1 The DC3 Fisk was flying that day from Managua to Puerto Cabezas tried to take off four times before actually getting off the ground. Says Fisk: “On the fourth try we got airborne. By this time everyone in the plane, having done his or her rosary, got up to go to the bathroom almost at once. I was in the back of the plane where I could see holes in the fuselage from bullets. The barbs of the pierced metal were pointing inward. I was nervous. Seeing everyone get up to go to the bathroom made me want to get up too, which I did, but I had forgotten to undo my seatbelt, and my entire seat rose with me when I stood. Apparently, the plane was retrofitted with seats when it wasn’t being used for military cargo and the grounds crew didn’t see the need to spend the time bolting the seats in place. Of course, any crash would have created a sardine can of human bodies stacked on top of each other.” 2 LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. The LEED rating system is a way to gauge the “greenness” of a building. See Chapter 11 for a detailed history and explanation of the LEED rating system. 3 The Raza Unida Party (RUP), or Partido de la Raza Unida in Spanish, was the political arm of the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It began in Crystal City, Texas, in 1970 and later spread to California and Colorado. RUP was a viable third party in Texas politics in the 1970s with members winning local and county-wide elections in south Texas. The party even fielded candidates for Texas governor throughout the decade. 4 The Mac 128 that Fisk used to do his work with the Sandinistas was probably the first Mac 128 in all of Nicaragua and one of the first purchased in Austin, Texas. 5 In 1987, Benjamin Linder, an American engineer working on a hydroelectric dam for the village of San José do Borcay, was shot and killed by a band of Contra rebels. His death sparked intense debate in the U.S. media and government over the “covert” war in Nicaragua and eventually spurred the U.S. Congress into officially prohibiting U.S. funding for the war. 6 Nicaragua has a rich supply of high-alumina clay kaolinite which,
BEAUTY AND INSPIRATION when heated to a high temperature, can replace Portland cement as a binder for concrete.
24
Spring 2014