All the excerpts were taken (with permission from the author and publisher) from The Death of Ben Linder

Soul Searching
I'm sitting on the stoop of the house where the two of us from INE stay in El Cua. It's Friday afternoon. There is one street in town which makes the stoop a wonderful place to watch the world go by as the cool evening breeze picks up. Since I started writing, a group of school children came by pulling on their teachers' hands, then several campesinos [peasants] on horses, a couple of soldiers off on patrol, and just now the kids came running by after being let out of school. In front of the house, across the street is a field, then the river Cua, then up the little hill across the river are several mortars and heavy artillery.

That is what is so strange for me. In the midst of intense country calm with thick green hills of coffee, bananas and corn, the war goes on...

After spending many hours of soul searching yesterday I finally began to understand my life in El Cua. It is intense. At first I thought it was peaceful, but now I see that it has an intensity which blanks out everything else.

Ever since I left home I keep finding myself challenged and being unsure if I can meet the challenges. Somehow I do but it is always so hard. Will I keep doing this to myself? Probably i will. Who knows why.

In times like this I always think of my unicycle trip [down the Pacific Coast]. It was almost abandoned when Brian told me I had to do it. And I did. Relatively speaking it was easier than this. I know that I'll get the project going. I really do. What is hard is the intensity of it all. The beauty mixed with the war, the abundant land and the poverty and myself, also a contradiction with the land.

About the conditions
For this cash they sold themselves to the coffee barons. "Sold" is the only way to describe it. To simply say "worked for" doesn't describe the slavelike work and the subhuman living conditions.

This is the key to understanding the historical violence of underdevelopment. It is a much deper, more painful, violence than that of mortars, guns and helicopters.I see people shitting upstream from where others get drinking water. I see people taking water out of the center of the river because it is "cleaner." The other day I saw the mother of five kids using her feet to wash the corn for the day's tortillas, the same feet which walk around the kitchen where the pig, the dog, and the kids all sleep. The littlest three kids all have the distended stomachs of parasites with malnutrition. But it is more than just health. Hours a say women carry firewood and water. Why are there so few oxen? Were people so much cheaper than animals, especially women? Why were relatively well-planned water systems put in for the coffee processing, but not for people? Was coffee and the money it made that much more important than the lives of som many children? Education wasn't "needed" for the mozos [day labors], neither was health care, nor shoes (except for the men in the fields), nor a house which offered the basics for a dignified life. All that I wrote about are part of the violence of Cua/ Bocay. Violence which year after year repeated itself. The effects are still deeply woven into many people's lives and habits.

From a letter by Ben Linder, September 24, 1983
...it is hard for us to imagine the meaning of a paved street. In Nicaragua there are two seasons- wet and dry. When it is wet the mud is two feet deep. When it is dry the dust permeates everything. Eating becomes like a picnic at the beach, all the food crunches with dust. Slowly more and more streets are being paved.

...But that is only the physical benefit. The more important change is the feeling of being in control...walking out at night and not being afraid of being shot by the police, as was the case before 1979...establishing control of the neighborhood and the work place... in education and health care. This is control. Granted there is still a long way to go, but people are still fighting. Not fighting against the government, but rather fighting old habits, odl customs and the results of the centuries of oppression. Unfortunately, at the borders, the struggle goes on militarily. The old enemies keep fighting with more and more U.S. support. It is such a waste. I guess our government knows quite well how to drain an economy through military spending."