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‹ Previous (31/07/2010) MONTH Next (2010-09-29)› ‹ Previous (2010-10-08 - Canada) COUNTRY Next (2011-01-23 - Mexico)› US Lake Andes (see on map) 01/09/2010:
The previous weekend we had lived a fascinating introduction to Indian culture or native American, unfortunately, the next three days we were staying with another Couchsurfing woman who showed us the other side of the coin. Pamela, for some time now, is in a childcare program for abused children or children that come from very dysfunctional families or with alcohol problems. So far she had received at different times up to 100 children, all children of Indian families. The last girl she had taken in foster care was 14 when she received her, with alcohol and drug problems due to regular consumption in her family. Pamela took care of her as her own child, providing love, education and stability until the age of 17, when the girl was ready to enter a program of social and labour in the city Sioux Falls. But, being a minor, the girl needed permission from the social services of the Indian reservation, and they decided to return her to the reserve for they facilitate the social integration program and labour also. Having cared of her for the last three years of hes life, Pamela complained of not being offered the best future, but social services reservation replied that she was not of their race or tribe and that she had to go back with them. Pamela explained that this outcome had happened only two weeks ago, complaining of not being able to contact the girl, who very likely would be forced back into the vicious circle of alcohol and drugs in the Indian reservation. Pamela worked as a prosecutor for the county of Lake Andes, the tenth poorer county (similar to province) in U.S. (Rosebud was the second) because being inside an Indian reservation, reduces significantly the statistics of wealth (27 % of the population lived below the poverty line). As we explained, the Indian reservations are in a jurisdiction and independence similar to the states, capturing their own taxes, drafting laws, conducting their own police, ... However, unlike the states, the operation of Indian reservations in general is a failure, corrupt and nepotistic, and sometimes permissive to drug business, that only the federal police or the FBI´s can investigate. However, the inefficiency is quite circumscribed, because over the years many Indians had sold land to the whites, being outside the jurisdiction of the reserve, although the natives are now pushing to expand the boundaries to their original boundaries , shaking with fear to affected landowners. The next day we had the opportunity to attend as spectators to the court or county court where Pamela worked as a prosecutor. We were surprised that all defendants referred to this morning were native, all of them having committed a fault outside the reserve, generally related to problems of alcohol, fighting, noncompliance penalties, ... After Pamela and her co worker told us that in general, 85 or 90% of the defendants in the lawsuits are Native Americans, although they only constitute less than 50% of the population of the county. Having heard the personal story of Pamela, I thought that poverty could not be the sole cause of high levels of crime, and perhaps the culture and education also affected. Pamela did not have a life any easier because at age 16 she became pregnant and was forced to leave school and start working. For many years she worked in trucking, but finally, at age 40 decided to go back to school and graduated as a lawyer. Surely she had a strength of will that was lacking to the accused to the court that morning. On the positive side, listening to the judge, I thought the American justice was quite flexible and was targeted to punish in order to avoid repeating the offense. The judge always significantly reduced the penalty much to the accused and insisted that if he committed a similar failure for a period of time the reduction of sentence will terminate automatically. They tried to make the defendant responsible for his behaviour by imposing clear limits to his future actions and the consequences of a transfer. Thus, in many cases, the court only imposed a fine, which the defendants had to commit to pay before a certain day. If they could not pay the fines, the defendant had to pay the jail (at a rate of $ 60 per day of detention) or community work (at a rate of $ 8 per hour). I asked Pamela if she considered just such a system in which the poor were more objective to the possibilities of going to jail for the same failure and she said no, but that justice on the other hand ensured that everyone pays the fines imposed. The next day, in addition to continuing the work writing the book of Africa, i helped Pamela to mow the lawn of the yard (a very typical activity among Americans) and had a good time drifting with a quad, we also had time to talk about her work. I questioned if she favoured the death penalty, which was legal in South Dakota, and very sure she said yes. Said that it should be applied even more, because for a family, for example, whose child has been tortured and killed, it is insufficient to see the murderer behind bars for life. I tried to refute her view with a typical argument: that in the past there had been sentenced to death many accused who subsequently had DNA testing proved they were innocent, but Pamela said that this argument favoured the application of the death penalty because now the technology is so advanced that it is virtually impossible to convict a defendant in error.
