On Sunday, May 4, I participated in a BookFest with other local authors in
our Capitol Hill neighborhood, as per photo above.
Received terrible news that Dr. Helmuth Castro, my Peace Corps health director in Honduras, has
died after an illness, a type of encephalitis, contracted while he was
attending a conference on HIV in South Africa, no doubt a great honor to have
been invited. He was a wonderful, supportive man by now in his 50s. Last I
heard from him, he was working with the Peace Corps in Guatemala, after the
program in Honduras was shut down. I just
got a message from his wife, whom I had contacted, saying she was sure that his
work in disseminating HIV information has had an impact worldwide, which has
given her some comfort.
My local NPR station broadcasts BBC news late at night.
One night, I heard speculation that China’s
economy might overtake that of the US as the world’s largest later this
year. Other estimates are that it won’t
happen until 2019. I had not realized it would be happening so soon in either
case. I’m just waiting for some Republican political blog to blame Obama and
the Democrats for this occurrence, assuming it is even true. Of course,
determining the precise year all depends how an economy is measured. China has more than 4 times the population of
the United States, but we always want to be Number One. Reportedly, the Chinese
leadership actually doesn’t want their country to be identified as having the
largest economy as that might make it more responsible for climate change,
foreign aid, etc. In any case, apparently,
China’s economy might perhaps come to be considered larger not in terms of actual
GNP or output of goods or per capita income, but rather in terms of internal
citizen purchasing power, in that many items cost less there than in the US. That’s
true worldwide. As I have commented before, American manufactured drugs or
their equivalents cost less in Honduras than in the US. Often, I can buy them
there for less than the co-payment would be here and usually without a doctor’s
prescription. (However, even using the measure of internal purchasing power,
some argue that China’s economy still won’t be close to surpassing that of the
US.)
A fellow Spanish interpreter sent me a request from a
Canadian medical charity working in Bolivia,
looking for a Spanish medical interpreter for a surgical mission scheduled
for next November. Like IHS, the group I regularly work with in Honduras, it
requires volunteers to pay their own expenses, not only airfare, but, in this
case, for a hotel stay too, as they perform surgery in a city hospital. It
would be very interesting to do this work in a country other than Honduras, but
I’m already committed to Honduras, where travel is cheaper. I certainly cannot
afford two very expensive volunteer trips like that in a single year, having gone
to Honduras already in February. It’s not only a matter of the actual outlay
for the costs involved, but of lost work opportunities while I’m away. It takes
a while for my interpretation agencies to get me back on board afterward and
they are not too happy about my annual absence. I would like to see more of
Bolivia, as years ago, I got only as far as the shores of Lake Titicaca, with a
tantalizing glimpse of fishermen trawling with nets from their impossibly
buoyant reed boats. I’m not particularly fond of Bolivia’s current leadership,
especially after the president kicked out the Peace Corps ostensibly as a blow
against Yankee imperialism, but I still would want to help people there if I
could. For first-time participants in such a volunteer endeavor, it’s very
educational and eye-opening. Probably a
Canadian medical charity is more acceptable to President Evo Morales than an
American one would be, which he might suspect of being a front for gringo spies.
USAID’s Cuban Twitter program was not
helpful in that regard.
The damage caused by the revelation of the now-defunct USAID Cuban Twitter program is based mainly
on criticism of its secret character, but it had to be secret to function at all in
Cuba, because, of course, the Cuban regime doesn’t allow private communication
among its citizens that might threaten its control. Many American critics use
Twitter themselves. News stories and
Cuban official outrage have focused on Twitter’s potential for sparking an
uprising against the government. But the USAID program was in no way influencing
the content of Twitter messages, just providing an avenue of communication in a
country where communication is routinely blocked, along with gatherings of
likeminded citizens. Most critics of the program don’t acknowledge how very
difficult it is for Cubans to have unimpeded communication among themselves. Even
gatherings of more than three unrelated people officially require a government
permit.
At the NRA’s
recent annual convention in Indianapolis, members had to leave their
firearms at the door. What? Were there any complaints about that? Perhaps, but
probably even the leadership of the NRA realizes that having a bunch of armed
gun owners together in a small space was not such a great idea. With someone
like Sarah Palin as their darling, I would say that such folks cannot be
trusted with firearms.
In a related development, a Maryland gun dealer planning
to sell a “smart gun” that only the
owner can fire has decided against it, after getting death threats from gun
lovers. I’m not sure of the logic here, but it seemed to have to do with opposing
any restriction on gun ownership and
use. Such people are fanatics, who value the freedom to shoot a gun and hurt or
kill someone else above the right of others to be protected from harm.
Since my last posting about visiting former neighbors
living in a lovely retirement community,
I’ve pinpointed the main reason why their comfortable life does not
particularly appeal to me, assuming I could even afford it. The complex is fairly
far removed geographically, as such places usually are, from city life and the
public transportation that I now use almost daily. If I were living there or
somewhere like it, I would no longer be able to work, host foreign visitors,
give public talks about my books, and just enjoy walking around my lively
Eastern Market neighborhood in Washington, DC. I’m afraid I would be bored out
of my mind and feel as though I had retired from life, no longer independent
and in charge of my own destiny. Going for meals is the highlight of the day
for most residents of such places, giving them their main opportunity to interact
with others. Eating is a biological necessity, but usually a rather routine one.
I need a little more excitement in my life. Of course, if our memory starts to fade
and we need prompts about when and what to eat or if we become too disabled
physically to care for ourselves, then that’s another story. At that point, we do
have to accept that we’ve become dependent and have no other choice. Beyond its
relation to dependency, any retirement, assisted, or senior living system is
also the next step before death, as we would be reminded if we lived there because
the death rate is naturally relatively high among residents. That’s usually how
units become vacant and available to newcomers . Somehow, clustering older people together in a
protective environment doesn’t seem quite natural, but many older folks prefer
it to being dependent on their kids. My daughter Melanie remarked, when we
visited our former neighbors at such a place in rural Maryland, that the layout
and amenities seemed identical to those in a complex where she recently visited
relatives in Portland, Oregon. If I end
up moving to a retirement community myself, I may change my tune.
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