dear friends,
this blog will not be continued,
instead chapeye is now in three languages:
ukrainian, english and russian.

for those who still remember who's writing :)
welcome there.

update. after travelling all this time, i came back to Kyiv, Ukraine.
a new stage :)

thanks.

haven´t been updating for a while. I´m already in Mexico City. 5 days or something of pure viaje.
a day off with friends and I think will be heading to Juárez...
yesterday was a lucky day. about 700 miles hitchking at once - from San Cristóbal, chiapas, to Mexico City. With three cool guys from Guadalajara.

In Matagalpa where I am right now Ben Linder is buried,
a U.S. internacionalista killed by U.S. sponsored contras.
In the town of San Jose de Bocay where he was killed there's now a neighbourhood called Barrio Ben Linder.
Ha, and tomorrow I go to seaport Corinto which was destroyed, also by the U.S.

As we came to the country to work for a week, the next day after Daniel Ortega was announced president, as soon as we got off the bus one peasant jokingly said to another:
Mira, solo ganó Daniel y ya vienen los cheles
Look, Daniel just won and the whites are already coming.

When snadinistas first came to power there have been a lot of cheles (whites) working in solidarity, and people remember this and expect this to happen again.

and, 2 of recent snaps.

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sorry, i do not post a lot here recently, but there's some more photoes at chapeye (with text in Ukrainian which i can translate in comments on request)

imho,
Bush and Putin deserve the same.
it would be fair.

how many civilians killed in Iraq? (btw)
how many hostages "liberated" from this miserable life in Beslan?

tod@s somos Atenco

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please excuse my Spanglish.

we have been in the mountains about 5 days, in a small village called Amistad ("Friendship"). there´s not even electricity there. we wanted to conocer, to live and work as peasants.
during this time we "desgranamos" half a ton of corn, cleaned half a ton of "frijoles" and brought it to the road. they measure in "quintales" here, which is 100 pounds in each sack. just good to be carried by an adult man.
we also brought down 5 dry trees and carried them in parts on our backs down from the mountain, for firewood. and, we visited a cervice by the Church of God (center in Cleveland, Ohio, slogan "Corporative Vision. Advance 2010 - 100 thousand members (in Nicaragua)". no kidding. i thought the term "corporate churches is only used by their adversaries.

the coffee plantations smell with alcohol. coffee grows in "uvas" - "grapes", and so when "pulpa" falls on the ground it brews and fertilizes the soil.

sometimes one hears infernal roars in the woods. scary at first but peasants say it´s just "congo" - in English something like "howler monkey", vegetarian. not dangerous.
but then, there´s another animal here which can potentially kill. it´s called cadejo. it´s an animalito size of a cat which sometimes follows human beings at night out of villages. it´s rather peaceful but if you throw rocks at it or call it bad names, cadejo grows the size od a horse and attacks.
in principle, cadejo guards people from other animals in the jungle but you have to be polite with it. if a cadejo appears to a man it´s black, if it appears to a woman the cadejo is white.

all pictures courtesy Carolyn - anthropologist from Simón´s native town. And thanks to her for hospitality.