Again I asked the same question to Tobi, our next host in Mankato, and he responded that he disagreed with the death penalty (was not lawful Minnesota) and added that he would be unable to take responsibility to send someone in electric chair thinking about his possible innocence. He said he would have nightmares, but also believed that few people could take his job as professor of anatomy, which had to kill and dissect several turtles and frogs per semester so that students know the correct functioning of different organs of the body and may become in the future a few good nurses. When we got home, his two daughters had just arrived, who were in shared custody with his ex-wife, which is quite typical in the U.S., where the children of separated couples spend exactly the same time with each parent. We spent two good days with them, but I stayed most of the time locked in the library and at home to continue writing the book of Africa. Alexandra left a bit more than I, taking advantage to buy a good jacket and some blankets for the cold of autumn in a thrift store, fairly typical in the U.S., which receive the products as gifts to allocate its profits to social causes or charities. Anyway, Toby and explained that in Mankato, there was practically no tourist, although the city was famous for having carried out the largest mass execution in U.S. history, posting 38 Dakota Indians, for their participation in Dakota war. Initially, the military court had sentenced to death the 303 Indians, while 265 were pardoned by President Lincoln, earning many enemies in the region. Dakota War was caused by the failure of the United States to provide food and resources to the Dakota reservations, which, blinded by hunger decided to expel the white settlers of the region, killing between 400 and 800. In the months that followed, the Dakota lost their war with the United States Army, after the mass execution, he sent the Indians of Dakota to other states cancelling their reservations in Minnesota. Toby´s daughters told me they were going to a Catholic school which, as I described-was much more backward than in Europe, with daily religion class 5-10 prayers every day. Against this background, I dared not ask about religion until the end of our stay, after discovering that Toby was very open person. Then he and his girlfriend who was visiting, he explained that they belonged to the Unitarian Universalist Church, of which I had heard. By caring for their beliefs, he explained that the Unitarian Universalist church has no creed or dogma, is open to any faith, including atheists, and just try to think with the experience, conscience and reason to improve our relationship with society with good ethical behavior for a better humanity. Both the church was open, even accepting gays and lesbians, while formalizing a church wedding if they wished. I should have been so concerned when asked about his church that he invited me to go with them to the office on Sunday morning, and naturally I accepted, despite the fears of Alexandra for me to become the member of a new religion. I was surprised that the aesthetics of the church to be Christian, with wooden benches, an altar with a candle burning on top, accompanied by piano songs with a musicality to the same spiritual songs ... I found it normal, when, after I explained that most of the attendees came from a Lutheran or Catholic education, the two major religions in the state of Minnesota. Anyway, did not mention God, Jesus, scripture, or salvation, and instead just talked about the spirit, the soul (two words that I too had more than enough), peace, hope, justice and love. I found it interesting that for a while open the microphone to any of the thirty or so attendees would like to share your jewelry and dreams or their concerns or sadness, to create a greater sense of community. I got the feeling that the Unitarian Universalist Church had simply tried to remove the evil of other churches: dogma and oppression, to leave the rest as well. Perhaps the explanation I gave a woman, when told that if you do not belong to a church in the United States are in danger of being marginalized and excluded from society. On the other hand, perhaps the Unitarian Universalist church was a comfort to all those who felt disappointed in their original churches, but remember how they felt at ease during services or belonging to a community. At the end of the office and while having a coffee, some of them commented that in Europe (or at least in Spain) Unitarian Universalist Church was unlikely to succeed, because the church has much less strength than in the United States and the people who feel disillusioned usually forever dislike churches, becoming atheists or looking for spirituality in Eastern religions.
