Miss Polly Politics...

Hello my Pretties,

Well, it´s May, and that means I´m about a month and 3 weeks away from coming home to the United States of America, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave! I´m ridiculously excited to be coming home even though life is going pretty well for me here. I´m working every day of the week, with 2 schools and a high school, two youth groups, a basketball league, and I´m about to start up computer classes in a week. I´m blessed with work, especially after I spent the rainy season vagando because there wasn´t anything to be done.

SO, things, all in all, haven´t changed much since my last posting. I´m happily working (even have a uniform, and anyone that knows me from childhood know how much I like playing dress-up) and I go to bed every night completely exhausted. Life is good here.

I got online today, and missing hearing about the state of the world, I decided to visit the oh-so-fabulous NY Times online...

I think there is a regulation about making personal political statements on a Peace Corps Volunteer blog, but as it says somewhere above that everything said here is mine, I´m going to go ahead.

1. With the porcine virus running rampant throughout the world, you´d do better to wash your hands and cover your mouth when you sneeze than to give up all pork products under the sun. For the love of Mike, you don´t get the flu from eating barbeque. High temperatures kill viruses, and if you´re cooking pork (which you should always do before eating), you´re not going to get sick that way. But wash your hands! You may not get the porcine flu if you don´t, but you´ll certainly be acting the pig.

2. Job loss? Peace Corps is expanding it´s programs worldwide. Want to spend 2 years helping others, learning to live with the basic necessities of life, learning humility as you try to adjust to a new culture, learn a new language? Give volunteerism a shot. That being said, Peace Corps is not for everyone, so if you don´t think you can hack it, look for something else to do for humanity. PC is not for everyone, but volunteerism is. You don´t have to be in some obscure African village to make a difference in the world. Look around you where you live and act.

3. Raul Castro--we´ve made gestures that signal a thawing of our cold policy towards Cuba. How about a little sign of good faith that you´re going to start working for the Cuban people? Interesting that you´ve called the changes (such as allowing remittances from Cuban-Americans to reach relatives in Cuba, or allowing unlimited travel of Cuban-Americans to visit relatives) in the 50 year US policy toward Cuba "achieving only the minimum," when all you´ve done in your year and a half in office is let Cubans have cell phones and enter Cuban hotels. Start making some real changes! Your people are facing starvation--men and women forced into prostitution and the drug trade while you´re sitting limp in Fidel Castro´s old stolen throne. How about You get up off your ___ and start trying to fix this problem found between our countries. Why do you expect the US to do everything if your goverment is just as capable of reaching out? Once again, these views are mine and not the US government´s or The US Peace Corps´. As a Cuban American with free speech (that´s this amazing idea that people should be allowed to speak their minds without fear of persecution, incarcaration, torture, disappearance, and death--try it out sometime), I would like to say, Stop trying to act superior when your own failure to act is a crime against humanity.

4. North Korea. If you don´t loosen up and bend a bit, there´s nothing to do but break. Try to get along. You´re like a child with a gun. Put the gun down. Grow up.

5. Pope Benedict XVI: stop playing politics and focus on God. And as for the Catholic church, is it common policy for anyone, even poor rural Ecuadorian people that don´t even have money for shoes, to have to pay $10 to have a baby baptized, or is that some kind of corruption? Either way, shouldn´t someone be looking into it? On that note, why is it that there are 20 priest in any given square block in New York, yet people in my town have to wait a year for mass because the one priest can´t be bothered to get around to doing God´s work more than that.

Well, anyway, that´s 5 bits of my opinion, probably worth less than the ink with which they were written... If anyone has a problem with this, feel free to contact me. And probably the next time I get on, I´ll have erased this blog, but still, a humble opinion to read for a week or so...