WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2014
Nicaragua, ALBA, and Climate Change: The Promise of a Good Example
Paul Baker’s Fall USA Tour -- November 5-25, 2014
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For almost forty years UK-born musician/organizer Paul Baker and his Nicaraguan wife Fátima Hernández have worked pro bono with the Chilean, Salvadoran and Nicaraguan peoples, as Paul puts it, "Surviving by skin of teeth and seat of pants. Quite a ride, but it's exciting (if tough on 'trousers'!), sharing life with people who drop into bed not knowing if there'll be food for tomorrow, yet always greeting you next day smiling, their children washed, pressed and ready for school. Fátima herself is a barrio girl, a guerrillera at 13 who fought the Somoza dictatorship to bring Nicaragua justice. She's worked on in barrio health and education ever since, and now primarily cares for severely burned children. It's wonderful to work with her/her compañer@s. Thanks to them/their FSLN government, after years of neo-liberal regimes killing land reform, destroying health and education, Nicaragua is the 'threat of a good example' once again."
Contact Paul to set up presentations here: Paulbaker2004@yahoo.com.
This extraordinary country should be paradise, of course. Like so much of the made-poor 'Third World', it has tremendous reserves of genuine wealth of all kinds: water, forests, biodiversity, sources for renewable energy, living indigenous cultures, wonderful coffee and other superb crops. Even gold. However historically and still today, the Me-First World, abetted by those same neo-liberalist forces, takes most of these magnificent resources to sustain its own ultimately unsustainable 'developed' way of life, so imposing poverty on Nicaragua. And today, to add disaster to injury, as the North's consumerist chickens come hobbling home to catastrophic roost, this valiant country, in the very cross-hairs of the global warming their droppings(!) have created, is forced to pay twice over.
Hear Paul sing:
'Echoes of Silence': http://echoespaul.wix.com/
Paul's song re Víctor Jara conceived in Victor's house, recorded Fdn Víctor Santiago:https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Paul playing the 'green guitar' he fashioned from a desk drawer, table leg & toilet seat while a supposedly silent Trappist monk: https://myspace.com/
Yet far from seeking revenge, today's Nicaragua is the promise of a good example, building a new world order with ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of our America, joining El Salvador, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and others to build a new world order rooted in fair trade, solidarity, gender/racial balance, and care for the Earth. Like most of us, Fátima and Paul plan to die with their boots on; plus a vital part of Paul's specific work is to challenge the corporate media's virtual embargo on reporting these wonderful Latin American initiatives. So he (alone, alas) is in the US Nov 5-25 to help break that embargo/raise funds (to shine those boots, support projects http://echoespaul.wix.com/