Our next destination was Cuyahoga Falls, near Cleveland, where there was a friend of ours. We had a choice to get going under Lake Michigan and Chicago or travelling across northern Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. Despite being a longer route, I managed to convince Alexandra to choose the second option, to visit some parks and around big cities in the U.S. which had left us quite indifferent. Nevertheless, on Sunday afternoon we had to cross the great city of Minneapolis before starting off small roads near Lake Superior. In those small roads again we found the large motor homes, big as a bus, usually dragging a small car or SUV behind . In the United States they can drive them with a normal car license. Although we had seen many in the West Coast, we are still surprised these large and expensive houses that are used by retired couples, from one side to another of the United States. On Monday morning we just get to the natural park of the Apostles Islands, where I made a nice walk through the woods near the shore of the lake to a vertical cave in the rock created by the waves of the lake. I was lucky it did not rain, because little later it started to rain and it continued all day Tuesday. We are not too used to rain during our trip, so we had to rule out visits to some abandoned copper mines, and one day we decided to lock ourselves into a library and then a McDonalds every hour connected to the Internet. However, on Wednesday we had a bit more luck and we did a short walk through the Natural Park of Pictured Rocks. We visited a small waterfall in a river of brown or red tint and white frothy attribute to pollution, but then we read it was due to the large amount of metals in the water. After a beach walk near some large cliffs carved by the force of water, which was especially virulent this morning. Unfortunately, the rain returned to wreck our plans and we had to return to the road much sooner than we thought. This allowed us to visit the morning of Thursday the stunning natural park dunes of sleeping bear (Sleeping Bear Dunes NP), and then drive nine hours to arrive completely exhausted in Cuyahoga Falls, where we were expect by our friends, Amanda and Mark.
We really relaxed at the house Amanda and Mark, maybe too much, because we became almost lethargic, as if life had not passed during these two weeks. We needed a vacation (especially Alexandra) and to stop a few days doing nothing much, just as we did it sometime before. But our motives are not always understood and was not the first time someone asked me intrigued by email: ´How can you make the holiday vacation?´, ´How come you are travelling stressed?´. First, the traveller does not travel for vacation, at least not in my case. My desire is to discover and communicate through photography and text to keep myself busy most of the day, in addition to countless hours of driving. For months, I have no time to read a book, something quite usual during the holidays, as the minimum that I have some hours stopped the attempt to take advantage of writing the book of Africa. So I would not say that travel stress, but I try to do it with such passion that occasionally ends up consuming the energies and must rest for a few hours, and sometimes a few days to recover to continue with the same enthusiasm as at first. Anyway, despite being a large part of the hours of the day doing nothing (basically looking series in the case of Alexandra and playing games over the Internet in my case), also we had the opportunity to have interesting conversations with Amanda, Mark and other friends of theirs. It was strange to go with Amanda to a big party to raise funds for an organization offering free legal advice to people in need. Amanda was invited to work for another organization that provides assistance and protection to victims of domestic violence or gender, and we were also invited. The dinner was great, sharing room with great personalities of the society of Cleveland, including the new Supreme Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who made a speech applauded by over 1000 people attending, who had generally paid $ 150 per place . I was surprised by the large amount of resources that move the organization that organized the event, especially considering that only acted in the county of Cleveland. But then I thought that the size of the organization was equivalent to the problem, because as Amanda explained, Cleveland is the worst U.S. city to live (according to Forbes magazine), after analyzing quality of life, work, social welfare, poverty , corruption, education, violence, ... Thus, Cleveland was called ´the Mistake by the Lake´ (the mistake by the lake). Amanda´s organization also worked exclusively in the Cleveland spot, working with hundreds of clients each year, of which she only attended Latinas. Given the large number of illegals in the U.S., Amanda explained an interesting initiative of the American government which in turn to denounce the perpetrators, victims without papers were nationalized. We also went to dinner several times with friends of Amanda and Mark, knowing one of these times a man I found