ESPERANZA
by Raul Gatica
Hope is always fat; she doesn’t do aerobics or lift weights. She is not trying to keep her figure. She wouldn’t be caught dead in a beauty salon or at a fashion show checking up on the fancy dresses and outfits, because she doesn’t have an image to protect. Hope is very strange because she doesn’t bother smiling at anyone. She doesn’t use make-up, or worry about anyone doing her nails or filing down her calluses.
Hope’s feet are full of cracks because she walks so much; swellings break out on her skin and her soul from all the beatings she’s taken. Her hair is dried out, but she doesn’t complain about anything, and she doesn’t burden anyone with her grief. Hope just is, despite everything, and she never explains herself, she just happens, and that’s the end of it.
Hope always rises up from the left side of the chest from the heart and never anywhere else – but not because she is a communist. She’s so way beyond Marxisms, Trotskyisms, Maoisms, and those other etceteras; at the most she is a little anarchist, because she wants to live in freedom without any kind of dictatorship holding her prisoner.
Hope limps sometimes, when her supports are demolished, but even though dragging a bit, she carries on with her journey and she is never polluted by hatred or by people’s dark side. She doesn’t ask for accounts, she doesn’t judge, she doesn’t make accusations, or forgive, she just keeps going like any joe heading for home, at the most she beats a retreat when brothers begin to fight amongst themselves. Hope is what makes life go, the very power that makes it possible for love to get to the next rest station without getting tripped up.
Hope helps others, and that is why they think she is a masochist, because without even blinking she puts up with the shit that they throw at her, the suffering they weigh down on her trying to make her lose the path that she walks on, her pockets full of tomorrows. That is why she is no use to the cult of martyrdom, or in the ode to the unfortunate ones. Hope never beats out the tortoises but she manages to trick them before despair begins to strangle the heart, saying that all is lost and we might as well just get used to it.
Hope doesn’t have a face and can’t be grasped; her power and presence can only be sensed. We can smell her and we can taste her when she shines out of our own depths, in our very own nest of spiders. That is where we go down into her, and emerge infected all the way to the marrow. She shows up, body and soul, in ordinary human life, right there where everything’s gone wrong, where all defeats flourish, where there is no chance for success and where disasters collect prizes. Hope is the right to be imperfect, to be perfectly human.
Hope is a whore who’s a little strange – she cannot be bought or sold in any supermarket or at the corner store, but she can be found in the same old place, right where no one had thought of it and . . . she’s totally free! For her nothing is certain, in the middle of all the disillusionments and hypocrisy, she only manages to pull everything together for this day alone.
Hope lives in the pores of all those who have fallen down, of those who are exhausted, who cry, who fail, who make ridiculous mistakes, in those who once couldn’t do something, and then later learned to do it better than many others, in those who betrayed others and then weren’t able to build up enough courage to recognize it and not do it again, in those who in a passion forgot about principles. Hope places her bet right in the middle of those who have given up and run away. She cuts right through the body of those who feel, and appear to others to have been shattered. Here, religiously, is the only place where Hope flourishes, where everyone believed, where they were utterly convinced that there was nothing at all.
Hope doesn’t live across the street, and she isn’t sticking her tongue out at us from the house next door. She doesn’t live in someone else’s skin. She’s not peering at us with a neighbour’s eyes: rather she can be found within ourselves, right when we feel our heart and soul breaking at the rejection by another, because in the end, we are that other as well. Hope is here and now, feeding on pain and joy and smiles from the past and the future. She has within our own bare-assed dignity an indestructible home.
It’s true that a lot of the time Hope is one-eyed, if not completely blind, perhaps that’s why she falls so much although she never eats dust forever: Hope is limitless patience, pig-headed resistance, constructive rebelliousness, never-conforming, everyday- protest, stubborn love and tenderness.
Hope shits her pants laughing at those perfect ones who won’t admit to ever slipping up and who end up believing that they don’t need anything or anyone that only their heart exists. She gets right in the face of with those who think like clockwork. Tenacious, she ignores invitations to quit fighting because of disillusionment, comfort or exhaustion. She is bored by “sure things”, by “no mistakes”, where everyone lives in conformity; she’s just a sharp rock that can’t be thrown aside. Hope’s stomach aches from laughing so hard when she sees them trying to turn her into apathy that watches worms eat through skeletons.
Hope never retreats before the unexpected revelation of betrayal, cheating or lies, because there’s nowhere for her to go. They can grind her into pinole* but can never stone her, the most that they can make her do is retreat and suck back a few trickles of salty water, but she carries on, because if she stops, she dies. Within Hope’s wide breast, cheating and lying to save some and hurt others, throwing words like beasts at the backs of our brothers and sisters, dressing up and hiding faults, are all pestilences that end up without teeth or molars.
