Volume iv, #2

September is one of my favorite months here in Progreso. The days are hot, but not overwhelmingly so, and almost every afternoon a storm blows the coast and leaves the evenings cool and clear and the nights perfect for serious sleeping. As well as washing all the flora so that the colors sparkle in the next day's sunlight.

September is also the month of numerous holidays and celebrations. Next week is the feria of Progreso, a week of civic celebrations, all kinds of sports competitions, dancing in the streets, and what's known locally as the "chiviadas": row after row of neon gambling booths set up to pander to that last hope of the desperate: "Maybe this time." Graham Greene was wrong when he wrote that "it is astonishing how much money can be made out of the poorest of the poor with a little ingenuity." It doesn't take much ingenuity.

Today, the 15th of September, is Independence Day throughout Central América; a national holiday, of course, celebrated principally by parades of all the school kids marching down the main street of town. (They've been continually practicing marching for weeks: it seems to be the one thing that the school system teaches effectively). This year, as the helicopters hover overhead and the troop convoys rumble through town, Independence Day leaves a strange aftertaste in the mouth. Arturo Rivera y Damas, the Archbishop of San Salvador, enunciated it this way in his homily last Sunday (as it was quoted in France Presse):

It is nonsense to speak of independence when our people suffer an economics, political, and military dependence of foreign powers... Once can't speak of liberty when what we see around us is climate of fear brought on by repression, destruction, and pillage.

Of course the powers-that-be pay even less attention to Rivera y Damas than they do to Pope John Paul II.

Next week the town fair, today Independence Day, last week the International Day of the Child: an observance to which our median age of 14 lends a special poignancy. One of the San Pedro Sula newspaper published that day a "Letter to a Honduran Child" that seemed to me to deserve wider coverage -- at least as much as, say, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus." My rough translation:

"Your hunger begins in the womb of a malnourished mother and your thirst for justice with the first beat of your embryonic heart.

"That is why when you are born your cry is louder than that of other children, since it already contains your protest and your hope. A deferred hope that someone will guide you to a society without hunger for bread, a society of literacy and justice.

"Today you are born to be retarded in your mental and physical development. In part this is your parent's legacy; but especially because as you grow you will nourish yourself on the milk of a malnourished mother, and later on a diet deficient in meat, vitamins, and minerals.

"It hasn't occurred to anybody to analyze how many varieties of deficiencies there are in your famished mother's milk; but our blind obedience to forging slogans makes us preach that it's the best thing for you. Later, while you are growing, you'll discover that there are heartless men who will even rob you of the milk that the people of other nations have donated to you. Today, this being your day, drink champagne in your name.

"And thus you will go piling up physical and mental deficits like indelible tracks stamped on your mind and body, to which will be added the illiteracy which affects you and thirty of every hundred Honduran children who will never see a schoolroom.

"But be patient, for when you are an adult you'll be good raw material for a demagogic government to use in an adult literacy campaign. No matter that to pay for it we'll have to beg more foreign loans, augmenting still more an external debt that we cannot pay.

"If someone offers you a job before you turn l6, you had best take it to complement the wages of hunger of your parents. Rest assured that the State, your erstwhile protector, has now legalized your exploitation in the Work Code. Grow up in peace, in the knowledge that when you are grown no one will prohibit you from voting; and with your illiterate vote you'll be able to elect those same ones who today are robbing you of your milk and of your education, so that they can keep manipulating you and selling themselves to those who oppress you and your parents.

"If you have the good luck to survive this first year of your life, rejoice: it means that you weren't one of the forty Honduran children who die every day of hunger and intestinal disorders. Your strength will be tested every year of your life as you drink the contaminated waters of your rivers and streams, and as you walk barefoot to get to where there awaits you an empty pot, while the health officials preach to your mother that she should wash her hands before eating.

"Survive, so that when you get fed up with your lot in life you can protest and become the victim of the 'preventive reactions' that your oppressors unleash against those who subvert the order of this unjust but democratic system. So democratic that even an illiterate can vote for his oppressors.

"Survive, because perhaps you'll manage to see someday a new Morazán or a new Bolívar born of a Honduran mother -- equally malnourished as yours, but who will have given to the Privileged One the greatest of inheritances: dignity and greatness of spirit. Two ingredients which are sadly lacking in our present leaders.