fascinating. As I was interested in his personal history, I will describe Miguel as a middle-class man with origins in El Salvador, that confessed that he had participated in the civil war in his country, struggling with the Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional (FMLN .) Miguel told me some of the cruelties of the dictatorial government of Salvador during the ´80s, as the death squads, which, he says, justified their struggle as a terrorist group. Without telling me, I felt that Michael was involved in the deaths of many political and military leaders because of his social class and easily with important people. Anyway, eventually he was discovered and had to flee the country to avoid the government to capture or kill the FMLN, for he knew too much. During his years of struggle, he told me he had met some ETA terrorists, whom he considered too radical and less arguments to sustain their fight terror, because in the Basque country the injustices that were committed were not the same as in El Salvador. Finally he said that he will facilitate contact with many interesting people in his country where, after the peace accords in 1992, currently governs the FMLN. We reserve for the penultimate day, a visit to the Amish, a religious community present in the Ohio state characterized by its isolation from the modern world, maintaining a lifestyle of centuries ago. However, the reality that we faced was very different than expected and often frustrating. On the one hand, the town where the Amish live in theory was completely corrupted by tourism, full of Amish food stores, hotels and restaurants. On the other hand, we immediately realized that the Amish, although the information we had, did not live a life so outdated and are surrounded by relatively modern technology. We decided to pay an entrance fee to visit an Amish home, which did not seem too different from a house in the 60s or 70s, with the difference that instead of electrical installation, light operated with natural gas. I asked the woman who attended the house, wearing a traditional simple dress , why could not the Amish use electricity and the Bible told us that they were forced to live with humility. She added that without electricity there is not the temptation to have television, a device that breaks up families, for example by preventing parents and children to eat together at the table. In any case I did not understand that they could not use electricity, or indeed they could only drive cars, but could use fuel-burning equipment such as tractors and sawmills. And less I understood when I read in the same house that the Amish bishops allow the use of solar panels to have electric light at night, much cheaper than the light gas. At the end I thought the Amish did not wish to deny the technology, even live like that in ancient times, just wanted to adapt more slowly to technology, so being able to be considered more humble than other mortals. Despite not preserve its origins, this way of life could even be considered for some nostalgic romantic but practical, these regulations and dogmas just bring more problems than advantages. I was surprised to read that the Amish children can only study in primary school through eighth grade, because they feel that the knowledge of high school and college are sterile to their way of life. I asked the woman of the house why an Amish man or woman could not be doctors, who visit when they get sick, or engineers who have designed their tractors, but the woman told me that they can not be because if they were should use electricity, which is forbidden in their culture. So in theory the Amish could only work in the field, making furniture and wooden houses and the tourism sector, the latter an activity that kept them connected to the outside world and under the influence of people-like me-intrusive to were questioning their faith and standards. Given all these inconsistencies keeping their backward society in the present, I was not surprised to read that ´according to their data, 20% of youth are leaving the Christian sect, although I swear that there are many more. Inevitably, this way of life is doomed to disappear, and eventually may be a pity, because the Amish are also known for their rejection of violence, for example by refusing to serve in the army, a quality too often absent today. Niagara Falls (see on map) 24/09/2010:
It has been a little over 3 months, since we arrived at LAX, and an immigration police asked us what were our plans in the United States. We explained that we had been four years travelling and that we intend to travel 2 years in North America, central and south, including eight months in the U.S.. Then, the immigration police warned us that we need to spend a month in Canada because if not, to re-enter the United States they would not give us six months and our visa to visit the United States will be only the remaining time of the original six-month visa. Relying on this information, we planned our stay in Canada for a month, but just across the border in Niagara Falls, we asked a Canadian immigration police if the information that we had was correct. Surprisingly, the