2018 was quite a year!
I started this blog back in 2012, not too long after I retired from what I thought was my last paid organizing job and before a trip I was about to take to Spain. Since then, I’ve managed to contribute absolutely no blog posts to this page and life sure has taken me in a lot of directions I couldn’t have predicted when I wrote that post about Spain and the Spanish Civil War back in 2012.
So to catch up a little on my retirement life, I’ll start with 2018 and then work backwards a bit later to share in this blog what has led up to this year of my participation in a bunch of iconic happenings in a number of countries I visited. I’m going to write about organizing work, politics and the difficulties of living in the USA under Trump in a separate post. This one is going to focus on the lighter side of life and the serendipitous set of iconic events I was excited to participate in this year.
I’ve been living in between San Salvador, El Salvador more than half of each year and Salem, OR since the summer of 2012, and this year I left El Salvador in March after volunteering for the fourth time to help out with a delegation of international observers to watch the disastrous congressional and municipal elections with the right regaining power in the National Assembly and many of the departments and municipalities, following somewhat in the same path as the 2016 election of our president in the USA.
Earlier in the year I agreed to accept a 16 month long, three quarter time job coordinating a new organizing fellowship program with the Rural Organizing Project in Oregon. More on this later as it is partly in response to the DJT election and other political events taking place in the USA.
But, I had already planned a big two-month long journey/vacation before I accepted the job and so on April 13th, I flew to Miami, met up with my friend and former co-worker Ann, and we boarded a cruise ship for a trans-Atlantic crossing which would take us to Southampton, England, then for a short round trip over to Le Havre, France, then for another week-long round trip up to the Fjords in Norway – linking a 15 day cruise, a short 3 day party cruise, and a 7 day scenic Fjords cruise together for us on one ship. After that, I’d leave Ann and walk over to the train station in Southampton and take a train to Cardiff to join my brother at an apartment we rented for six weeks in Cardiff Centre across the street from the Millennium Stadium and the Cardiff Arms Park – my second time spending extended time in Cardiff since my retirement and my fourth visit to Wales. The plan was to spend time in Wales, visit with my cousin and her husband who live in Carmarthenshire, enjoy hanging out in the city and countryside , and after Bob’s partner Jan joined us, fly up to Iceland to meet up with friends Lorene and Jess from Oregon and spend another week there – partly in Reykjavik and partly out in western Iceland at the home of lifelong Icelandic friends of Lorene. And all of that happened. But along the way all of this did too:
When the ship docked in Portugal on the route to Southampton it was Independence Day – a chance to celebrate the fall of the fascist dictatorship called the Carnation Revolution on April 25, 1975 and to talk about it with the locals and wander the city on a festive day. It was also an opportunity to reflect on how long it takes to break the chains after a country is taken over by right-wing dictatorial regime.
In Cardiff – the Cardiff Bluebirds, the city’s football club (AKA soccer), had recently been moved up into the premier league. Many people were sporting their Visit Malaysia shirts (who knew what that meant? Not me. Found out the owner of the team is Malaysian and the shirts were a premium at a game). We were in town for the big parade to celebrate the team – and the rally in front of Cardiff Castle.
Then – what else was happening in the UK while we were there? Well – the royal wedding of course. Wedding mania – the BBC and the BBC Wales were solid wedding coverage and there were a lot of other weddings going on in that month too – so many hen and stag parties in Cardiff Centre! Beyonce and Jay Z showed up while we were there too for a big stadium concert that brought a huge crowd to the city too.
And then…..the 100th Anniversary of the first women (and working class men) getting the right to vote in England in 1918 (not all women I have to add here – a lot of misinformation about the facts of this) – but it was a significant breakthrough. So – in all four of the capital cities of the UK (London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast) there were huge women’s marches sporting the colors of the original suffragettes – purple, green and white – and Jan and I marched with 10,000 Welsh women while Bob took photos. Men were not allowed in the march.
And then….off to the Republic of Ireland. This was not part of my original plan but through my friend Brooke who I am connected to through election work in El Salvador, I was connected to a Canadian woman organizing an observation of the vote to liberalize abortion laws in Ireland. Since I was already in Cardiff and she knew the travel costs would be minimal she asked me if I’d like to participate and since I have worked on abortion rights in the USA of course I was interested. She connected me with Sherrida, amazing new Welsh friend, who picked me up in Cardiff and drove us to Pembrokeshire to take the ferry to Ireland and introduced me to several historic sites there – a short vacation ahead of the delegation that included Glendalough and the fabulous Newgrange. I then got to spend some time in downtown Dublin, several days with a retired teacher in South Dublin and a day observing the vote in 10 schools in her area (8 Catholic, one Muslim, one denominational – all publicly funded) and then observing the count in South Dublin as well. It was a historic vote – 65-35 countrywide to approve legalization of abortion! After our debrief session and a bit of a tour of downtown Dublin with Margaret, we took the ferry back from Dublin to Holyhead and I had a chance to see even more of the northern part of Wales and the mountainous areas of Snowdonia National Park. The abortion vote in Ireland, and their previous votes on approving divorce and gay marriage, were thought-provoking as well. It is much harder for the right-wing to continue to fight back against a resounding democratic vote than a court decision like we have had in the USA on both gay marriage and abortion. It was also interesting to hear that the majority of the anti-abortion funding came from USA sources.
Then on to Iceland for the last of the iconic happenings I experienced across the pond. Our third day in Iceland was the day of Iceland’s first game ever in the World Cup of Football (AKA soccer) and the entire country (or so it seemed) turned out to watch it on big screen TVs outside in rainy downtown Reykjavik. Since Iceland has only about 350,000 people and Argentina has about 55 million, it hardly seemed like a fair match up but Iceland held their own and it ended in a tie which definitely felt like a victory!
Since returning from that trip, we’ve had midterm elections in the USA and in Oregon we beat back four bad ballot initiatives including anti-immigrant, anti-choice and anti-tax ones and gained seats in our State House and Senate, re-elected our female Governor, elected the first African-American woman to the Portland City Council and had some other local victories so there is hope that changes can take place in the nation too.
I don’t expect 2019 to be quite as exciting for me personally as 2018 was – at least for someone who loves traveling as much as I do, but I am going to travel across one major threshold in 2019 – I’m going to reach the age of 70. Ojala!
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