Spanish views from a small town

The plumber finally came by about a week ago and dried up the Victoria Falls in the basement. Now, I await the bill, which will probably send me into fits of crying. Next, I suppose I should save up something toward fixing the car. Eventually, at some point in time, I should also buy a new computer. It still operates with Windows 7, 32 bits (whatever the bits are). I've already had to buy an external memory because 300 gigas are not much in today's computing world. Apart from that, the connection to internet is not the best, and probably won't be resolved any time soon. Still, at some point, I should splurge a little, to make sure the new computer lasts as long as this one (more than ten years). The last time I wrote a blog post, I hammered out most of my thoughts just before lunch, thinking they would be fine with the page opened until later.  They weren't, because it turned out that nothing had been saved, and I had to type everything out at around midnight. Even so, ...

Last Saturday the temperature rose to 44ºC/111ºF in the region of Murcia. That afternoon, a man was brought to the health clinic in a small town in a van, from which he was apparently let fall out. He soon fell unconscious. Shortly thereafter, he died of a heat stroke, and the medicalized ambulance that arrived couldn't do anything.  The 42 year old man was Nicaraguan, and here illegally. He came to Spain to escape death threats, and tried to find work not only to eat, but also to send money back home, where he left a wife and children, including a newborn he still hadn't met. He had been recruited that day by a man, who was later arrested, to go work in a field picking watermelons. Given the expected temperatures, these workers were supposed to be told to work only until midday, instead of stopping at midday and continuing in the afternoon. But this man and his companions were not told to do that.  Conditions at different farms are now being looked into. Workers are gener...

Concentration camps. Prison guards. Structured time. With those words it is easy to think of a Nazi concentration camp, or a Soviet gulag. But they can also describe the imprisonment of people who were simply different anywhere in the world. The United States is guilty of such an inhumanity, not once, but twice, and to people we don't tend to think of as "enemy aliens" in our wildest dreams. People like Joe DiMaggio's father. Yes, the famous ball player. The relocation during World War II of the Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast has long been known and considered the lowest point of modern America. But, though they were the largest group so mistreated (around 120,000 displaced and imprisoned), others were also rounded up or had restrictions placed on them because of their ancestry. German-Americans and Italian-Americans were considered "enemy aliens" as well. Around 11,000 Germans and 2,000 Italians were also interned in different camps. Others h...

Does anyone remember Aylan Kurdi? Though his first name might ring a bell, I'm pretty sure no one remembers who he was or why his name became so well-known in Europe. His name has been washed away by the tide, much like the tide that washed up his three year old body onto the beach at Bodrum, in Turkey. The picture of that little boy lying at the waters' edge, in a red t-shirt and navy blue shorts prompted a shudder in most of the world. That little boy and his family, paradoxically dead because they tried to escape death in their home town in Syria, made Europe open its eyes for a short while. Quotas were set up; each European member country was to receive a certain amount of refugees according to its wealth and possibilities. In the aftermath of Aylan's death, with his picture still circulating everywhere, everyone agreed. But they were only awaiting the moment that collective amnesia would fall upon a fast-forgetting public, awash in a daily bombardment of sights and s...

The Dreamers. There but for the grace of God...  Down the street lives a child that has gone to school with our children since first grade. Her parents don't speak English very well, and sometimes the girl has to translate for them. Instead, they speak a rapid-fire Spanish. They are good neighbors, though. We can see both parents go to work every day, and that their daughter is well-taken care of.  The child has turned into a young woman and has recently graduated from college and graduate school. She has become a social worker. Recently, with all the growing hysteria against immigrants, her parents have been staying at home more and more. Both still go to work, but other than that, don't leave the house. Their daughter has been going out to bring them necessary groceries. She only replies that they don't feel like going shopping when we ask about her parents. But one day there is a commotion, and police and other people in uniforms are at the neighbors' house. The ...

Hatred is a loaded word. It is loaded with all our deepest fears and most rancid beliefs. It is a rottening of the mind, with its stench and filth emanating whenever odium is declared toward anyone. The reek coming today from certain groups is nauseating, and has already caused at least one death in Virginia. Some of that reek is strong here in Spain, as well. Though the majority of Spaniards accept people from all over the world, there are some who consider immigrants the bane of society. These infelicitous souls think that immigrants are somehow favored by the authorities over the indigenous population. In Madrid an association has sprung up dedicated to giving out food and shelter to the homeless and other desperate people. But to qualify, those asking for help must be Spanish, not foreigners. This association, Hogar Social Madrid, initially occupied an abandoned building, and were thrown out by the police. They went on to occupy another building, where the judge still hasn't ...

Europe as a region seems to have a short memory span. Around seventy years ago at the end of World War Two, it asked for clemency as millions of its citizens began migrating for many reasons; looking for loved ones, a new chance at life, or as a result of ethnic cleansing and redistribution of borders. They tried to go mostly to North America, Australia, and South America. Now Europe is being asked for clemency by millions from the Middle East and Africa escaping from bloody civil wars, uprisings, and meteorological devastation. But Europe has become deaf. These days we are seeing news about the island of Kos, in Greece, just off the coast of Turkey. Thousands upon thousands of refugees from the Middle East, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, all the way to Pakistan, are arriving each day on boats. But it's not just Kos, it's all the other Greek islands that are right up against Turkey's coastline. In the month of July, about fifty thousand people arrived in those islands. I...