But Hope loves the wild life, when we don’t want her around and we even sweep her out of the way with a broom, she packs her bags quietly, without anyone noticing, but she doesn’t leave. She steps aside, but she doesn’t leave. Invariably Hope refuses to go, and if we really insist that she does, she’ll get all skinny and grimy and she’ll whither away, but she won’t leave.
Hope has many faces and sometimes she trots out all grungy or all dressed up. She is a lady, noble, a gentlewoman even. Or she poses regularly as a gentleman, but a ruffian as well, an anti-hero of all the battles. She doesn’t like to be around for the victory or the glory, and that is why few remember her even when it is she who forges the winners. When the time comes for recognition, she steps aside and leaves the path clear for the victors. They never hang medals on her and they never make monuments to her, and they don’t celebrate her birthday, and they never serenade her with songs. Hope is a place in anyone’s heart and that’s that.
Hope has no respect, and pays no attention to winter or to spring. She is hot in the cold times, and cool in the days of heat. She is tenderness in a bottle, thrown in the ocean for all prisoners in every place; she is the puddle of water in endless sand for those suffering torture, and dust of forgetting for the father abandoned by his son. Hope is the certainty that there is a world beyond our miseries.
Dark circles grow under the eyes that Hope doesn’t have. She scares away nightmares with dreams. Branches grow in the body that she doesn’t have so that those who have given up all hope can cling to her, the lovers who have lost the love of their life, the kiss that never arrived because it was never even sent, the night with its goodbye unsheathed in a hand that doesn’t sleep.
That is why Hope doesn’t want to hang around by herself, and she looks for a partner who is the biggest, the most important one, who will never back down. She found Rights walking upright, pretentious, proud, full of himself, even. Together they invented the Right to Hope, who doesn’t mess around with subtleties, or around the edges of things, or even less, with half-measures.
The Right to Hope is outrageous, without manners or delicacy; with his body marching out front, even if he ends up stabbed and bleeding. He is without god, without boss, without father and without a fucking mother. He uses his tricks to shake our brains out, he yells with a loud voice, uttering bad words to those who choose to be deaf, or those who think that their life is over. Or when we’re at the very edge of suicide and we say, “Fuck this! I don’t give a shit! I am a disaster, abandoned, unloved.”
The Right to Hope doesn’t give a shit about the proper way of doing things, or the normal places they should be done, because historically he does everything backwards, with unexplainable results, for example, when a community or a person who has been beaten down, rises up.
The Right to Hope is the only new shoot that never gets crushed, that is never humble, never a conformist; he doesn’t care if they yell at him, “Big, Fat, Egoist!” He is so sure of himself that he doesn’t give a whistle what they say behind his back: The Right to Hope bends back the blade and the point of all daggers and their vileness.
Raúl Gatica
Translated by Emilie Smith
One of the co-ordinators of the trip was Jessica Farias from Horizons of Friendship, the organization that first developed the idea of conducting a delegation to a Mesoamerican country specifically oriented for youths. Jessica was wonderful with every aspect of the trip from planning, timing, and even some unexpected translating. The second co-ordinator was Tucker Barton, a World Issues and Drama teacher at Trinity College School. She helped share her views and knowledge about travelling to foreign countries, and issues such as foreign debt, free trade, and many more. 
Our trip started out quite busy, because we were there for both learning and helping out wherever we could. We wanted to give back to the organizations that had let us into their world and shared their stories with us. Our hardest but most fulfilling task was the painting of the guesthouse for the educational organization Madres Maestras (Teaching Mothers). This organization sets up pre-school centres that provide learning for both children and a member of their family, and it provides education in many areas that have no access to schools, like the one we visited that was practically built into the side of a large hill.
Also among the numerous organizations we met with there was IDEMI, a youth group that promotes AIDS awareness in schools. Both our groups had the chance to interact with each other for the day that we all banded together and helped out at a local school. The school children were all giddy with excitement whenever they saw us walking about doing either tree planting, painting, or even helping out in the classroom. 
We were well-taken care of by the organization Interamerican Cooperative Insitute (ICI) Panama, whose facilities we stayed at. During our stay, we enjoyed many slideshows and presentations put on by different staff members of ICI, all of which were about current issues that Panama or Latin America (or even the world) faced. The subjects included free trade, environmental globalization, poverty, etc. We also experienced the tourist’s view of Panama, with a tour of the Panama Canal, a national park, a marine center, a visit to the beach, and even a traditional dance performed by a group of local children. Getting to see both sides of Panama really made us feel a special bond to the country, and it’s something we will continue to apply to many more of our journeys in life. Our group got along great, and at the end of this experience we were all glad to have been a part of it. After all, “it’s not where you go, it’s who you go with” that makes the difference. 
Changing the world is a slow process. As we’ve found in the Community Outreach Program, engaging and educating people about the challenges communities face in the South isn’t always an easy job. Very often you find yourself frustrated at the apparent snails pace of change. 
