Life in Central America

Marañon

Is this wierd, or what? It's the only fruit where the seed is external to the rest of the fruit (on the left). It tastes alright tho.

Several people have told me it's a cashew.

Power, greed, and murder

These are the necessities of human existence. Food, clothing and shelter are nice too, but they are not really the emotional necessities.

If you don’t believe me, just turn on the TV. This is what you will see, with maybe some stupidity and sex thrown in for spice. We never tire of it.

I should add a disclaimer here. This list of priorities has not been true for all human cultures. But it is also true that most human cultures have been wiped out. This is a fact we should not ignore.

What I am talking about here is the universal modern culture, which has one main reason for its success: it has eliminated everybody else. In this culture, the need for murder is built into our genes. This urge is not evenly distributed among various individuals, but as a social trait it is always present, and America is no exception.

However, I am not a fatalist, even if I do sound like it. I don’t believe we have to follow our destructive instincts. But I do believe we have to be aware of them. Denying our murderous instincts will only make them stronger.

Our neighbors won’t come right out and say “We need another war, don’t we?” Instead they will say, “You do support our troops, don’t you?”

We need war, and we are going to get it no matter what (Iraq, for example). And each war makes us more warlike. We don’t know the exact shape of the curve we are on, but it’s certainly not pretty.

The toilet paper of love

This is the perfect example of culture clash. Ticos don't see anything too strange here, even when I make a point of showing it to them. Can you imagine a brand name like this in the US? Click on the photo if you want to see the details.

Stupid traffic lights

This is the only kind they have down here, and believe me it makes a difference! Ticos spend a lot of time parked at stop lights, with no traffic going in the cross direction. In California, the lights are smarter. Each stop light has a set of sensors associated with it, loops of wires laid in the road surface. And the stop light has a simple computer that works much like a traffic cop would. It senses the local situation and reacts accordingly. Some of these lights are pretty smart - and, as you know, some of them aren’t. The municipalities are always struggling to get them updated. Down here they don’t know the difference. San Jose (CR) is a total mess, and it is not going to get any better.

This reminds me of when I lived in Manhatten in the 60s. The city gave a huge contract to one of the aerospace firms to computerize the traffic lights. It was a complete flop. But the programmers learned something: there is no way to control gridlock on a grand scale. Before this, they assumed computers could solve any kind of problem, especially this kind of problem - but they learned, just as the mathematicians did long ago, that some problems just can’t be solved. A road system will only handle so much traffic, period, no matter how much pressure there is on the drivers, and I think the term gridlock was invented about this time.

But they also discovered that local control worked – or at least it helped. For example, in Orange County they kept track of the traffic load on each segment of a freeway (using TV cameras), and reduced the number of cars allowed to enter the freeway at each intersection. This worked, and I was amazed to see this wasn’t used in Silicon Valley. They let everyone crowd onto the freeways as much as they want, and the result is parking lots as far as you can see.

Of course, there is a simple solution to the traffic problem: growth control. But this will never happen. The illusion of unlimited, painless growth is too dear to our hearts – and to the pocketbooks of real estate developers. And Costa Rica is no different than anywhere else.

Sometimes you wonder how the human race ever got this far.

The US doesn’t have friends or enemies, it only has interests

I read a lot of stuff, and most of it doesn’t affect me me much. But this statement jumped right off of the page. It was one of those things that you know is true immediately, but you can’t quite explain it. But let me try anyway.

The context is this: the La Penca bombing in 1984. You may be asking: so what is La Penca, why should I care about it? I can only answer the first question, and leave the second question up to you.

Back in the 80s the world’s worst enemy (according to the US) was the Sandinistas, and the US went to enormous lengths to eliminate them. Of course, it wasn’t that simple, and all kinds of hanky-panky was going on (including the Iran-Contra affair), which the US has never been eager to disclose.

The situation was complicated, and Edén Pastora was right in the middle of it. Pastora was one one of the original leaders of Sandinstas, who as the charismatic Comandante Cero, led the takeover of Managua’s National Palace during the uprising against Somoza. He later had a falling-out with the Sandanistas, and formed a rebel group to overthrow them.

At the same time, the US was organizing the Contras, which consisted mainly of former Somoza guardsmen. Pastora would have nothing to do with these unsavory types and organized a press conference to make his position clear. The press conference was at La Penca, a remote jungle camp, on the border with Costa Rica. A bomb exploded during the press conference, killing several Tico reporters and injuring many more. Pastora escaped with minor injuries.

It has never been clear what happened, and probably never will be because the US has classified it’s data as secret, and refuses to release it to the Tico courts. But eventually, after 20 years of intense investigation, the overall outline is becoming clear: the US cooperated with the Sandinistas to kill Pastora. The US supplied the technology (the bomb) and the Sandinistas supplied the personnel.

If Pastora had been successful, and turned the Sandinistas into a democratic party, the US would have been in a difficult position. A people’s government in Central American was the last thing it wanted. It had already negotiated the terms of surrender, which allowed that rascal Daniel Ortega to continue in office. Pastora was in the way of both sides, so they decided to get rid of him.