"I hear a louder cry. Are you the long-awaited child-redeemer? Maybe you've just been born on this day consecrated to the children, and maybe you're announcing that you are ready to take up the task of liberating your people and your country.

"I hope to meet you some day, and to see you drive the pharisees out of the temple."

--Ramón Custodio López
Tiempo, 9-ix-83, p.6.

(Dr. Custodio is the president of the Human Rights Commission).

For me that piece vibrates with resonances of Yeats' "Second Coming":

...Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned....

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand....

Somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouch toward Bethlehem to be born?

I leave it to you to discover the source of those resonances in my subconscious. Probably it's the fact that I know absolutely nothing about Yeats.

September also sees a new show on the boards at teatro la fragua; or more precisely, a new mounting of one of my old favorites, the Just So Stories. I was first associated with this show in Chicago in the summer of '76, when I served as assistant and stage manager to Joseph Slowik, who created it for the Goodman Children's Theatre. I fell in love with the show, and it was high on my list of shows to try as soon as possible when we started the teatro. Based on "How the First Letter was Written" from the delightful Kipling collection, the thematic of the importance of learning to read and write seemed a natural in this context. And I have a special affinity for Kipling (believe it or not): a cheap two-volume set of The Jungle Books is the first possession I remember treasuring. I eagerly awaited the day I could read them for myself without the necessity of adult intervention between me and Mowgli and Rikki-tikki-tavi, who not only cast their spell on me: they became an integral part of me.

So I tried to mount the show in teatro la fragua's first year, 1979. That attempt was one of the great learning experiences of my life. (In the course of various "learning experiences", I have discovered that "learning experience" is almost invariably a euphemism for "flop". In spite of that, I prefer to remain with Newspeak.) I remember that the whole time we were rehearsing and performing the show, there was a refrain that spewed itself out automatically, like this month's top-40 hit, every time the next of the continuing series of disasters struck: "When I'm 80 years old and sit down to write my memoirs, I'm sure that this one production is going to occupy at least half the book." I was very naive back then. Selective memory has since swept away most of the gruesome details, although the culminating disaster remains clearly imprinted: a rain that washed away all trace of bridges along the North Coast, and that left us stranded in the mud in Olanchito for three weeks. As part of the learning experience, I learned what "the rainy season" means.

By some miracle we did get a fairly good production of the show up. The trouble was that, aside from the plagues of Egypt that struck us at every turn, I didn't yet understand how to get show and audience together in the same place at the same time. So the centre could not hold and the whole thing fell apart.

In spite of everything, there were moments during the learning experience when we managed to skirt the disasters and actually present the show to a real audience of real kids. And their reactions confirmed me original instincts about the appropriateness of the Just So Stories for our audience. It stayed high on my list of projects to try again whenever the necessary forces become available.

The forces became available, and I succumbed to the vanity of putting a little personal "Note from the Director" (For Adults Only) in the program:

The work is small, like the children to whom it is directed. But it has brilliance that is capable of lighting up the dark recesses of our hearts and of awakening the child hidden in each of us -- and of awakening the human values of that child, small and simple values that have gotten lost in the confused mass of adult preoccupations.

We dedicate this production, then, to that child, with the hope that the work might foment the spirit of exploration, of invention of creativity -- in our children and in ourselves.

We're discovering these days that there was a miscalculation in my original instincts about the appropriateness of the Just So Stories; it is proving to be as popular with adults as with children.

Peace,

Jack Warner sj

P.S.: I found a mouldy old set of the complete works of Dickens around here a few months ago, and I've been re-discovering that writer whom it was so fashionable to denigrate in the days he was being force-fed to us in English classes. One quote (from The Old Curiosity Shop) called my attention the other day:

Besides, the children of the poor know but few pleasures. Even the cheap delights of childhood must be bought and paid for.

Now pick up that return envelope that you threw in the trash, write out a check payable to "Jesuit Mission Bureau, Inc.", put the check in the envelope and the envelope in the mailbox, and help us to buy and pay for a few of the cheap delights of childhood. If your dog has already chewed up the envelope, pull out one of your own and address it to:

Jesuit Mission Bureau, Inc.
4511 West Pine Blvd.
St. Louis, MO 63108

In this case the cheap delights of childhood are tax-deductible.