Letters in the Time of Corona

     I have been wanting to share my notes from the book  What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché (Penguin Random House 2019) since I first read it several years ago, after my first trip to El Salvador.  Here are my notes transcribed, without regard to conventions of grammar.  The references are to page numbers.  Sometimes the notes are very sketchy, with the hope that they will jog my memory later.  The notes are illegible in many places and consequently the transcription may contain misspelled words and typos.  Sometimes a foreign word is noted without translation.

Page 1

p. 307  palapas     umbrellas?
                    19 1/2 x 10 1/2 x 25

p. 308  Leonel advice:
     try not to stand out
     don't wear blue jeans
     fix hair
     wear dress
     pay attention but don't get caught
     be distant - American

p. 317  campo
NGO     cambios
kumbayas

 p. 328  Monseñor
     "This is my role as pastor:  to animate the just
and the good, and to denounce that which is not good."

Page 2

p. 331  what is revolutionary?  to tell the truth

p.  332 the war summarized

p. 356  People think that what happens to someone else has nothing to do with them.  They think that what happens in one place doesn't matter any place else."

The Captive Mind  by Czeslaw Milosz     Polish
"If a thing exists in one place it will exist everywhere."

Page 3

View from a 2nd story balcony in Ahuachapan in 2020

 

Cause of revolution  

p. 373

     Vō Nguyên  Giap
General Giap
one of the great military strategists of 20th Century

Salvadoran guerrilla fighters fought like Vietnamese

maquiladora
a village p. 378
  capinol seeds

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