[Inez] Transcribing: Day ?

Do any of you like to sew? Have you ever tried to thread a needle that is just a little bit too small, or where the thread is just a little bit frayed? You keep poking at it and poking at it, trying to get the thread through the needle, perhaps stubbornly refusing to go find your scissors to cut the frayed end, or the beeswax to bring the micro-threads together. You keep poking at it, squinting to try to see the tiny hole of the needle, trying not to drop the millimeter of thread that finally pokes through before you can grab it and pull it all the way.

Transcribing is like this. Sometimes a sentence -- even a paragraph! comes easily. Sometimes the madre enunciates, no trucks drive by, and the neighbor's dog does not bark. Sometimes you thread the needle on the first try.

But sometimes she speaks quickly, her napkin over her mouth, and the neighbor's dog barks twice, loudly, in the middle of the phrase. Sometimes you have to poke the same thread through the needle for minutes and minutes, trying to capture that word. Before we digitized our recordings, when I was transcribing from cassette, I sometimes wore the tape thin from listening to the same 3 second segment over and over and over.

Sometimes as you stare at that tiny needle hole, trying to fit the thread through, there's a tiny hopeful image on the other side. Something went well, someone was released from their capture, someone successfully escaped the country. Something went well.

More often, though, the napkin to the mouth muffles the words being recorded because they are the most painful words. Sometimes the tiny picture just visible through the needle hole is a woman whose teeth were knocked out as she was hit repeatedly while being asked who paid her to become a guerrillera. How is she supposed to answer that question satisfactorily when she is not, in fact, a guerrillera? When everyone in the room knows the gun she was arrested with was planted on her?

Sometimes the tiny picture is a woman whose breast was slowly cut off, one cut to punctuate each question. One cut to punctuate each demand. Each one added up until today, she has no breast. It's gone. It went missing before she escaped, and she escaped without it.



Update: I was looking through my old blog about the project, from when I got a grant through my college for this work. It turns out I've been describing transcribing pretty much the same way for 5 years! Here's what I wrote in 2007:


Transcribing is so hard.


There are the obvious reasons– it’s in Spanish, it’s such a slow and tedious process, it takes so much concentration… I mean really, I don’t think I’ve ever concentrated on anything so hard for such a long period of time. It’s like when you’re trying to thread a needle, and there’s that one little bitty strand that’s [messing] it up and you keep trying and keep trying and it’s not working and you have to squint and get your face up all close because the needle is so small and the thread is so small and if anyone says anything to you you want to scream ’cause you were about to get it but they ruined your concentration and now you have to start all over… are you feeling sufficiently fidgety and drained? Okay, well it’s like threading the impossibly small needle, for hours and hours, every day.


Of course the other reason is that it’s just so damn depressing. Not only are you threading an impossibly small needle, you’re threading an impossibly small needle with a picture of someone being raped or tortured– and you have to keep looking at that little picture because if you take your eyes off the [freaking] needle, well then, how are you going to thread it?

(Ruby) Union suppression, US vs. El Salvador

Ever since the recall election in Wisconsin, my neighbor state, I've been thinking about Scott Walker and the state of unions in this country in general. As a public school teacher, I'm proud to be union member. While my union isn't perfect, I'm still grateful to have a union and to be part of it. It's sad and just plain crazy that unions are under attack, that our power of collective bargaining is being limited. People are being mislead to believe that we, as union members, are somehow the cause of the economic problems we're in today. As someone said on Facebook,

Remember when teachers, public employees, unions, NPR, PBS and Planned parenthood
crashed the stock market, took trillions in TARP money, spilled a crapload of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, wiped out half of our 401ks, gave their selves billions in bonuses and payed no taxes? Yeah...me neither.

I can get pretty worked up about the injustice of it, but our troubles are small in comparison to what happened in El Salvador in the 1970's and 80's. Not that we shouldn't be concerned, not that we don't need to act to prevent the further erosion of unions' power. We do. But in El Salvador, union leaders were imprisoned, tortured and killed for advocating for safer, more humane working conditions and livable wages.   Here's an excerpt from an interview with Alicia, the former head of CoMadres. Alicia died in August, 2010.

             In those days, in 1978, my oldest daughter, Marta Alicia, started to work in a factory that made men’s shirts. They sent the clothes up to the U.S. She was studying at the university, but started to work to help me out so I would have money for all the busses I needed in my searches. (Searching for missing family members.) So there in that factory, a union began. Because she was very active she was made to be a spokesperson for the union, part of the leadership team.
            When she was already involed in the union, the National Guard came to the factory. The boss had called the Guard because the women were meeting there. He didn’t want them to lose work time. He wanted them working, so he called the Guard. Well this day they just came to see what was happening. But three days later they returned and took all the women in the leadership team.
            When we knew that the National Guard had captured Marta, we went there, but no. They told us that they didn’t have anyone. They hadn’t captured anyone. That surely it was another branch, like the Police of the Hacienda or the National Police had done it, but they, the National Guard, had not. So we went again to the different quarters. It was the same thing all over again. They all said they hadn’t captured the union organizers.
            Fifteen days later, five of the young women appeared assassinated in a little town called Ilopango, close to Lake Apulu. But not my daughter. When they were found, these women had been tortured, murdered, they were without fingernails, without teeth, beaten. Their mothers retrieved them and buried them.
            At eighteen days, my daughter appeared, three days after the other young women. They left her, they thought she was dead, you know? They left her there just lying on the pavement. Just her. Just Marta. Naked. Some people saw her body. Vultures were coming, the ones that eat dead bodies were moving in. But she woke up and moved, and some people saw her. A taxi driver moved closer and he said, “This girl is alive!”

I'm writing this not to diminish our problems, but to try to understand how bad it would be if I had lived in El Salvador during the Civil War. And it's still bad there today, with unions being suppressed by the government and by multi-national corporations doing business there, including US corporations. I wish I had a positive note to end on. I'm not sure what that is, except to say that Marta survived and was helped to escape El Salvador.

[Inez] Fundraising

As you know, Ruby and I have been fundraising on the website indiegogo.com to try to raise enough money to fund two trips to El Salvador this year. In addition to the price of the plane tickets, there is also food, lodgings, and daily transportation to consider. We are also asking for some money to help with transcription because that is the next step that needs to be completed in order for us to move forward towards completing the book. In total, we're trying to raise $3720.

So far we've raised $1525. It's an incredible amount of money. Most of this money has come in the form of $25 donations from people we know directly. Some has come in $10 donations, and we're incredible thankful for this level of support as well. a surprising amount has come in $100 donations which is absolutely thrilling every time it happens! I am mostly writing this to express how thankful I am for the support (emotional and financial) from these incredible people, including those who weren't able to give but spread the word among their friends who may be interested in our work.

I'm also writing the post to talk a bit about giving. If you're reading this blog, chances are you know Ruby and I personally. But just in case, let me give a bit of background information. Ruby and I are both Quakers (What's a Quaker?). Our Yearly Meeting (an organization that conducts business once a year with representatives from many regional Monthly Meetings) has a long-standing relationship with the Yearly Meeting of El Salvador, which means that we have several Quaker friends in El Salvador. One year when we were in El Salvador we went to a f/Friend's house to participate in their ministry to distribute food around the city to homeless folks.

Our friend gathered with several family members and a few other members of his Meeting and together they cooked up a few giant pots of food. They also made a large amount of coffee and a large amount of hot chocolate. They they loaded it all up in the back of a pickup, everyone piled in (three of us up front and the rest riding in the back with the food) and we set out into the dark streets of San Salvador. We drove around for a few hours, handing out food, coffee, and hot chocolate to people who were homeless -- some of them mentally ill, some of them business men who simply couldn't afford a place to sleep, some of them drug addicts. All of them grateful that someone took the time to bring them something hot to eat or drink.

This ministry isn't financially supported by their Monthly Meeting. We asked them later how much money they spent on the food each week, from their own pockets. It was an incredible sum of money, considering that none of them makes very much. Yet they feel honored to be able to do such work, not burdened.

So here's how I like to think about it when I'm trying to figure out how much money to give away: What don't I need? I don't really need to buy a $10 lunch out; a little foresight and I can prepare a lunch at home for a fraction of the cost.

I don't really need another $40 pair of shoes when I already have half a dozen. Instead, I could give $40 to a cause I believe in.

Or even longer term -- can I go two weeks without buying lunches out? If I had been buying lunch every day at an average of $8 per day, that's $80 saved over two weeks. Maybe I could give that money away.

If you're reading this, I would encourage you to take a couple minutes and think of something you want but don't really need. Maybe it's a new dress. Maybe it's dinner from a local restaurant you enjoy. Maybe its a six-pack of beer -- or a six-pack of ginger beer. How much does that thing cost? Consider donating it to our Indiegogo campaign instead, to help us write this history of an incredible human rights organization.

[Ruby] A glimpse of the aftermath of the funeral for Archbishop Monseñor Romero

When I was doing some research, I came upon a remarkable video of the funeral of Monseñor Oscar Romero. So I thought I'd share it here. But first, a little background.

Romero was skeptical at first of what role the Church should play in the political struggle that was heating up the second half of the 1970's. He eventually became convinced that the government was committing atrocities and he worked to try to bring an end to the human rights abuses. Many individuals sought his help to find their missing family members, or to seek the release of political prisoners. Romero urged a group of women to form a committee, and so in 1977 CoMadres was started. For the next few years, Romero helped the Committee of Mothers, CoMadres, enormously. One way he supported them and furthered their work was by weekly publicizing the evidence they collected of deaths, detentions, and torture on his Sunday radio broadcast. 


Monseñor Romero wrote to President Jimmy Carter, imploring him to stop funding the war. He even pleaded, then demanded that soldiers stop carrying out their orders to torture, mutilate, and kill innocent civilians. The government, controlled by the oligarchy, could not abide these actions, and so he was assassinated. But this wasn't enough. When an estimated 250,000 people poured into the park and adjoining streets outside of the National Cathedral for his funeral in March, 1980, the military responded by firing smoke bombs and shooting on the gathering. The message was unmistakable; the government had complete power and total disregard for the lives of peasants, as it had for Archbishop Romero himself. This video shows film taken that day. 

The crowd gathered for Romero's funeral.

http://youtu.be/EN6LWdqcyuc

[Ruby] A ten year old's impression of El Salvador

2006 was the first year that Inez and I worked with Co-Madres. That year I also took my then 10 year old daughter, Celeste, with me to El Salvador. A couple years later she wrote this poem. I think it sums it up pretty well. (Celeste is now 16.) Celeste also helped me make a video for our Indiegogo campaign. Well, she made the video, I watched her do it. (To see the video, go to  http://www.indiegogo.com/comadres)


It took me three days to get used to...

The smell
of filthy streets

Celeste, Alicia & I at memorial, Parque Cuscatlan

of the ocean big and wide
of the garden full of bright luscious flowers.

The sight
of the street side cooking
of men holding guns by every store
 of the people walking in the flow of the cars.

The taste
of a warm enchilada with gallo pinto every night
of the fired corn at the fair
of the coconut drink sold by the highway.

The feel
of loving for all
of fear of gun men
of happiness at the carnival.

The sound
of a million voices
of the madre telling us to eat more.
Of an unheard cry from memories of the past.

                        by Celeste Buss

[Inez] Support our work

We have recently launched a fundraising campaign to help fund our work on the book this year. You can find our web page (and contribute!) here: http://www.indiegogo.com/CoMadres

When I was in college I was fortunate enough to get a grant for two of the summers that we went to El Salvador. For one year, Ruby was able to get financial support from our Yearly Meeting (the body which organizes and helps govern our regional group of Quaker Monthly Meetings). However, this year Ruby has taken a leave of absence from her job in order to dedicate more time to this project. That means that not only is she paying out of pocket to make trips to El Salvador, buy necessary equipment, and hire someone to help us transcribe our recorded interviews, but she isn't making any income! I have kept my job and am helping out in my spare time, but I am similarly paying out of pocket for any trips, equipment, and to send money to CoMadres from time to time.

In short, we need your help. In order for this project to succeed, we need outside support. We intend to make two trips to El Salvador this year to meet new madres and fill in gaps in the organization's story. We estimate that these two trips will cost us a combined total of $3720. Can you spare $10? Or $20? Or $50?

Think about it this way:
$10 = A meal from a Chinese take-out place, a cocktail, or a sandwich and chips.
$20 = A produce run to the local farmer's market, a manicure, or four boxes of girl scout cookies.
$50 = Dinner out for two or three people.

Any amount will help. And if money is tight, please help by spreading the word.

Thank you.