I am not really interested in debating the similarities and
differences between early Nazi Germany and Trump’s America. I am only desperately interested in defeating
him, to which end I shall continue to do the tiny insignificant things that I
am able to do. Which brings me to today’s
Friday List. At this moment only three
people have reported in. I will hold the
list open until late this afternoon in hopes of hearing from more of you. This is hard, folks, and what is more to the
point, it is boring, but it is actually the way we change things, so buckle up
and knuckle down and do something. And then tell me about it.
Had surgery this week, so can't say I did a lot, but did write a grant application to try to get some money to local asylum-seekers. The problem here is particularly thorny. The preponderance of them are from the same indigenous tribe in Guatemala and speak neither Spanish nor English.
ReplyDeleteTom Cathcart,
ReplyDeleteI hope that you're recovering from your surgery without problems and that whatever health problem that you have or had is not serious.
Tom Cathcart, a dialect of Mayan? My wife (a midwife) used to spell the doctor at a clinic in the Lake Atitlan area, and while her Spanish was very good, her Mayan was non existent. To a quick recovery...
ReplyDeletes wallerstein and Christopher Mulvaney,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the good wishes. My operation was just an umbilical hernia repair, same day, so not really a very big deal.
These Guatemalan folks speak K'iche', which Google tells me is indeed a Mayan language. It also tells me there are 22 Mayan languages! When I was in Nicaragua years ago, we went to a resettlement village that had been created for people coming back from a temporary village in Mexico that they had created after having fled the contras. They told us that there were three Mayan groups in their village, who spoke three different Mayan languages. Two of them could sort of understand each other. The third was out in left field. So, they all learned Spanish in Mexico so they could communicate with each other!
Oops! CORRECTION: Although there had. prior to the Spanish invasion, been Mayan tribes in Nicaragua, they have since become absorbed in the mestizo population. My memory was actually of a story we were told while in Guatemala a few years later. The Mayan groups had fled to Mexico because of the Guatemalan civil war, not the contra war in Nicaragua.
ReplyDelete