Interviewer: The first question would basically be what the trajectory was that led you to work in Central America and what it was that you started doing when you first got there.

Participant: Well, I suppose, without getting too long winded into details into my whole past, I first became aware of the situation in Central America when I was working as a journalist in the United States, but as a stringer for Irish newspapers. I did a story in San Francisco about some Irish American nuns who had a sanctuary church. I met a woman who was a Salvadoran refugee with her children who were living at the church. We did the story for Irish Radio. I also did a photo essay for a magazine as well. It just really impacted me very profoundly because up until that stage of my life, I'd been concerned about social justice issues and general political issues, but a special focus on Northern Ireland, and that's why I ended up working as a stringer for Irish newspapers and covering Irish American politics as well.

Participant: It was Jesse Jackson's first run for presidency with the Rainbow Coalition. That was what was exciting about being at the Democratic Convention, and there was a coalition of Irish-American politicians from New York who were supporting Jackson, and I was covering some of that also for this newspaper, "The Sunday Tribune" in Dublin. So meeting this woman from El Salvador really woke me up to the fact that there were things going on in Central America that the United States was involved in that I really didn't know anything about. I felt a little bit sheepish because I was always going to Northern Ireland to cover the situation there and talk about human rights abuses and injustices that were occurring in that part of the world, and yet I was really ignorant about what the United States was involved in. That prompted me to want to learn more.

Participant: Then I started reading a bit more, and it also coincided with the timing of an photography exhibition in New York. When I came back to New York, there was a big photography exhibition called Salvador. The work of 20 photographers or 30 photographers, and now I don't recall the exact number, but it was a project that Susan Meiselas and Harry Mattison had put together that now resides at UT. It's part of the Ransom Center Collection, those photographs, and Eli Reed was one of the photographers included. It was basically work by about 20 or 30 photographers, some of them from El Salvador and many from international photographers who worked there during the early period of the 1980s when a lot of the worst human rights abuses that made the international news came out. That was the murder of Archbishop Romero, and also the American nuns who were raped and killed as well. Those were things I sort knew about. But I wasn't paying that much attention to Central America.

Participant: But part of me felt, after meeting this woman, she said her name was Monica -- Later on I met her in Washington D.C. again, and she had a different name. That was her name that she was using when she first came to the U.S. and she was underground as a political asylee refugee. But that -- just the awareness that my interview with her provoked about the situation, and then seeing those photographs in ICP. ICP now has this very glamorous, wonderful space on Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street, I think, in New York. I think that's where it is now. But at that time, they had a much smaller place, and it was uptown just on the edge of Spanish Harlem, on the east side. This show took up the whole floor, this exhibition. I remember feeling both shocked, and very moved, and also thinking, "That's the kind of work I want to do." This is what I want to do. I filled in the back of my head. I didn't buy a plane ticket that moment, but I started to become more interested and started following Central American politics more and what was going on there.

Participant: In 1987, I had an opportunity to go to Central America. It was sort of always on my list that I wanted to do that. But I was making a living in New York and trying to figure out how to go about doing that and saving some money so that I could. Then finally, in 1987, I had an opportunity to go to Central America. Another friend of mine had a grant, and we were going to go together and report. He was a writer and I was a photographer. We were going to collaborate together. Initially, I went to Costa Rica because I didn't speak Spanish very well. I had done very well in high school and college in passing tests, but I really couldn't speak it. I felt it was important to go someplace that was safe. Costa Rica didn't have an army and didn't have any internal conflict. There were refugees from Nicaragua there and other interesting things going on, but it was a relatively safe and peaceful country and a good place for me to get my feet wet learning the language. I lived there for about six months first. Then I move to El Salvador, which is really where I wanted to go.

Participant: The other question, I just fell in love with the place. My intention was to go for maybe six months or so, maybe a year, try and get work. I went there with no promise of work. Before I went, I went and saw the photo editors at "Time" and "Newsweek," "The New York Times Magazine" before I was going down and everybody said they thought my work was strong and that I should stay in touch. They gave me their phone number to call collect if mayhem occurred and there was a major news. That's when they'd be interested, but you weren't expected to call unless you really had exclusive material. I didn't actually end up calling any of those people when I first went because I was just learning the country.

