friend convalescing. Glad to report he is doing well enough to challenge me to the daily duel that is cycling the streets of Paris. We get the "Velolib" bikes, available throughout Paris. We ride to galleries and cafes and places I am lucky to see through the eyes of my good friend who has lived here for many years. The streets are a constant movement. The streets live and breath as some being made of  all the attempts, successes and failures that surround us.
Still I am not convinced.  I love the history, the Paris Commune, the very birth of a socialist notion. The French Revolution and the very clear fact that none of that history is forgotten on the streets of this city. People may try to hide it but like the bad behavior of a tiresome brother whose thoughts provoke and annoy, it is never forgotten.
Oh ya, there are buildings jammed with art. But you knew that.

I have insinuated myself into the Pere Lachaise  neighborhood through my friend. As in every city every barrio is a small town. Small gestures. I saw an old man having difficulty with groceries. I helped as anyone would. Gesture noticed and now I am a neighbour in a city I do not pretend to know, but a barrio I recognize as the barrio I always know.

Paris has a special place in collective memory, well deserved. Still as I dig into it's history I wonder if all here know that streets have names changed  from " Scratch ass street, or, pull the sausage street to ""Rue St. Martin Rue saint no look away nothing here to see street".  We once had a more colourful language.

Paris does not fit my usual travel routine. I was asked to come here.  Still every obligation is an opportunity. Paris to me is the Paris Commune and the birth of socialism. A hard task that.

There also exists a weird tourist Paris but I need not see it. I went to the wall in La Pere Lachaise Cemetery where the brave and betrayed remnants of the Paris Commune were executed. I regretted that I had not written a poem to pin to the wall three blocks and three days away. I promise to write it and tuck it in the crack that is the Paris I have come to know.

VAGABOND PICNIC: drug war

VAGABOND PICNIC: drug war

Canadian Desert

The frozen north with a pocket of dry west. Ashcroft British Columbia is a small town in a Canadian desert.
I last wrote of a need to earn money. I don't have money and I don't worry about it but I do what I need to do to participate in the vague notion of our current economy.  As luck would have it I was hired by Brazilians to location manage a TV show in British Columbia.  If you have followed this blog you may have wondered how I travel with no visible means of support. I am not a trustafarian.  I organize film production and show off the Canadian landscape for movie making.  I am a location manager. It was once a pretty good gig. In the new economy, I am adjusting.  Today I am thankful for Brazil.

The good fortune of this illusion of a job is that occasionally I am paid to travel. The best part of this travel arrives in the form of relationships I often develop with people I would not have otherwise known. If the script has a dentist I will learn about dentists, if it is logging then loggers I will meet.  So the Brazilians rented a Ford Iraq Invasion and sent me to the Canadian desert.

In Ashcroft I found the kitty litter mine. Really they mine kitty litter. As a Canadian this is endlessly amusing. The cour de bois head to the yukon, fighting cold and wild animals to pan for ...kitty litter.
Actually I suspect they may have had kitten scouts fed dangerous levels of fluids.  On leash they roamed the desert in search of the ideal material to lay their scent. The miners with picks and shovels ever ready to exploit the absorbent earth.

The desert has never treated me well. I suspect that is why they call it a desert. Dry and barren. People tell me it has a beauty.  To me the desert is a place that makes it clear it will not make your visit easy.  You need water? Look elsewhere. You need shade, shelter, comfort...not here. Yet cultures thrive in deserts. Sadly the Bedouins would probably give Ashcrcoft a pass. This is a working class town without work. There are many towns in British Columbia like this. The mine is dry, perhaps too absobrant, but heck there is a town here, maybe the mine will reopen, my house is here, I guess I'll wait it out. Sadly that waiting out can last a generation or two.

As I have a job here I meet with the local people of authority. This is a small town area with very wealthy ranching interests. Cattle are burgers and we all want them.  The folks who own the land here do well. There is a large first nations presence. They do not do as well.  I did have the pleasure of working on native land. As always happens I was welcomed and got to spend a day with an elder of the Kamloops band. We drove the  back roads and he taught me the ways of bighorn sheep and we talked of the youth of the band.  The band provide the opportunity to see the original way but there is no pressure. "They come to it when they see it".  We also went to a house the band owns that had white renters. All was not well but I was very impressed with the way the situation was handled.  A kind of cordiality bankers don't offer.

Movie bear

Big Horn Sheep

Another great trip. I am amazed by what I don't know.

Vagabond Picnic at sea

As you are aware the recession is over.  Myself and most of my friends are unemployed but apparently we are not that necessary to a healthy economy.   So the sea.  I decided to venture to the Northern Gulf Islands of British Columbia.  I loaded my 35 year old sailboat and on a windless morning I motored to my first stop at Lasqueti Island.  Lasqueti is unique.  The citizens of this special outpost voted against electricity.  BC hydro offered to provide power but the curious folks on this pirate island said no thanks.  This says a lot about who lives here.  On my visits to this area I have heard many stories of rum running, gold hoarding cults and the general rejection of conventional forms of social order  that existed on the Gulf Islands of the 30s and 40s.  While most of the Gulf Islands have become hobbies for retirees who enjoy a good committee, Lasqueti seems to continue in the spirit of the originals.  Original they are.  There is no car ferry but there are cars. Most of the cars on the island look like they were imported from a Mexican village that used wood as a main aftermarket component.  Wood does make a good fender.

 As any sailor knows the best days of sailing are those spent hitch hiking on remote islands in search of the ship boneyard which you hope will have something resembling the part of your boat that just broke.  At the boneyard you will meet a man named Jim or Jake. Jim or Jake will climb out of some hulk of a fluid oozing vehichle  to greet you. The greeting ritual will consist of ignoring you for as long as possible. Jake or Jim cannot count to ten using his fingers. Eight, nine and a half tops.

 So yes I had a major breakdown on my first stop. Being at the mercy of a local and unknown community is a good way to measure a place.  You are easy picking,  the low fruit dangled in front of the mechanically inclined.  I met most of the wrench wielding philosophers on Lasqueti.  Never was I asked for a penny.  Indeed I was invited to everything and felt like an unexpected guest more than anything else.  I saw a woman walking down the road with a wheelbarrow full of hard to identify items and asked if the wheelbarrow was the island equivalent of the the downtown eastside shopping cart.  Her wry response "everything I own is in here". No paucity of wit on this island.  You will also find a bakery that is a kiosk of cookies with a cash box running on the honour system. Make your choice and deposit your coinage.  Several fruit and egg stations work the same way. I was drawn to one vegetable stand by the plaintive wail of old time country music being played on battery powered radio. A note informed me that I must leave the radio on and tuned to this deer repelling station.
  I was glad to discover a small rebel island in my midst and I hope to return with a new engine aboard.   My mechanical issue insists that I visit a bigger place with a shipyard.
To do that I will have to solve the employment issue.
Next up: A trip to the interior desert to pay for the time at sea.