October 2003

(Preliminary note to my mom: don’t worry. I’m fine.)

Typhoid fever–yes, Typhoid Fever–has hit Cuenca.

A Spanish teacher at my school came down with it a few days ago. She was hospitalized briefly and she’s recovering now. And two people who’d had close contact with her also tested positive. They’re being treated with antibiotics as a precaution and haven’t produced any symptoms. Other teachers are getting tested just to be sure.

Luckily, I got a typhoid vaccine a couple years ago; it’s good for five years.

More info on typhoid, which is potentially fatal, is avaiable here.

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Aaron Tassano, a friend I know through my New York pals Nick M. and Russell W. and Reeves H., is teaching English in Busan, Korea. And he’s blogging up a storm. An especially hilarious posting from a few days ago:

Cats are only in Busan because they eat rats. The cats here are wild and can be heard nightly fighting in the streets. There are no rats, fortunately, because that’s my most feared animal. Though the cats are mangy, a little like rats.

I asked the student if he still had the pet cat.
“No…,” he said, stopping. Looking for the right words. “I…used to give bath…to cat.”
“You bathed your cat?” I asked.
“Yes…”
I started to wonder what happened to said cat…
“Did it like the bath?”
“No…it hated bath.”
“But you kept giving it baths.”
“Yes…I give bath…every night.”
“Every night?!”
“Yes. It’s…” he made a motion as if to pet the smoothly washed coat of a cat “…very soft after I give bath to cat.”

You can read more here.

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This should be of practical interest to approximately .001% of newley.com’s readership. Nevertheless, if you’re looking to buy a vacation home, check out my adopted hometown, Beaufort, South Carolina.

MSN Money says it’s one of the top 10 American towns for “second-home investments”:

You know Beaufort, even if you’ve never been there. You’ve seen it in movies like “The Big Chill” and “Forrest Gump,” and you’ve read about it in the pages of “The Prince of Tides” and “The Great Santini” by one-time Beaufort resident Pat Conroy. Fishing, shrimping and a National Historic Landmark District are features of “The Queen of the Carolina Sea Islands.”

(Thanks to Mike W. for the heads-up.)

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I’m not writing about Bolivia very much these days, as events there have slowed down; Indigenous protesters are giving Carlos Mesa, the new president, a grace period to see how his new policies shape up.

But Randy Paul and John Smith are keeping tabs on what’s happening in La Paz. I recommend checking out what they have to say; in the meantime, I’ll continue to weigh in every once in a while.

Update (Wed. afternoon): from Jordan M.’s dad (by way of Jordan M.) comes this excellent political cartoon making light of (no pun intended) the natural gas issue.

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A brief anecdote: Last Saturday night, I attended an unbelievable party at my girlfriend Jill A. and my buddy Mike F.‘s apartment. It was perhaps the best soiree I’ve been to here at latitude zero.

Jill and Mike live with an Ecuadorian woman; she’s friends with a great number of gay men from Cuenca. The party consisted of the four of us–and about 25 gay Cuencanos (and, briefly, approximately 10 Ecuadorian lesbians).

The highlight of the evening was when a bunch of guys (no, I wasn’t one of them) turned the living room into a catwalk and strutted their stuff, two by two and one by one, to the delight of the thronging crowd. (“Estamos modelando!!” they exclaimed repeatedly.)

Most of the self-styled runway models had ditched their shirts. And all of them were grooving to the tunes thumping out of the stereo: lots and lots of Madonna and a little ABBA thrown in for good measure. It was an extraordinary scene. Gay culture is very underground here, where the Catholic church and Latino notions of masculinity reign supreme, and I’d never seen such outward displays of flamboyance.

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Opposition leader Evo Morales, who narrowly lost Bolivia’s last presidential election, received a $50,000 peace prize from Muammar Gadhafi last year.

Morales might be anti-Semitic; he’s certainly anti-”foreigners.” “Bolivia’s Jews,” meanwhile, uncertain whether new president Carlos Mesa will survive for long, “are keeping a low profile.”

Turning to the drug issue, Al Giordano reports on Morales’s recent comments regarding the US’s coca eradication program in Bolivia:

“The so-called war against drug trafficking is just an excuse for the United States to increase its power and to control other countries,” said Morales, who represents traditional coca growers in Bolivia…

The Bush Administration drug policy folks in Washington must be sweating bullets right about now; Morales wields extraordinary power in Bolivia.

And in the world of Weblogs, Colorado Luis (via Body and Soul) asks an interesting question: if Goni had been ousted on Bill Clinton’s watch, would the media have made more of the story? He thinks the media don’t question Dubya enough, but I disagree.

The media largely ignores third world crises that don’t involve US interests. Period. (Sure, the coca angle is important, but it can’t compete with the specter of terrorits in Iran or Syria or Afghanistan plotting an attack on US soil.)

Taking a step back, I think people exaggerate the issue of media bias (though I agree with Brian Montopoli that liberals tend to enter the field of journalism because they want to “speak truth to power”).

3.3 million people have died in the Congo in the last five years. How come you see little US mainstream media coverage of what some are calling the “African Holocaust”? Because media outlets are businesses, and they produce products that are intended to sell.

International news–unless it threatens America–just isn’t a hot commodity. And regardless of who’s in the White House, consumers in the United States don’t really care to spend their hard-earned dollars on news stories that don’t resound with them. Bolivia, just like The Congo, is simply an abstraction to most Americans.

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If you’ve never seen this, feast your eyes on Japanese Cat Costumes. (Scroll down for photos.) Simply unbelievable.

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Last May, I met an American woman who lives in Riobamba. She said rumor had it that a munitions plant explosion there this time last year was no accident: lots of people think it was orchestrated by the military in order to hide evidence that the army had sold small arms to Colombia’s FARK rebel group.

Now comes more info: Reuters’s Amy Taxin says continuing scandals threaten to undermine “the role of Ecuador’s military as a calming, central power broker in an unstable nation.” She writes:

In the latest scandal, two acting sergeants were detained on accusations of trafficking arms to rebels in August and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe last week said a rocket launcher used in a Bogota attack belonged to Ecuador’s army.

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A couple interesting items from another poor Andean nation: Ecuador. Home sweet home.

First, the AP’s Gonzalo Solano brings us up to speed on the ChevronTexaco trial. The American gas company is being sued by an Ecuadorian Indigenous group for polluting the rainforest.

And second, a story that’s too good to be true–mainly because, well, it’s fake. Joseph Addison, writing in Wayne State University’s student paper, claims that…are you ready for this? No, seriously, are you ready?

Addison says a tribe of “headhunters” in the Ecuadorian rainforest is in posession of a nuclear bomb. And they’re threatening to detonate it unless the US stops cutting down the jungle. Quoth Addison, in a article I really really really hope is tounge-in-cheek, but which I fear is not:

Problem is that when a story is truly terrifying, we aren’t told because we might stop shopping, causing our economy to crash.

The headhunters found it, and they have made a demand: America must stop the destruction of the rainforest.

Um, Joe: you missed one crucial thing: the Weekly Word News is a fake newspaper, a completely fictional supermarket tabloid.

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