Participant: But later on, I started to get a reputation as being a solid photographer, and a lot of newspaper reporters who came from out of town, from Mexico City, or from Miami, or from LA that were being sent by "The L.A. Times" or "The Miami Herald" to do a story, they would call me up and hire me to be their photographer and fixer too. It's because I knew the country. I lived there. I could add to their reporting as well. I would sometimes have access to things or know about people that would interest the reporters also. That's how I was making my living, and I was going along. Then in -- About a year after I was there, "The New York Times Magazine" was doing a big story. Kathy Ryan called me up, and she said, "We really want to use one of your photographs," that I remember from a trip that I had made back to show her work. She said, "We definitely want to use that. We want to see what else you have."

Participant: After that, that's getting into "The New York Times Magazine," especially back then. It's still very important, I think, but it really broke your name out in a bigger way to be published there. After that, I got lots more assignments. But I didn't go there just to get assignments. I went there because I really wanted to know I cared about the story and the situation. That's why I stayed for five years. A lot of photographers came through and left where they stayed for six months, or they come in and out just to work on a photo essay or work on a book project. But then they leave. I really fell in love with the country and felt a commitment to the situation. It became clear to me that what was going on there was, in many ways, it was a war. But what provoked the war was extreme injustice. It was the situation, it was feudalism, the attitude that people had.

Participant: This is what really I found shocking. When I went to try and buy a house, I was told that I couldn't rent a house without hiring a Muchacha, or a servant, basically, to work in the house. That wasn't possible. You had to have someone, and many of the people who were trying to rent me places wanted to hire the person for me. They would provide that, and then I would pay them, and they would pay the person, and I knew they were going to take some of the money. They were going to skim off some of the money and not pay the person properly. I didn't really want to have someone in my house either. I didn't want to have someone because I knew I'd be doing sensitive work. I'd be going with the army sometimes and going with the guerrilla movements sometimes. I didn't want to have a spy who was looking at what I -- because I'd have a dark room in the house and I'd be printing -- I didn't want to have someone that I didn't trust.

Participant: During the time I lived in Costa Rica, I frequently went to Southern Nicaragua, to a village there where I documented daily life, and it's part of how I learned to speak Spanish better as well. I became quite close to one of the nuns who worked in that area. She told me that when I went to El Salvador, that the nuns from her order, the order of the Sacred Heart, had a very posh, upper-class girls school in the rich section of town, but that they also did work in the zones where people were fleeing the war zones. They worked in the area where those Maryknoll nuns who were killed by the National Guardsmen had been working. I wanted to get to know them anyway, but when I was faced with this dilemma about hiring a housekeeper, I thought, "Well, go ask the nuns, 'Who should I hire?'"

Participant: I met the mother superior and explained that I didn't really want a servant, and all this stuff, and she just looked at me like I was crazy because people needed jobs. I saw this as -- Growing up as I did from a working-class background originally were people in my own family had had to work as servants, and then I got the opportunity to go to college, this would be against every fiber of my being to hire someone to work for you like that, and that's how I was thinking about it.

Participant: Then I realized, this is a different culture. It's a different life. You can't necessarily apply the same standards. I would be giving someone work, and as long as I treated the person properly, that it didn't have to be this relationship that often existed between the upper-class and the class of people who worked for them in Central America. In Central America, I remember going one time to this very wealthy man's house, and he had the people who were working for him sleeping on straw mats, not even a mattress. When I asked about it, he said, "If I let them sleep on a mattress, they'd think they were equal to me. I sleep on a mattress. We can't let them get ideas like that." It was really feudalism, is what it was. To me, it was extremely clear.

Participant: All the talk about, "The Cubans are taking over," and, "The Russians are --" I didn't meet a single Russian the whole time I was in. There may have been a few who went to Nicaragua because Nicaragua got frozen out and sometimes they took out from whoever would give it to them. But the Salvadoran rebels were Salvadorans. They were rebelling because they were trying to fight for a better life, the right to go to school, just basic things that we take for granted here, and that were very similar to the kinds of struggles that African-Americans had during the civil rights period in our country. That's how I saw the situation and not the way it was being framed in the media, and that's why I wanted to stay.

