Near Love Stories
by J. B. Hogan

Watching the side of her face as she told about living in the mountainous countryside above Matagalpa where she worked on a coffee cooperative - one I had visited, though not when she was there - I remembered seeing Anna Lee for the first time. It was at some sort of pre-demonstration meeting at a local church and there were speakers just back from Central America.

Anna Lee was there with a girlfriend, a really pretty girl, and both of them were probably not that far out of their teens at the time. I remember, despite the other girl's good looks, being attracted to and impressed by Anna Lee. She was a good sized girl, with a noticeable physical presence, but I was just as interested in her behavior.

While the speakers droned on, Anna Lee and her friend - both of whom seemed completely relaxed and somewhat detached from the proceedings - would whisper to each other, shake their heads, and roll their eyes at particularly boring, pretentious, or stodgy moments in the presentation. They didn't disrupt the proceedings in any way but I found their irreverence, especially Anna Lee's, to be amusing and refreshing.

Lefty and religious gatherings always seemed to be too dense, too heavy, too lacking in humor, and to see a bright young woman poking holes in the process where it needed them was just fine with me. Somewhere in the middle of some lame discussion of "violence on the right and violence on the left," I saw Anna Lee shake her head in disgust, roll her eyes dramatically at her friend and then stand up and walk out, the friend in tow. I could barely keep myself from laughing out loud.

*    *    *

Not long after the Calero demonstration, a group came through town with a film and presentation about the death of Ben Linder. Ben Linder had gone to Nicaragua to work much as Anna Lee had, and in fact they had known each other, meeting at occasional gatherings of internacionalistas - international workers - in lovely, hilly Matagalpa in the north of the country. Linder had been working out in the countryside near the combat zone, an area so dangerous the workers required armed Sandinista troops to protect them from the Washington-supported contras or counter-revolutionaries.

One spring day in 1987, no doubt a typically humid tropical one with light puffy cumulus clouds floating overhead, Linder's group - working in the countryside - was ambushed by M-16 carrying contras whose indiscriminate firing left the young U.S. worker and several of his protectors dead or dying. When word of the American's death leaked out, the Reagan administration - working from what evidence no one ever knew - declared Linder a combatant for the Sandinista enemy and therefore deserving of his fate. The group bringing Linder's story around the U.S. had, of course, a very different story.

The small auditorium on the University of Arizona campus where the film and discussion were presented was nearly full - at least one hundred or so people attended - and I got there with the main crowd. By chance, Anna Lee was coming up the aisle I was going down and we stopped to visit. She told me about knowing Ben Linder and I told her about visiting his grave on my last trip to Nicaragua just a few months before. When the presentation began a few moments later, we found seats together on a row near the front of the auditorium. I sat on the aisle, Anna Lee in the seat next to me on my left.