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Sick of the Revolution.BY DEB OLIN UNFERTH, - - - - Part One My boyfriend and I went to join the revolution. Nicaragua had the best revolution, he and I agreed. There were several other revolutions in the area—in El Salvador and in Guatemala, in Honduras, in Panama (sort of). My boyfriend said we should get shots and malaria pills and that we would ride the bus there. I knew my mother and father were not going to go for this so I didn't tell them. I wrote them a letter from Mexico. Actually I wrote the letter in Nogales on the American side of the border, then I crossed the border and mailed it from the Nogales post office on the Mexican side. The letter went something like:
- - - - Two things: I was 18, and I had recently become a Christian. I was heavy into John Calvin and Kierkegaard and liberation theology. I may not have understood any of it, but my older boyfriend did (he was 20) and that's all that really mattered—that somebody around there knew what was going on even if it wasn't me. - - - - My father still tells the story of the time I went to join the revolution. That girl told us nothing, he says. I had no idea. I open the mailbox and there's a letter from Mexico saying she's off to foment the revolution. He used to shout it, She told me nothing! and point at me—there she is, the traitor, the tramp. Later he said it sadly, shaking his head: I had no idea. Later he said it with pride. His loony girl, a bit like him. Do you know he once owned a Communist bookstore? Now he tells it like an old joke. So one day I open the mailbox ... - - - - As it happens, it was the very end of the revolution, the year my boyfriend and I went, but the way it looked to us, we were arriving at the very beginning. It was a new world order. Everybody in the world was talking about it. The revolution was coming over the ocean. It was floating up through Texas. It could spread over America. People were writing their ideas in the papers. But a year later the Berlin Wall came down and soon after that the Sandinistas were gone, the Cold War was over, and the FMLN signed a peace accord. By the time we arrived, the decay had set in but we didn't know. There were a lot of us like this on the scene.
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