police told us no, that re-enter the United States would still have the same visa, and in theory would have to leave the country on 9 December. Shocked by this new information, we asked the police if we could return to the U.S. to ask about this problem, since the entry into Canada had no American immigration control. To do this, we had to queue at immigration offices and other Canadian immigration offices in the United States, which angered Alexandra, who accused me two or three times of getting us into trouble. Finally, we were attended by an immigration police officer in the United States, who confirmed the information we received in Canada, that our visa was for six months and to enjoy six months, we had to go back one month to Europe, because Canada did not count as a third country. So we began to ask for possible solutions, because for us it was hard to get back to Europe or Mexico in two months and a half, until the police came to talk to his boss and came back with new information: ´`The law says you have to go back to Europe for 6 months visa. But if you are you a month in Canada and when back to the United States you prove that your intention is not to stay forever in the country and that you plan to go to Mexico, the immigration police also has the option to give you 6 months visa, but depends entirely on the police. ´` Happy with this more detailed information, we returned to Canada with the intention of spending a month in the hope of returning to the United States and that hopefully we met a nice enough immigration police who we could convince that we were really making a journey of 6 years worldwide. We crossed the border there in Niagara Falls, which we had already been amazed to observe from the United States. But from Canada, the falls were even more spectacular as we looked ahead as rushing waters of Niagara River rushing along nearly 700 meters down a cliff 50 meters high shaped like a horseshoe. It was a formidable sight, even if not the best waterfalls in the world, contrary to some opinions heard, they were surpassed in height, width and flow rate (during the rainy season) by the Victoria Falls, between Zambia and Zimbabwe. In particular, we enjoyed more of the Niagara Falls, because we had visited Victoria during the dry season, but expect much more ecstatic after a year when we had planned a visit to the Iguazu Falls, Brazil and Argentina, in theory even more impressive from the previous two.
In Toronto we enjoyed an unforgettable entertainment, comparable to the one I had received years ago in Ukraine and Russia, and perhaps not surprisingly, since the family we stayed came from Poland, fleeing their country under communism. Ewa, the mother of the family, treated us like we were more than her children, inviting us to dinner and breakfast every day (except for one night when Alexandra cooked), suggesting remote and interesting places to visit in Canada and Costa Rica , leaving a card for free entry into the national parks of Canada, giving us food before leaving ... In exchange for the overwhelming hospitality we could only show pictures of the trip, telling them funny stories and frightening, and commit to host them at our house when we returned to Catalonia. The next day arrived, Sunday, we visited Toronto. We were lucky that Ewa and Christian,her husband, called some friends in the center of town and could park for free in his apartment and save 10 or $ 15 parking. We started walking around the university, where he had a book fair and had a chance to relax listening to a concert of Mexican music and Cameroonian. Then we trekked up to the high Canadian National Tower, the 553m without finding much of interest along the way: many office buildings and deserted streets, because it was Sunday and it was cold. Yet we found one thing that people in Canada were less reluctant to live in apartment blocks, as in Europe, and secondly, unlike the United States also had many more buildings of stone and brick. Convincing ourselves that Toronto was very unattractive, the following days were spent relaxing in the family home, working and talking to Christian, who was a truck driver and then had no job, and his daughter Zoshia. Both, showed a critical attitude toward the U.S., their policies and wars and also to an important part of society that wants to have the right to own arms, do not want universal health care system and accept that students pay up three times more than in universities in Canada. They also criticized the attitude of their citizens, who did not understand that they wanted the independence of Quebec. Without modifying its critical tone, Christian agreed to be interviewed for the project ´`taking the pulse of the world, believing that the main problem of world and Canada was that politicians were stupid, populist policies were only used to be re-elected, a difficult problem solution because of tyranny or kingdoms work less, while education would improve the situation. On a personal level Christian feels happy, but he would be more happy if he did not work, but the secret of happiness is not to worry about money. |
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