Colombia Trip on the Radio

For more info about my first trip to Colombia with Witness for Peace, you can listen to an interview with two other Kentuckians who took the trip and myself that was broadcast back in August:

http://www.appalshop.org/wmmt/node/448

Recap

Between technical difficulties and world-traveling, I haven't kept up with this blog as much as I've wanted to. It has really fallen by the wayside. But, it seems that there's something about fall that makes me want to start up again. So, the best place to start is probably a big ole update: what's going on now and what's happened this year...

And a big year it's been: I visited NYC for the first time for the AWP (creative writing) conference. Went to Tallahassee--and visited friends in Atlanta on a tornado day on the way down--and successfully defended my dissertation. And the finishing of said dissertation was also a biggie. I've sent the book out to a couple places so far, and will send out to a ton more during the fall submission periods. More recently I've had poems accepted in journals I like (Subtropics and The Virginia Quarterly Review) and have gotten paid for poetry finally. In April I traveled to Washington, D.C. for the first time and, there, lobbied with more than 120 other folks from 20 states for the Clean Water Protection Act (which would help to curb mountaintop removal mining by disallowing "waste" to be used as "fill" in US waterways). Since then, I've been back to DC three more times, twice to lobby. And during these trips, I've learned something(s) about myself: I love "city-time," the quick pace, the fierce walking, the something always to do. And I love lobbying, the sitting down with a Congressperson or aide and explaining an issue for the first time, or going into more depth about the issue, the mental gymnastics of trying to figure out what would be the most effective to share with these folks. All of it is so exciting to me. In February I participated in my first big KFTC action, "I Love Mountains Day," a rally on the freezing cold KY capitol steps, surrounded by thousands of others who want the same clean, healthy, and secure future I want. And then, in May, I went to Colombia for a week with Witness for Peace to tour the coal mining regions of the Guajira and Cesar--truly a life-changing experience for me, all of which is too great to go into here in this little update--maybe a later post? But, after that trip, I knew that I wanted to work both against MTR mining here, but also with the communities affected by the coal mining in Colombia. A big turning moment was after I got back to the US and took my first MTR flyover in a little four-seater plane. Driving back to Hindman from the Hazard aiport, everything fell into place, though the emotions were scary at first. I knew I wanted to go back to Colombia this year to learn Spanish, to take photos for an art project, and to work on starting the Appalachian - Colombian Coalfield Alliance. And in the beginning of July, that's what I did: signed up for four weeks of Spanish courses in Bogotá and bought my plane ticket. Before I left in early August, things really picked up around here: my grandmother celebrated her 100th birthday, I gave my first public presentation on MTR to a group at the Lotts Creek School, I ran reconnaissance on an valley fill directly above the lake where I'll soon be getting my drinking water, I flew in a Dept. of the Interior plane with two US congressman and an official with the Office of Surface mining (more than holding my own against OSM's lies and propaganda), and returned to DC for another one of those lobbying trips. Also during this time, I was driving all around eastern Kentucky, interviewing folks for a piece on MTR coal that was was writing for Greenpeace. Then, I went to Colombia for what ended up being six weeks instead of four, spent mostly in Bogotá, studying at the Spanish World Institute. Toward the end of that trip, Jordan Freeman, a videographer with a documentary on MTR coal in the US, flew down to Bogotá and then we traveled together to the coal mining region to visit with the communities affected by the mining, and to talk with unionists and others working in solidarity with these communities. While in Colombia, I finished my Greenpeace work. Before leaving Bogotá for the US, I learned that the Corps of Engineers / Bureau of Land Management is considering leasing the mineral rights to the area that my family was displaced from (in order to build the East Lynn Lake) in the 60s. With Skype and chat and the help of my mom, I started getting informed on that issue--the first time I or my family has been directly influenced but the coal industry and its bureaucracy. We're still working on sending in public comments, speaking out against the environmental and cultural/ethical problems about such a lease. I then flew from Bogotá to DC, where I had a meeting with other members of KFTC with Congressman Norman Dicks (chair of the Appropriations Committee that oversees the Office of Surface Mining) and Congressman Ben Chandler from Kentucky. I gave a 20 - 30 minute presentation on the first day, and then we lobbied for the next 2 days. From that trip, we've already gotten at least one more co-sponsor for the bill. I rode back home to KY with folks in two vans. Since then I've done fun things like visit Whit's class to talk about government (soon after, of their own volition, the students were writing letters and drafting petitions to send to lawmakers), participated in a news conference and have been interviewed by a few reporters, and went to Delaware (via DC) to speak to two Sierra Club groups. Oh, and got to watch the VP debate in Biden's home state--which was exciting. During this, I've also still been making the sporadic updates to the websites I work on (Chattahoochee Review, Kids in Need - Books in Deed, and LEAF) and gardening some while I'm in town. I was happy to learn I hadn't missed all the harvest while in Colombia. We're working this week on getting late winter crops in the ground.

