MONDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 1999
56,000 Orange “No Contra Aid” Stickers!
By Phil Hughes[Phil Hughes lives in Esteli. He can be reached at fyl@a42.com or tel. 011-505-841-2675]
My life has been a series of logical but totally unplanned transitions. After working at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation [in Washington State] I learned enough about that industry to become an anti-Nuclear activist. I got involved in a project called the Pacific Peacemaker which was a boat that had an anti-nuclear mission in Micronesia.
My friend Janie who got me involved in that project then suggested NicaTech as a group that might be of interest. This was early in the 1980s and my interest in Appropriate Technology fit so I got involved. Besides being involved in material aid, I videotaped Mira Brown's slide presentation about the work of Ben Linder and, on a more depressing note, the rally at the University of Washington after Ben's death.
While my initial involvement was to do good--that is, offer aid--I got more and more involved in preventing bad. The version of bad at the time was Ronald Reagan's Contra Aid. I did a lot of speaking but the most effective thing I feel I did was to have some bright orange stickers printed that said NO CONTRA AID on them. I initially printed, as I remember, three thousand.
Giving out the stickers at meetings was all I had planned. But, the initial printing was quickly exhausted. The final print count was 56,000. While I lived in Seattle, people brought them to other cities. For example, one person told me they saw lots of them in Boston.
All during this time I never traveled to Nicaragua. I justified this by saying that my income bought stickers, gave me a place to show videos once a week and such. But, there certainly was the fear factor there as well. Not just fear of the US war in Nicaragua but the language barrier, the weather and, in general, fear of the unknown.
Life changed in 1999 when I went to Costa Rica on a business-related trip. I loved it there and moved there in January 2002. It was a great transition for me but a trip to Nicaragua reminded me of how much I knew about Nicaragua and the struggle for self-determination. I talked to people at an educational cooperative here (Cooperative Christine King) and was amazed at how much could be done with so little money. I would say an order of magnitude more than in Costa Rica.
Today, I live in Esteli. I have a small house in the very pro-Sandinista barrio of El Rosario. The fact that my dog has a red and black tongue has been a real plus around here. I still have a "day job" in the US which I do over the Internet. In addition, I volunteer time at the cooperative and maintain the www.nicaliving.com web site.
Labels: Archives