La Libertad

Yesterday morning I was lucky enough to catch President Obama's Inaugural Address. When our shotty wifi at Tres Pisos failed us, we sprinted to one of our favorite little cafes, Euro Cafe, and huddled around a computer, glued to the screen. I have never been particularly politically minded and always felt I could pay better attention to current events, but being removed from the US while I watched and listened, I felt a complicated swelling of emotion.

I got goosebumps when Obama said: "We the people declare today that the most evident of truth that all of us are created equal -- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth." This last part was especially moving to me. I felt that Obama's references to freedom were the most touching part of his speech.

Throughout his oration I felt proud and patriotic, which I wouldn't say I am generally more than the average person. I also felt an overwhelming sense of good fortune that I am an American. My good fortune sentiments were tempered however with strange pangs of guilt and cloudy confusion. Only having been in Granada for three weeks, I am only very beginning to digest the situation here: the poverty, the lack of schooling opportunities, the few good jobs that are reserved for the wealthy and connected. I think my guilt and confusion were (and are) tied together. In many ways, simply because of where I was born, my life has and will have countless more opportunities than the people and specifically girls who live here. Why do I deserve a chance at a better life than anyone here? The truth is I don't. But the reasons for the realities of life here in Nica and the realities of life in the US are varied, complex, intertwined, long-standing and ever-changing. One of my goals for the coming months is to learn everything I can about the "why" in order to better understand a "how" for improvement. 
I know there is so much that the people of this country and of the world need, but Obama's reference to freedom is one that is particularly lacking here and in the world at large. Freedom of choices, freedom of religion, sexual freedom, political freedom, freedom of expression, and maybe most of all freedom to succeed are things all people deserve but very few possess. I'm not at all making a commentary on prescription to the American brand of democracy, but rather revealing my thoughts (however scattered) on what it means to have personal and real agency. I think every person on this earth is born with the right to be free and a right to dream.


Obama proclaimed "We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal not just in the eyes of God but also in our own."  How far we have to go, not just as Americans but as a global community, to make that dream a reality.