The Rum Diary

The film The Rum Diary is based on a book written by Hunter S. Thompson. The movie was directed by Bruce Robinson and was filmed in Puerto Rico. American actor Johnny Depp  interpreted an American journalist called Paul Kemp who hasn't been successful in the United States and started working for the San Juan Star newspaper in our island during the 1960s. 

The Rum Diary is similar to the Jamaica Kincaid's novel A Small Place. Jamaica Kincaid attacked the tourists in a way the reader can assume the tourist's role and felt offended by her writing. Paul Kemp arrived to Puerto Rico without any knowledge about the island. Kincaid said about this: "A tourist is an ugly human being." And why not? At first, he didn't know anything about our culture, the Puerto Rican lifestyle or even the economic status. He was an outsider who was hired to write about horoscopes until he faced the reality of Puerto Rico and started caring about the problems in the island after relating with Sala. Kemp became more interested in the situations of the island: poverty, alcoholism, ignorance, etc. 

Kemp changed throughout the movie. His transition can be defined with two scenes. The first was at the beginning of the movie. The taxi driver asked him something in Spanish and he replied he don't speak Spanish. This is a clear example of his outsider (tourist) view. The second scene is the one at the bowling alley. Kemp asked a tourist: "What you like most of Puerto Rico?"  The tourist replied: “The bowling alley and the casinos." Kemp asked him: "Have you seen a lot of the island?".  The tourist's  wife replied: “We never leave the hotel. It is not safe”.  His last question was: “But you are having fun, right? The woman replied: “Oh yeah, lots of fun! “. Here is Kincaid's voice: "The tourist is an ugly human being." After that, he wanted to write about the issues of Puerto Rico and he can be seen as an insider or partially insider (traveler). 

At the end of the movie, Kemp went back to the United States and became a successful writer. It is also a transition from an unsuccessful to a successful journey. It was a change of his perspective toward Puerto Rico and its locals. Kemp was able to understand the issue's location of the Puerto Ricans and sympathize with them in a good way.

"Teaching" and "Helping" by Jim Cooper

It was assigned to read two chapters from the book Down on the Island by Jim Cooper. In the first one, "Teaching", Cooper expresses his point of view about the syllabus for the English class he was teaching at the Colegio located in Mayagüez. He noticed how much difficult was for the students to learn English because most of them didn't know it very well and therefore they didn't understand the readings they had to do at first. After he visited some public schools, he also noticed some of the teachers were having trouble to speak English. Cooper proposed a syllabus which included strictly language courses to the freshman and short stories and novels to the sophomore students. He would loved to stated that the language program he set up solved the student's language problems, but it didn't at all.

In the second chapter, "Helping", Cooper expresses his point of view about a method implemented by the students from our island. This method consisted of 'helping throughout cheating'. How this can be possible? Puerto Ricans, as Jim Cooper demonstrated, are the most hospitable people in the world and they tend to do whatever they can in order to help others. Many of the students seek for an extra help in their classmates, but this attitude was not only in their everyday work but during the time they were taking exams too. However, students learn how they must behave in the school since they are kids at the primary levels. All I want to say with this statement is that students have been taught since their primary levels to be cooperative with each other.

"When I started asking students why they were looking at another student's paper during an exam, they replied with no embarrassment: because I don't know the answer, and maybe he does. If I asked the other student why he let him look at his paper, I got some such answer as: but I'm just trying to help him. He's my friend."

We all know that this kind of help is actually cheating, but the students didn't realize it. It is also worrying that Cooper stated teachers also promote the cheating attitude. I think we must do everything possible to earn our grade by our own effort; not at the expense of others. Students should help them, but in a good way working on cooperative teaching or learning, but they should not cheat. I'm against it.

Internal Journey: A Reflection on my Journey Journal

As part of our Journey in Literature class, it was assigned a special project that consisted in writing into a journal for eight weeks. At first, I felt scared because I'm not very good in English grammar and vocabulary and I was thinking about  how I was supposed to write in it having this kind of situation. The first reflection took place in the classroom and it was like a challenge for me. First, I must keep my hand moving during ten minutes, but it was  difficult because I had to translate all the thoughts in my mind to the English language and my hand started to hurt at the fifth minute, approximately. Second, to lose control and go for the jugular was a little hard because I think my thoughts weren't really interesting and crazy ones.

After the first week of writing on my journal, I started to feel more comfortable with my writing, but I know I have to continue improving  it. I had also talked about the difficult part of this experience, but I want to let you know the bearable part. The other instructions we had to followed on the journal were that we can't cross out, didn't worry about spelling, punctuation, and grammar, and don't think nor get logical. These instructions were more easy for me because I didn't really worry about how I wrote any word or sentence during the ten minutes. I simply wrote whatever I thought at that moment and most of the times I didn't get logical. Most of my entries are sentences without any logical sense. I like it because it helped me to wrote more fast in a given time. This practice helped me to explore my internal journey after experienced my external journey. I also had the opportunity to wrote about my dreams after I woke up in the morning and I felt more comfortable because I remembered most part of my dreams. The journey journal is a reflection of my inner journey; a journey many people didn't know about and a one from which I had also learned about myself.

Another thing we had to do in our journal was three life compasses per week. These compasses helped me to have a better understanding of my everyday situations inviting me to think about my spiritual or natural, mental, emotional, and physical state. Life compasses were variable as the entries, but I have learned many things from each one of them.  This activity also helped me to being relaxed and satisfied when doing my daily's reflections. I'm looking  forward to keep discovering and working with my internal and external journey throughout my entire life.

Journal Writing: 5 Smart Reasons Why YOU Should Start doing it TODAY