New photos of the new house

The first photo shows the new house from the middle distance. Our house doesn't stand out any more because is is being surrounded by other tiny new houses. Our house the one-story house to right of the yellow two-story house.

The second photo shows the spacing between houses: zero. Our house is on the left and the house being constructed is on the right. Being in intimate contact with all this low-tech construction has been stressful.

My knee has no cartilage

The joints in humans (and in all vertebrates) have cartilage in them. Simpler animals don’t have hard bones; they only have cartilage, which suits them fine. The cartilage in us more advanced species protects the ends of our wonderful hard bones, which would otherwise grind themselves to pieces. Unfortunately, in modern times, where we live much too long, and this cartilage sometimes wears out. This is what happened to my left knee. I was in a lot of pain.

So the surgeon drilled holes into the ends of the bones. Hopefully, this would make a big blood clot in the middle of the knee that would generate new cartilage. There was only one problem: I didn’t know what was going on. The surgeon didn’t debrief me on the results of the operation - and even it he had, he probably couldn’t have explained the situation, because his English is not that good.

So I just assumed everything was ok, because I didn’t have much pain. But two weeks later I went to see my rhumatologist to get my stitches taken out, and to find out what was going on. He was shocked to see I wasn’t using my crutches. I wasn’t supposed to be putting any weight on that knee because this would destroy the new cartilage that was supposed to be forming.

Try being a one-legged animal sometime, it’s not easy. So I am hobbling around on my crutches, trying to keep my left leg off the ground. Fortunately, Javier is very supportive, and takes me anyplace I have to go, such as the Internet. Heavens knows how this will turn out, some people have as many as six knee operations. And they did a double-blind test where half of the patients just got two holes cut in their knee, and the other half got the complete operations. The results, on an average, were the same.

What we really need is some kind of replacement cartilage that could be squirted into the joint. But this is going to be hard to find. It’s easier to replace the whole joint – which is not easy at all, in the case of the knee joint. In the case of the big toe, it is relatively routine, because the joint is so simple, but it’s still not much fun. (I know because I have tried it).

Now, every time I see someone with healthy knee joints, I am envious.

Traffic is a sign of success

I wonder why I never saw this before, it is so obvious. Tico’s look at traffic differently, and that motivated me to look at it like they do. The result surprised me.

If you are stuck in a traffic jam, you can consider yourself fortunate. You are occupying a choice piece of real estate without even paying for it. You are right where a lot of other people want to be. You are a success.

Of course, it is easier to have this detached attitude if you are not in a rush to get anywhere. But Latinos usually aren’t. The most horrible conditions don’t bother them at all. Urban ugliness is just another sign of a successful community, where anything as frivolous as beauty is undesirable. Ugliness is beautiful, because it stands for success.

Mechanical relationships

These are the kind of relationships modern societies excel at. Each person has a well-defined function (or job), and does it well. This is not as bad as it may sound. I have always considered the symphony orchestra to be the forerunner of this type of organization.

Another example is a postal system. In advanced countries, we take this for granted, but such a system is no small matter – a lot of people have to be carefully coordinated, and everyone has to be honest. This never happens in underdeveloped countries. They simply cannot form large-scale mechanical relationships. This is why they are underdeveloped, and will stay that way.

However, they usually have good social relationships. They haven’t forgotten how to be people. They just haven’t learned how to be machines. They don’t know how to be honest in an abstract setting. They can be honest in personal relationships, if they want to be, but put them in a more abstract setting, like a clerk in a post office, and they will automatically steal from the mail envelopes. Why should they be honest with people they will never see or know? To them, this doesn’t make any sense. They have no concept of large-scale abstract organizations, or of impersonal obligations.

In this sense, machines are honest, they do what they are told to do, and nothing else. This makes them reliable. This is what makes affluent cultures work. It is now fashionable to make fun of mechanical people, and indeed it is easy to go too far with this kind of behavior, but its advantages should not be overlooked.

Maria likes fussing over my medicine

My personal physician likes vitamins, and when I last saw him he prescribed a new kind: Sargenor. This is a solution, and it comes in plastic tubes with the ends pinched off. You break off the ends and mix it with a liquid. Maria was very impressed with this.

After a while, I stopped taking my vitamins, even though they seemed to help. I made sure I took my serious medicines, but I forgot about the vitamins. Maria noticed there were no broken vitamin tubes in my wastebasket, and she got on my case. I must take all my medicine, absolutely!

So I gave all my medicines to her, and every morning and every evening we go thru my medicine ritual. This makes her feel important. And Sargenor seems to be good stuff. Maria gets sick every once in a while: she calls it gripe. But Sargenor knocks her right out of it.

My knee operation has given them a new kind of status. Javier (the head of the family) makes a point of taking me each time I go to the Clinica Biblica. They can’t afford to go there themselves, but they like to be seen in such an expensive place.

And it is a place where you meet everyone who has any money (including bums like me who can afford health insurance of about $85 a month.)