leah leah leah

Hi! It would take way too long to tell you all what's going on with me, although I guess there's not much to say other than that I'm a waitress with a college degree at a place that calls me a 'biscuiteer'. But really I just wanted to write so that I could show you a picture of my cat.

This is Miley/The Littlest Raptor/Broccoli/Billy Ray/Little Cheese Curd/Everything Bagel (Extra Toasted)!




She's turned me into a cat person, for better or for worse.


I hope you all are doing well!!

I am overwhelmed by this experience, I had an amoeba that left behind an intestinal infection and I missed the last boat back to my town across the lake and now am alone in the program's office thinking about too much and wanting for there to be people online because I have wireless for this one night.

I've been talking to people about how their husbands and sons were tortured and massacred one day in 1981 about a half a mile from the house where I live, my aim is to investigate the efficacy of the Guatemalan civil war reparations program in my town and so far I've gotten enough information to fill a book but none of it to flesh out the neatly divided sections I need for the deadline 4 weeks from now.

Here in Panajachel I can hear fireworks going off like gunshots every 10 minutes, I know it's practice for next week's Corpus Christi parade but I can't stop thinking about the fact that away from this tourist town in the place where I've been living there were guerrillas in the hills one morning firing real guns instead of fireworks. About how the army mistook sons and husbands for insurgents and set about burning the bottoms of their feet, cutting out their organs one by one with the farmers' own machetes and leaving behind a legacy that our own country helped create with its operatives and lofty economic goals for what could only have been seen as another potentially prosperous banana republic.

After a civil war of 30 years that killed more than 200,000 people, the government in Guatemala is still embattled and the families of the civil war victims have only the tenuous Programa Nacional de Resarcimiento (reparations) to look to for any acknowledgment or apology for the army's actions against their husbands, sons and lives. In my town, some of the victims have gotten their 24,000Q. Most of them had to report to Guatemala City and present their testimony before the truth commissions to even be considered, and many of them haven't received a penny or a hope regardless of the insurmountable evidence speaking to their losses. This inefficacy is offset by the presence of a sort of reparations middle-woman who takes fraudulent reparations claims to the government and sleeps with officials to get the money sent back to families who didn't lose anyone in the war at all. In a town like Santiago where everyone knows each other and most people have lived there their entire lives, I am only beginning to see the ongoing and divisive attitudes many people have about the way the civil war echoes in their lives and the government's continuing and pervasive corruption.

I've been talking with this human rights assessor from a nearby town that was affected by the massacres, he keeps telling me he's happy I chose my topic and honestly it's making it harder and harder to push forward without seizing up and wondering what in the world I'm doing.

My interviews are wearing me out, I feel completely honored and 10x more unqualified to do this project every time I hear someone else's story and I really just hope I can pull it off. I just want desperately to be able to make this the best it could be, and I'm not sure at all how to do that.

http://leahinguat.livejournal.com

sadgasdfasdhgoaergdxawdfsoh1!!

I graduated from NC State on Saturday. I still don't feel like it actually happened.

I leave for Guatemala in a week and a half, which also seems surreal.



daaaang life changes!

It seems like everything that's happening this week falls clearly and evenly into 2 neatly distinct piles. In the good pile, there is the fact that I'm continuing to go on dates with someone I like who is awesome! I also have done laundry, grocery shopping, lots of homework and have mercifully received a little money from my dad so my bank account balance isn't flashing red and evil anymore. In the bad pile, I didn't get ANY of the 8 scholarships I applied for to use in Guatemala this summer. I am majorly bummed, and now have to find a way to raise over $600 in the next month and a half. Handjobs, anyone? Also, work has been totally awful. A million tables and chairs need to be picked up and moved and set up and re-moved every day, and while I guess the extra money I'm getting from staying late every day really could fit in the good pile, the racists and the bullshit and the exhaustion really aren't worth it.

I'm going to interview at a restaurant that's opening up downtown called the Busy Bee, I have no idea what it'll be like but I hope they like me and want to give me a job!

"That made me jumpy, Bruno, that they felt sure of themselves. Sure of what...you only had to concentrate a little, feel a little, be quiet for a little bit, to find the holes. In the door, in the bed: holes. In the hand, in the newspaper, in time, in the air: everything full of holes, everything spongy, like a colander straining itself... But they were American science, Bruno, dig? White coats were protecting them from the holes; didn’t see anything, they accepted what had been seen by others, they imagined that they were living. And naturally they couldn’t see the holes."

It's very hard for me to remain calm in 3/4 of my classes this semester. Even when I remember to tell myself I go to an incredibly conservative university, the things people say and the opinions the majority of my classmates put forth are so brutally and staunchly ignorant that I want to stab their parents, them, and myself in the eyeballs to be done with it once and for all. What do you say in a Sociology class when someone uses the idea of sociological imagination to put forth the statement that black people don't like to swim because they're poor? Or, more recently, when 90% of your senior level history class maintained over an hour and a half that nuclear weapons were the greatest invention of the 20th century or fume at the very notion of America using their international weight to economically subjugate 3rd world countries in the name of 'progress'? There are only so many times I can raise my hand and try to explain how these ideas are wrong, and only so many times I can be shut down with idiotic gloss-overs about the US' might and benevolence and about how saying something 'true' isn't racist. When that kid in Sociology said the swimming remark, not one of the other kids in my class (including the black ones) or my professor said a WORD and my indignation was quickly traded in for a new subject of discussion. I can't be the only one who thinks this shit is stupid, seriously. I'm exasperated.

I'm just going to keep spouting off about proxy wars and loan-based neocolonial economic slavery, even though not one of these COLLEGE SENIORS WILL PROBABLY EVER FACE UP TO THE UGLY PARTS OF OUR COUNTRY OR THE WORLD

guhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

she was only a whisky maker, but he loved her still

waaahhhh spring break is effectively over :[