Interviewer: I guess related -- That brings up -- My next question was going to be, obviously, the presence of communism in Central America was one of the big preconceived notions of what was going on and why there needed to be American involvement in the region. That was a preconceived notion that you found was shattered once you got there. Were there others, cultural, or in terms of societal like preconceived notions that you felt you had, or were popular in the United States once you got on the ground, you realized weren't the case, or you realized were shattered, or you had epiphanies once you were getting to know people on the ground there?

Participant: That's a really good question. I think the main one is that the whole narrative was completely inside out. It was a brutal country. The human rights abuses were brutal, but the people were not. I think, this is something I really discovered that I felt was surprising to me in a way. It isn't now, and maybe it shouldn't have been. But I expected there to be a huge chasm because of the class structure of El Salvador -- a huge chasm that would result in resentment as well. I felt that, as a white person who was clearly from a different economic milieu, that I would face maybe some of the same skepticism that people of the upper-class from those countries would face going into situations. I actually found that was never the case, and it may be because in those situations, most of the foreign people who came were people who came to help in some way, and that's who showed up. And so people, when they saw that you were a foreigner actually expected you --

Participant: Even the FMLN, whenever I met them -- and there were different ways to meet with them. Sometimes you would go through contacts that you would be verified that you were okay, they would agree to meet you, and of course, they were going to receive you. But even when I just went into a place where I didn't know anybody. They could have thought I was a CIA agent or something, I never encountered a kind of -- I always encountered courtesy, respect -- People were so respectful -- and genuine interest and curiosity about you, and also generosity. They'd have nothing and they'd kill the only chicken they had to make a feast because you had arrived. Sometimes you feel terrible in those situations because you know you're really taking food out of the mouths of their children. But you don't want to insult people either, so I'd always eat a little and then make sure that everybody else got fed. But I guess that was something that --

Participant: The idea that people were really generous and welcoming is not the picture that we had in the United States. We had a picture of a country that was torn apart, and it was revolution, and they hated the Americans because they were all on the side of the Soviets, and that you were going to be immediately treated with suspicion, and you'd be in danger. It's always dangerous in a conflict situation, especially if you're walking in the middle because the bullets are flying from both sides. But I found that people there were very generous and would risk their lives to protect you because they saw us also as being a vehicle for getting the story out, the truth out, to a larger audience. So people would go to extreme lengths to help you do your work and also to protect you as well. I didn't really realize how remarkable that was until I went into other situations later where there wasn't that same sense of solidarity and community commitment that existed in Central America then.

Participant: It's rare, so many conflicts situations that the different factions -- It's so factionalized that no one knows who they can trust. That's how it is today. You go into a neighborhood, and if it's overrun with gangs or other kinds of violent actors, everyone doesn't know if they can even trust their neighbor. In Central America in those years, sometimes you'd go into a town and you really wouldn't know, "Does this town support the army, or does this town support the FMLN?" But quickly, you would be able to get some feeling, and usually, the people in the town would know who they could trust and who they couldn't. Once you got inside, then you were really protected because you knew the lay of the land and you knew who you should avoid as well. Whereas, I think, with this other kinds of violence that people are dealing with now, that's not the case at all. People are very suspicious and living with a complete sense of insecurity and no sense of solidarity or community, who they can rely on if things get rough.

Participant: That was something very special, that I think doesn't happen in every conflict, or every situation, or even every country. It's what made me fall in love with El Salvador and stay so long, was that feeling. It's sad because now it's not the same as it was. But there are places that I've gone to in the years since that I've gone back to where you can still breathe that air and you know that there still is a sense of idealism in helping people, and it's just so refreshing because that doesn't exist in a lot of other places.

Interviewer: In terms of your reporting, your photography, you as a storyteller, did that evolve at all once you got on the ground? How did it change over the years that you were there?

Participant: I think that's also something that's interesting to talk about. I went there with an idea that I would work on photo essays. I always had a sense of photography being art as well as information. I tended to do the longer-form stories so that, even when I was working, I worked for newspapers, and sometimes it was just go here, make pictures, come back, process the film, send the pictures off. Sometimes, we'd have to process them at the AP office and we'd send them on these machines that we can't even remember what it was called now. But there was a machine that was like rotated that you hooked up to a telephone line, and it took three hours, but it would transmit the picture. Sometimes we were working like that, but often, I liked to work where I did some research about a situation.

