As seen from a city bus, and JFK's Alliance for Progress

From the bus (my favorite series):

A small child, no more than six, probably five years old, walking down a busy commercial street. With an even smaller monkey on his back.

"Solo con rosas podemos" (We only can with roses) -- written one word per white fabric panel and hung from the popular cemetery (popular in the Spanish sense of -not elite-) I don't know what this means, but the link above has a series of photographs, and it feels profound even without knowing the precise meaning, at least to me.

Rappers on the bus (good actually) -- with the message: wouldn't you rather us be on your bus, singing and rapping, than robbing and hurting people on the streets? (I would, for the record.)

The conference was kind of awful, and I'm not the only one who thought so. My friend Diana went too, in the afternoon, arriving past the point where I could take no more, to put things as melodramatically as possible.

Sometimes it feels like words are rocks people hurl without regard to their size or fitness, just to see how far they'll go, or whether they'll skip.

Sometimes a photograph can stop the barrage of words with little meaning. Ciudad Kennedy: Memoria y Realidad. (The four year olds' birthday party a few months back was in Kennedy.)

My favorite part of this exhibit is "Johnes y Jackelines," a series of school photographs of children named John and Jackeline. The Kennedys apparently visited Colombia in 1961 to promote the Alliance for Progress ("We, the American Republics, hereby proclaim our decision to unite in a common effort to bring our people accelerated economic progress and broader social justice within the framework of personal dignity and individual liberty.")

Perhaps as a result, half the photos are of people posing with JFK and Jackie cutouts. How far we've fallen in the world's regard.