School of Americas

This deserves a second post.

This past weekend (Thursday-Monday) I went on a trip to Ft. Benning, Georgia to go to protest the School of Americas. It was probably one of the coolest experiences of my life. For those of you who don't know, the School of Americas is a military combat training facility to train the latin american military. (www.soaw.org is a helpful website) The school trains Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics, and thousands of civilians, union leaders, religious workers and students in Latin America have been murdered, tortured, raped and assassinated by soldiers trained at the school. I went to the protest with a bus from CSB/SJU.

Music and dancing was a huge part of the protest. On Sunday there was a funeral procession for the people who have been killed. Every one of the 22,000 people at the protest held a white cross with the name of a person killed by the soldiers, and people on stage sang the names of just some of the people killed more recently. After each name (and sometimes age), the thousands of people in the crowd sang, "Presente" It was incredibly moving to hear the names. "Eugina Claros seventeen years old" and "Eduardo Alvarez, 76 years old" and "unnamed child of Domingo Parez, two days old." After the procession a parade of drummers and puppetismos came and everyone danced to celebrate life.
Another moving experience was on Sunday morning when people came and gave facts and testimonies about killings going on, and after each testimony the crowd sang, "No mas! no more! we must stop this dirty war, companeros companeros, we cry out, no mas no more!"
Most of Saturday was simply singing and dancing, but there were also speakers who gave first hand testimonies. Many people had witnessed their families being killed or raped or both. a lot of the songs were very folky, and quite a few were in spanish.

Here are a few pictures from the whole thing, if you'd like to see more go on my facebook (this is Christina Newman by the way) and I have an album called SOA watch.




some of the music going on at the SOA (a lot of old ex-hippies sang at their own booths or in front of trailers)



during the funeral procession everyone walked toward the fence of the SOA and hung their crosses on. This is at the very beginning, but after 22,000 crosses, you can imagine what the fence looked like- the entire thing was so covered in crosses you couldn't see the fence hardly.



dancing! some of the people I went with from CSB/SJU (and my friend Cass from here)



During the funeral procession, everyone raising their crosses and singing "Presente"


The first day during the Puppetismas, people singing "Viva! Life! Viva! Life!"

month late blog summary. ooooops.

Somehow I thought my blog discussion was at the end of November, but it turns out I missed it...oops. I'm really sorry about my lack of blogging in general. :( I'm not at all used to doing blogging like this and it never occurs to me just to go write a post unless it's an assignment...and unfortunately I missed the one big assignment I had. I went back and looked at all the blogs between November 7th and the 13th and there was only one, by Jweb. Apparently more people than just myself are having troubles blogging regularly. I'm not sure what to sum up so since I missed so much, I'll sum up the 14th-present.

Many people blogged on the gospel music list, several saying it was easy listening and others saying it was hard. One person mentioned that they expected the gospel music to be uplifting, but quite contrary it was rather depressing and dismal. People commented mostly on how the songs were sung (many a capella, large choirs, cool rhythms, etc.) Several people mentioned the sermons. Liz said that the preacher was passionate and broke into song at times which sounded like a positive remark, while others seemed to think that his style was annoying and hard to listen to. in another blog, Liz asked the question does he really feel passionate about what he's preaching or is he just doing that to get audience approval? Good question I thought. Overall, people seemed to like the gospel listenings.
Little Red Rabbit observed that most people don't blog much at all (including me). I think a blog is a sort of hard way to do a class...it's natural for some people to blog and not for others.
Stephanie finally got the folkways chapter 4 to work, Go Stephanie!
Kelsey said she went to swing club (she did, I was there!) with Dan and she enjoyed it. I'm glad she went, and I hope more people go...except now it's kind of late to still learn for the Jamboree. Still, I think everyone should check it out.
Kat also mentioned seeing the Decemberists in concert and going to the movie The Fountain, and someone else mentioned going to see the RHCP. cool beans.

Since I haven't blogged much on my own I'll do a little more than just the summary.
I've felt sort of frustrated with the jamboree. I feel like I have responsibility since only mary beth and I know how to swing dance, and yet I don't have any more power than anyone else in the class. I feel expected to teach everyone how to dance, but I'm not really in charge of the class. I didn't thinmk we had really talked about swing dancing for the jamboree except that everyone liked my presentation with mary beth at the last minute so suddenly we were doing swing dancing instead of a movie. I will be glad to have the jamboree over with.

Sorry again that this is so late in coming...have a good day, all