Oh, and just a few days ago: I got a job: working for Appalachian Voices (telecommunting), doing research and writing for a white paper on mining and climate strategy among other projects. And just in time: student loan repayment starts in about a month...

Well, I think that's all for now, you're all caught up. Now, time for me to go get caught up on more work.

Photos from my most recent trip to the Guajira region of Colombia

Back!

Finally got the problems with the server worked out today, and so, after months, I can start posting here again....and, boy, do I have much to post.

As you can see, that last post languished in the queue for more than a month and a half, and that's the only thing I've written so far about Colombia. Since that time, I've been back to Colombia for 6 weeks, and back to Washington, DC, twice.

Hope to get y'all caught up shortly, if anyone is still even checking in on here. First task: finish that last post.

But, in the meantime, you can check out pics from my most recent visit to the coal fields of Colombia here: http://tinyurl.com/4e9ylo

Happy fall, y'all. Merry autumn, y'uns.

Mi Vida Loca

As usual, it has been far too long since I've posted an update here. Maybe I've said this before: the more that's going on in my life, the less likely I am to post. The more I have to write about, the less I write. Ain't I got it backerds?

So, the only way I can get over these humps, is just too go random on y'all.

I guess the first topic should be Colombia...the big'un.

So, I went to Colombia May 23 - June 1 with KFTC and Witness for Peace to visit the coal mining regions of the country. To continue the randomness, I'll show you this rather tangential pic of the trip first...for some reason, this is the pic that made me want to blog about all this:



Here we are, on the street, outside a restaurant in (I think) Valledupar, buying a desert, what I think, in English, is called something like "the sweet." In the pic is me--with my old woman-looking, Yoda-looking arms (boy, do I need to start working out again)--Nancy, and Leo, who is from Colombia and is translating--I think it was Leo who called the concoctions we were buying "the sweet." You get a little shot sized plastic cup with two VERY sweet foods in it, and one of those little grade-school, wooden ice cream spoons to eat it with. As I kept saying: es muy dulce. I had papaya and coconut. There was one thing that Leo kept saying was "cut milk"--I think it might have been fried and sweetened milk curds...but I'm not sure about that either. I wasn't about to try it, either.

Random note: speaking of all this super sweetness (I couldn't even finish my little cup of "the sweet") is making me think of water. Instead of bottled water, we drank from bags. And the bags littered everywhere we went, especially along the "highways." Thousands...millions of bags everywhere: this is what happens when the gov't-corporate complex cares so little about the infrastructure and health of the rural poor that you have to get all your water from bags.

Okay, moving on...look at these two pics: one from Hazard, Kentucky (outside the aiport, from where I flew last week in a 4-seater Cessna to view MTR mining from the air):

[....to be continued....Blogger isn't wanting to let me upload more pics right now...]

Hindman Gothic

Ahhh...it finally rained last night--after a bit of a dry spell--and so this evening we got to play in the dirt. So much easier cultivating damp soil than dry. Tomorrow, in go the seeds and seedlings. And "on" switches the electric fence. (I put it up all by myself...feeling proud.)





Other random notes: Bill Clinton spoke at my high school in Wayne today...I found out about it in the NYTimes. Weird.

And, another good webby find for today: the "How can I recycle this?" blog.

I just flew in from Vegas...

and, boy, are my arms tired!

Ba-doomp-cha!

Seriously, seriously...

I didn't fly in from Vegas, but my arms really *are* sore. I would like to tell you that it was from driving a piece of rebar (to use as a grounding rod for the garden's solar electric fence) seven feet into the ground yesterday, all by my scrawny self...but that wouldn't be true. My arms are already aching from getting four vaccination shots three hours ago. Yellow fever, typhoid, hepatitis, and tetanus. All prep for my trip to Columbia in 2 1/2 weeks. When the NP saw my scrawny arms she said it was going to hurt me, so I should go home and play some basketball.

Anyone up for a game of H-O-R-S-E?

Get Behind

Check out this old WWII Victory Garden poster. Sexist....but, hey, I like her outfit. (If you've ever seen me walking around Hindman this spring, you know what I mean. On top of the overalls, it's time to bust out the straw hat.)



More soon on my gardening attempts, maybe some pics--seedlings and overalls, for example--, other philosophical gardening thoughts, and other Victory Garden propaganda.

You'll get all the quotidian details...soon, I promise.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with this quote from George Bush from today (well, yesterday, now, at this hour) from a speech in the Rose Garden:

"We are deeply concerned about food prices here at home"

and

"Creative policy is to buy food from local farmers"

G'night, sweet peas.

