Let’s go fly a kite

50 more things to do before you graduate: Meet a friendly Brunswick neighbor: Jaime Reatiraza

A Bowdoin Neighbor: Meet Jaime Reatiraza I first met Jaime when I was five years old. He was working as a security guard for the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. I spent half an hour each Saturday wandering around campus while my sister had a piano lesson. One day, when I passed through the revolving glass door of the museum, Jaime came up to me and asked if I would like a guided tour. He was a small Filipino man with beady eyes and a sincere smile. I agreed and followed him through high-ceilinged rooms. We continued to spend Saturdays looking at artwork together, discussing photography exhibits and examining ancient artifacts. For the next couple of years, Jaime and I shared this exchange each Saturday.

50 more things to do before you graduate: Unwind with Labyrinths

Cost: Free Child's pose...downward dog...cobra! Lay on your back. Close your eyes. Focus on your breathing. My yoga instructor's words echoed in my ears as I wearily lifted my eyelids to check that I was in the correct position. Still shaking from coffee that I had consumed the night before, I found it exceedingly difficult to hold a pose. What was I doing standing on one leg rocking back and forth like a sapling on a windy day? Soothing meditation music began playing softly in the background. My thoughts shifted from overwhelming future obligations to immediate present. I forgot about papers, tests, exams, practice, meetings, everything. By the end of the hour, I had blissfully forgotten about my heavy workload and heavy eyelids. Yoga is just one way to reach a meditative state, to escape from daily stresses; everyone has a different way of achieving inner peace. Some play piano. Some might sit beside the café and drool over the smell of freshly baked cookies. Finding your "special place" is not always easy, however. I did a little bit of research and came across something new: the practice of labyrinth meditation.

50 more things to do before you graduate

Anna Ackerman

Columnist

April 2, 2010

Date: April 11, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Place: The field behind Watson Arena.

Basking in the sun on a window seat in my Sculpture II class at Fort Andross, I sat mindlessly folding paper strips in a star-shaped pattern. It had been a tedious learning process, but I was finally able to complete the origami sequence with my eyes closed. Just as I was dozing off into a daydream, my enthusiastic Cuban-American professor, Nestor Gil, woke me with his booming voice projecting over the classroom as if it were a Broadway stage. He was announcing his latest project—a kite-flying event. With the help of the Brunswick community, Gil will fly 59 Cuban-pattern kites made of wood, paper, tape, wire and string with cloth tails in the skies above Bowdoin's athletic fields.

Gil explained the significance of the kite-flying event to me later in an e-mail.

"The kite is a thing that reminds us of childhood—even if we have never flown a kite before. I think kite-flying can activate that same part of our remembering. It is a day of running back and forth, trying to force the form to fly, feeling the air into and out of lungs, the yelling and laughing, and vain celebrations when one goes momentarily aloft," he said.

Gil hopes to bring the community together for a physical experience of space, wind and bodies.

"In sculptural terms, the event is really a living, active, sensory installation".

This event is one of Cuba Week's many activities. There will be Cuban Salsa Dance classes, a documentary on the Cuban Health Care System at the Frontier Cafe, a presentation of the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana at Cram Alumni Barn and a Latin Dance Band Concert. But what's the Brunswick connection? Why is Brunswick a sister-city to Trinidad?

Maine has had a long political, economic and personal relationship with Cuba. In the mid-nineteenth century, when Cuba was still a Spanish colony, shipping traffic between Portland, Maine and Trinidad, Cuba was bustling. Maine state officials established a permanent post in Trinidad from the U.S. Government, and members of shipping families from Portland regularly occupied this post. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Trinidad supplied Maine with sugar and other sugar products, such as molasses and rum. Maine provided consumers in Cuba with potatoes.

In 2001, Brunswick adopted the resolution to establish a sister-city relationship with Trinidad to promote creative and non-political interactions between the two cultures. The Sister City Program and "citizen diplomat" tradition was started by President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s to foster global cooperation.

Gil will be launching kites on April 11 as a way to introduce the Brunswick community to an art that was passed down through generations.

"I learned to make [kites] from my father when I was a kid in Florida. He learned from his father when he was a kid in Cuba. There is a political and personal element to this work which deals with the distances that political conflict can put between families, between people and their histories. For example, my grandfather was alive until I was an adolescent, but I never met him because of the unfortunate direction the relationship between the US and Cuba has taken over the years," he said.

The kite-flying event will be patience-testing, similar to folding hundreds of paper strips in Fort Andross for my sculpture project—or for Gil, creating 59 delicate kites. Gil is sure, however, that the event will take flight, even if not a single kite does. What are you waiting for? Go fly a kite!

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