Soli's Boat Outing

10 29 10
In the middle of all this Soli decided it would be good for morale to go on a unit outing.We might get some work done. There was no quiet place to meet in the open space.
Soli's unit boat outing was weird. I don't know how I survived it. By the time I got home I had a throbbing migraine in my right eye from keeping my face on and looking at everything so hard. I looked so hard and what did I see? One thing I always longed to see, the river up close. It was like those onyx stones my father brought back from his preaching trips. B's (Soli”s?) friend Rich's boat was a sailboat it turned out, but we had to use the motor anyway. Even without wind and waves I got seasick. Rich is the son of the 'Soli's friend from when she was a City volunteer on the Island right after college. I'm pretty sure he's the one whose mother jumped from a window of an Island luxury hotel after the father left. (How do some lives go so wrong? What is there not to be scared of?) We made it to the Immigration Museum on the Wind Island where the first European immigrants were penned when they arrived. At the museum Soli was the only one among us who maybe found her relatives on one of the boat (manifests) lists in their computer exhibit.
In the main exhibit room, which was once a waiting room for the immigrants, blown up photographs showed clusters of sorted out small white people. The groups they'd been sorted into were marked on their clothes with chalk. An x marked the ones who did not read. They would have been our people, for we are the literacy program. This was the place where the hoards of criminal European immigrants entered the country, long before the Islander economic immigrants or the Venturan political exiles arrived (one of each of whom is me; I'm both Islander and Venturan). Stacks of their trunks were scattered throughout the room and their clothes, Bibles and family photographs were stacked around them.
On the way back on the boat we had our potluck picnic. Lucha got Teresa talking about Amina. “It looks like she's finally stopped dating Ed. He almost got her into a car accident, driving her home like a maniac, when she refused him sex.” Everybody laughed and I joined in. “Or that's the story she tells.” They laughed harder. “Thank god. Maybe he'll stop calling me at home.” Now they were bending over laughing. I was confused. Ed was another of the Bb's (Soli's boss Xiomara's gossiped about hires. I'll have to catch Lucha by herself sometime when I'm not trying to keep myself from vomiting. I couldn't eat on the boat because I was seasick and I could barely watch them eating. I brought Basam's falafels and persimmons I bought from Mohamed . Teresa brought arroz con gandules and potato salad. Solly brought three kinds of cheese and pears and crackers. Lucha brought two six packs of beer. She had more than her share of it and when Solly tried to give Rich the two beers left over when we docked Lucha bristled and said she'd take them home. Lucha was so edgy even after three beers that Solly got her off to the side for privacy but I could hear them talking about Lucha's daughter Jody. Solly was telling Lucha she had to send Jody away, away from the neighborhood someplace where she could get treatment. I picture Jody looking like Machi's girlfriend God help our teenage kids.

When is this what's the sequitor?
We were supposed to bond after the boat trip and be ready to march into the program year.
I had my first site visit as a staff developer last week. The week is like a tunnel that goes on almost forever. I barely hang on til the end, by my fingernails. The teachers were prickly. I knew some of them from my before bureaucrat self (Ricardo) but that didn't seem to make a difference. Or made it worse. They resented me or distrusted me for leaving their ranks. So they hazed me.They hated me because now I am a bureaucrat. Ricardo from Moon Park, who used to be my friend and chat me up when we were both participants in Soli's workshops, just wanted to see me squirm. “Why are we delivering free labor?” What answer could I give? “Ricardo, why don't you get off your ass and make the revolution and then we won't have to?” I said Freire didn't come up with popular education for the places where it would be easy to do but for the places where it would be difficult, and where could it be more difficult than in the belly of the beast? I wouldn't say those things if the Soli or the Xiomara, or maybe even Lucha were with me.

Sequitor?
Just before the workshop while I was in the xerox room making copies of photographs to use for generating student writing, which is what my workshop was about, I overheard Teresa and Amina by the other machine talking about Ed. He's stopped calling Teresa at home after she put her husband on the phone and her husband sent him to hell. Lucha told me he's the worst serial sexual harasser she's ever seen in all her years as a burocrat and (her words) before that a poverty pimp.
Now Xiomara called us all in last week to look at a video about sexual harassment. Lucha said she's finally caught on and wants to help him (by making the rest of us watch the tape). All departments in the agency under Xiomara were required to come watch. The lifers and the grant fundeds sat on different sides of the room. This also breaks down by race; most of the lifers are black and the grantfundeds are latinos and jews and ethnic whites. There was lots of tittering when the video showed a black guy hovering by a white woman's cubicle making double entendre jokes. Ed didn't show a thing on his round black face.