not the motorcycle diaries

This is, on the whole, an enormously humbling experience. I am reluctantly, ruefully reliant on others for the basics of life. It’s a real exercise in letting go of the need to control - to know what’s going on all the time and respond exactly as one might like. My hosts continue to be a font of generosity, and today I am sitting with one of them in the CPT office as I write this blog and he prepares some material for the up-coming national referendum on disarmament. A referendum on disarmament - actually asking citizens how they think and feel about national complicity in the arms race. Now there’s an idea! This morning’s newspapers also yielded two particularly exciting things: firstly, an anthropology section and secondly, what appears to be a Porto Alegrensen Mystic Medusa. The corruption scandal in the PT (Partito Trabalhisto, or Workers Party) seems to grow larger by the day - photos of Lula show him looking very drawn, and there seems to be a hovering possibilty of impeachment, which I expect would bring great de-stabilisation and probably some disillusionment in the left as well (although it is clear that many on the left think Lula is a crook and a sellout….I keep thinking of the ANC in South Africa, it seems the PT has a similar challenge).
I met some gorgeous, tough children in the town square on Saturday. One of them drew me a picture as she sat in my lap, after asking me if I wanted to buy some hair clips for 1 real. I see kids selling crap on the streets from morning to night, I never see anyone buy it, and they exhibit this strange combination of innocence and toughness, which I know is a cliché, but I guess I can see where the cliché comes from in these kids. It’s not hard to see where the MST finds its popular base - I for one would prefer a self-sufficient life on an *assentimento* with home-grown schooling and health care to having to scrounge for every little thing on smoggy, busy city streets.
I’ve started to process things a bit in terms of my research, though I think it will be some time before my head is clear enough to focus on this properly. My hospital experience, for example, was pretty eye-opening. I’ve been thinking, sure everything is old and dilapidated and kind of unhygienic … but short of a bit more maintenance and about 50 more staff it’s, as I said, a very functional place. I suspect that part of the problem of ‘development’ as a discourse is a Western obsession with cleanliness and hygiene as part of the priveleging of privacy, separateness and individualism. No doubt that this obsession contributes to the racism, clientelism and so on that is associated with the so-called ‘first/third world relationship’ - as well as the hard material inequality itself, i.e. the amount that the West spends on ‘hygiene’ and ’security’ (which comes back to the disarmament question, I suppose). So my question remains, and is being informed by new perspectives all the time - what is the shape of an ethical solidarity? how do global justice movement activists reproduce the hegemonic inequalities of the first/third world relationship? Is there enough caffeine in the world to make my brain function clearly in the midst of all this newness and confrontation? And so on!