New Names and faces; a young man without a country

My brother Steve arrived for a six month stay on Wednesday. We enjoyed a couple of days bumming around together and lounging around our pool. This morning we cut the apron strings and dropped him at his apartment in centro. Tonight will be his first night alone in Mazatlan. He is happy as there are many sports stations on his TV, but most in Spanish. I suspect his Espanol will soon eclipse ours.

After we left Steve off we met two different young men that we are sure were put into our paths for a reason. The first is a young man named Mark from Portland, Oregon. He was raised in Philadelphia, but calls the Hawthorne District of Portland home. He was living in a one man tent on the beach in a secluded part of Stone Island. He has been hitching and riding buses around the world. He spent time in eastern Europe including about a year in Prague, Czech Republic where he worked at a hospital. He is currently working his way south for a spring wedding of a friend in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He was suspicious of us until I told him where to find where Jack Kerouac had stayed in Mazatlan and topped it off with directions to where Herman Melville had stayed. We discussed Ginsberg's "Howl" and I told him to check out Ferlingetti. Janice's big heart won the rest. He will visit on Tuesday to get a home cooked meal, wash his clothes in our washer and dryer and enjoy some time in bourgeois comfort, before he returns to his tent. During the two and a half years I bummed around the country in the 60's this occasionally happened to me, so it feels good to pass it on.

Next came a young man who told me his name is Jose Daniel Cortes Noriega, but in the US he goes by Daniel Noriega.  Daniel will be eleven years old on January 25th. He noticed Janice working on her Spanish homework and came over and we thought it was to help, but instead he was wanting to learn Spanish better. Daniel's sister and brother-in-law run the small beachside cantina we were lounging in and he was visiting them for the day. He lives with his grandparents in Centro. His mother is in the US working to get him back in the country. He was in the US from the time he was two until he was eight and a half when it was found his papers were not in order. His mother is working on getting him back to the US. Daniel is finding school in the 5th grade in Mazatlan hard as he speaks English like an American, but is slowly learning Spanish. When I asked him if his schoolmates were helping him, he just said the teachers were trying to help. This is what I mean a young man without a country. He speaks and thinks like an American, but the US considers him a Mexican and Mexicans consider him an American. He understands the US better than most American kids. When asked why he wants to return, he said that he wants to be with his mother and in America he is free and can become anything that he wants to be. We talked for a couple of hours and we had a swimming race in the water.  Next week we will return and do our Spanish homework with him.

Our friends Michael and Maxine from B.C., as well as my friend Cliff from England arrived this week.
We are unsure of what we will do for Halloween, but I am sure we will report next week.
Adios for now, Joel, Janice, Ollie