Heart-wrenching, from Mother Jones

The Coal Miner's Granddaughter

Meet the self-proclaimed Appalachian redneck fighting for the children in coal mining country.

Kurt Pitzer

Mother Jones
April 18 , 2008

Deep into Coal River Valley, a remote region of hollows in West Virginia's Raleigh County, the children of Marsh Fork Elementary attend school less than a quarter mile below a dam that holds back billions of gallons of toxic coal mine sludge—about 2.8 billion, depending on the season and the rains. At first, no one was alarmed when the dam began to leak a few years ago. Coal mining is such an all-consuming part of these hills that its dangers are almost generally accepted as a fact of life.

But in April 2004, when Ed Wiley picked up his granddaughter, Kayla, from school, he noticed that the recurring red splotches on her face and neck were worse than ever, and that the spunky fourth-grader seemed listless.

"Possum, buddy, you okay?" he recalls asking her. "Tears were running down her face. And she said, 'Gramps, these coal mines are making us sick.'"

A self-described redneck—he's a 10th-generation Appalachian whose father was a trapper—Wiley cuts a distinctive figure with his slightly hunched gait, bulbous eyes, and camouflage baseball cap. Like most everyone else in the region, he'd spent most of his life working for the coal companies. But after that talk with Kayla, and doubting the school nurse's diagnosis that she had asthma, he started asking questions. He grew worried that arsenic, chromium, lead, manganese, and other carcinogens from the coal slurry might leak into water from the school's drinking fountains or the stream that runs by the schoolyard. Then an independent study of the air inside the school showed the children were likely breathing fine dust from the coal silo and other mining facilities only a few hundred yards away. A follow-up "visual" survey in August 2006 by the Environmental Protection Agency (in which no water or air samples were collected) confirmed that coal dust was present at the school, but said that no studies were available to determine the health risks.

That's when Wiley started looking into Marsh Fork, the dam he himself had helped build for the coal companies starting in 2000, a massive pile of rocks and soil across the valley. A similar dam at Buffalo Creek in nearby Logan County had burst suddenly one morning in 1972, killing 125 people, mostly women and children in their homes. If the Marsh Fork dam were to give way during school hours, Kayla and her classmates could drown within seconds.

A few Marsh Fork parents keep their children at home on days of heavy rain, fearing a dam collapse. Otherwise, Wiley says, the isolated community had been doing its best to ignore the potential catastrophe. "All the guys in the valley work for Massey," he says. "They like to walk around in their blue uniforms with red stripes and never take them off. They's all young guns, who say if we complain about the coal company, the company's going to leave us."

Haunted by what he'd learned, Wiley went to the local board of education and asked them to move the school. When that didn't work, he started gathering pennies from neighbors and friends—"Pennies of Promise," he called them—hoping to shame officials into taking action. In the summer of 2006 he marched for 40 days, alone, to the governor's mansion in Charleston, carrying a flag with a picture of Marsh Fork embroidered on it and a bag with $400 in pennies as seed money for a new school. A local news crew followed him as, with Kayla at his side, he confronted Gov. Joe Manchin, who promised to look into the issue and was quickly whisked away by aides.

Since then, Wiley has staged a hunger strike to temporarily stop construction of a second coal silo next to the elementary school, picketed the Today Show in New York, and been hauled off to jail for protesting outside the governor's office. "I've lost a few friends around here," he says. "But I've made some new ones" —young environmentalists, who consider him an inspiration.

Meanwhile, Massey subsidiaries are still planning to build a second coal silo right next to the school. And there seems little enthusiasm to move Marsh Fork, or to study the safety issue, from Manchin, who has followed through on promises to make West Virginia even more coal friendly.

Calls to Manchin's office were returned by his general counsel, Carte Goodwin, who said, "If there is a need and a justification for the closing of Marsh Fork Elementary and relocating it...that is an analysis and a decision that needs to be made by the residents of Raleigh County." Indignant, Raleigh County Board of Education president Rick Snuffer responded that, while he supported moving the school, it was unfair to ask one of the nation's poorest counties to pay for a situation created by one of its wealthiest industries. "The problem isn't the school," he said. "The problem is the coal mines, which came in after the school was there. Massey and the state of West Virginia created this mess, and they want to pass the buck to us."

Wiley says his campaign will continue; Kayla has graduated to middle school, but he has two grandchildren old enough to start kindergarten at Marsh Fork in the next few years. "I wake up every morning worrying about what could happen to all those kids up there."

If he ever succeeds, Wiley says, his next campaign will be to protect wildlife endangered by strip-mining and mountaintop removal. "My eyes have been opened to a lot of things," he says. "I've started down a whole new road in my life."

Mile Long Petition / For Clean Energy in Virginia

Help the people of Southwest Virginia (just over the mountain from Kentucky) defeat Dominion Power's new coal fired power plant: