The cream of life
I remember the breakfast of “tortillas with fresh cream and sprinkled with salt.” It was the first time I was tasting this. I am from Quebec, land of the maple tree. I remember my mother’s fresh home made bread, with fresh cream and maple or brown sugar. Just the souvenir of it and the taste comes back immediately. Then, for hygiene purposes, the law prevented farmers to sell the fresh cream that comes up in the pail after the cows has been milked. In fact, after this law, neither farmers or cows would not have to look at the milk again. All wen through pipes, from the cow, to the truck, to the box that came on our table. Through the pipe went also a taste that disappeared, leaving it in the memories of a few now. With globalization it became a taste in danger of extinction.
Now we know, the choice was also better for our health. But now it is the chemical products they feed the cows that go through the pipes and into the box that comes on our table. Milk is no more milk.
Carried from Bosnia to Nicaragua by a taste
The breakfast I had at the Briones’ table, would stay in my mind for ever. (Like the one in Kiribati and in Grenada). I travelled from family to family, then one day, the taste came back. I was having breakfast in “Bosnia.” It was not tortillas, but fresh home made bread spread with fresh made cream sprinkled with salt. There sitting in the summer kitchen in the mountains surrounding Sarajevo, my mind travelled back to Nicaragua.
In Bosnia, we did not know, but they were two weeks away from their own war. How much wars have erased the cream of life for so many.
My freedom and dictatorship
South and Central America contributed to my political awakening. It started with Eduardo Galeano’s book Open Veins of Latin America and then in Chili and Argentina, second and third country visited, I realized I was a revolutionary at heart. If I had been born in these countries, I probably would have been killed for speaking out. But I probably would have been taught silence. From the very beginning of the project, the thoughts on my freedom were reviewed. Freedom is fragile but it is even more to speak of it when people around you live within a dictatorship. I would live my freedom more discreetly afterwards and I would live in gratitude of the birthplace life had chosen for me.
The effects of war on daily life
In Nicaragua I was seeing the effect of war in daily life. It was so truth, so real, when the house was shaking in late afternoon when the military helicopters were coming down, nearby to park for the night. It was so impressive to realize that all the young people of the house were ready to go and fight. The family’s destiny was played every morning around the radio. One call from the government “we need you all” and Lucia would have been left with the little ones only.
Raping a country of its spirit
After, colonialism comes imperialism which is a form of rape. Raping a country of its spirit. These mornings in Nicaragua, I have asked myself, if I would fight for my country, for peace and for my freedom. Would I let my children go to war at fourteen years old? Would I have the choice? Now I know that when children want to go to war at such an age it’s because they have probably a very good reason and right in their desire. Lucia told me about her son who died during the war: “He felt it was his duty that he had go. So, I let him.”
There are stories and people who stay with you all your life and the Briones are among them.
Would there be war without young people? Is it not young people who have world peace into their hands? If not where is peace? Certainly not in those who bring them to war.
A part from WWI and WWII, was there at any time, a reason that could be justified to all humanity for Americans to go and kill people outside their territory?
