The view from my window

Here's the view from my window in Cusack Hall lately:

The new Gaffney Hall - it will be our home health center for Sisters who need some assistance in their daily living - is going up right across from my room, and it's been illuminating and fun to watch the men at work.  An astonishing level of planning and coordination and complex ordering are required for even a simple building like this one: for us, watching the assurance with which the tasks are done and the pieces come together is a joy.  I think our workers are having a good time, too.  Aside from having a first class view of Lake Washington while they work, they're being treated to coffee and Joan Holiday's cookies - and, of course and most important, earning a good wage. 

By now, as I prepare to head to the airport and to El Salvador, the building has progressed quite a bit: almost all the siding is up, the roofing is being completed, and interior walls are beginning to be formed.  The promise is that when I return in June, it'll be almost ready for the move-in. 

Excess

The first day after coming home to Bellevue, I needed to make a trip to Bellevue Square, our local mall, to get a new battery compartment for my Macbook laptop. Now Bell Square is not just any mall - it's full of high-end luxury stores, and I've heard that it makes more money per square foot than any other mall in America. So you can imagine.

The first thing I saw as I walked in was a store called "Free People." "Free People" - I'm not even going to look up the URL - features fluffy dresses for teenage girls. The next thing I saw was a giant poster at a store called Oakley: "Join the Rebellion!" said the poster. "Join the Rebellion" was surrounded by photos of a guy in swim trunks and sunglasses (sunglasses being what they sell: Join the Rebellion, wear expensive sunglasses).

What would Libyans and Tunisians and Egyptians think of those notions of freedom and rebellion?

After I got my new battery, I walked over to the nearby QFC supermarket and marvelled at the sheer excess of offerings in any category. In El Salvador, I can find three kinds of flour in the supermarkets: white wheat flour, corn flour, rice flour. Period. In QFC, there must be 65 different kinds of flour - rye, barley, amaranth, quinoa, teff, red winter wheat, and so on and on. There was a display case with 23 different varieties of gourmet chocolate bars. Mind you, it's grand fun to shop there: you can find anything and everything. But for someone who's been living in Central America, it's beyond excessive.

I know I could find grocery stores in the Seattle area that would look a lot more like my Salvadoran supermarkets, and I'd feel more at home there. The flashy wealthiness of Bellevue, apparently untouched by three years of economic collapse, imagines a world full of people who think they should have anything they could possibly want. I hope and believe that is not the truth of my Bellevue neighbors - but it is the truth of the merchandizing that surrounds us.