Participant: Then I embedded myself in the community, more in the way an anthropologists would. When I covered the refugee repatriations from the Mesa Grande refugee camp, I went there a few days early. I stayed there, slept there, traveled on the buses with the people back crossing the border, going to their villages, then stayed there for a week, and then we'd go back and forth, and go back up there, and visit, and spend a week here and there to document how life was transforming. That's very different from the way most of the photo journalists covered it. They were like, "The picture of the buses crossing the border at El Poy." That's the picture because the refugees now have moved from Honduras into El Salvadoran territory, and that was their picture. Then they may take a few pictures of people on the bus. They'd climb on the bus for five minutes, take the picture. But the kinds of pictures that I wanted to take and stories I wanted to tell required me to really get to know people and not just be grabbing. I think that's really when I began to develop that longer-form style of photographing.

Participant: As the years progressed, I continued. I did a story, and this was a story that actually led me to do the work I did post-war on the youth situation and gangs. I was doing a story about prostitution and about HIV, and I got to know a group of women. In fact, I even helped an NGO establish a relationship with the women so that they could start some workshops to teach them to read and write and also to offer them training to make pinatas, or open a beauty salon, or something, cut hair and things like that if they wanted to leave that life. Because many people ended up in that life because of poverty, because of abuse as children as well. A lot of them were young girls who had been abused by family members. Sexual abuse is an extremely traumatic situation. Back then, there was no counseling or anything for that. If people went through those experiences, they felt just shamed and that they weren't worthy of anything. The only life that they saw as being open to them was that. I cared about that issue, and I began to get to know these women.

Participant: That was how I got to meet the woman who ran the AIDS ward at the hospital and, eventually, a young man who'd been deported, who was a gang member. It's like one thing led to another. I'd be working on a longer story about one topic, and in the course of doing it, I'd meet somebody else who was a secondary character in that story but then maybe would become the main character in another story later on about a different topic but that was related. That's how my work progressed, but that work was really important. When I had the first show, first of all, my friend, Celia, who's a singer, she was one of the people who started the literacy classes. She invited the women. She was performing, she was singing at the National Theater in El Salvador downtown. The National Theater is shabby, but it's like one of those old opera houses, those from Latin America. It's amazing. It's a little shabby around the edges, but it's beautiful, spectacular, the architecture, and the red velvet curtains, and the red seats.

Participant: We brought this group of prostitutes to the show, and it was fabulous. They were so thrilled to be there, and to see Celia sing, and to feel like they were welcome there. It was really life-changing for them. And a number of them -- I still keep in touch, actually, with a few. They came to my show when I did the photographic show years later about gangs. They came to the art opening, and they said to me, "You didn't forget us." I said, "But this isn't about you." She said, "We're the same people. You care about us, the real people, the people that nobody else pays attention to." Gabrielle, that's the most rewarding thing, I think. That means more than winning an award or anything, to really feel like you made a difference in somebody's life by making them feel recognized.

Participant: Because I also made a point, whenever I had a show, to have the media interview the people, not me. I wouldn't just be speaking. I'd say, "Well, you want to know what the folks in the pictures think. They're right here, ask them. They can speak for themselves." El Salvador is really where I started to think that way. It set me on a path that I've only deepened over the years with all the other work I've done. But it really did set me on a path. It was just seeing that sense of solidarity and commitment that people had to one another. It was really special.

Interviewer: That's great. The last question would be if there were any individual -- you mentioned the women, the sex workers that you took to the theater, any other moments or individuals that you've kept in contact with, or you've been able to reconnect with, or that were also really memorable in any of the countries? Actually, just before you answer that, if you could just say what the countries were you worked in. Just what  the countries where you worked in, and then if there are any additional highlighted moments.

Participant: From my period of time in covering those countries in the '80s, right, and that's what the main focus is. It's not after. I worked in Nicaragua, I worked in El Salvador, I worked in Guatemala, and I worked a little bit in Honduras during the 1980s. In all of those countries. I lived in El Salvador. I was based there. I would say, in terms of people that I met, there's just so many. It's hard to answer that. My housekeeper, Adela, she lives in Montreal now, and I'm still very good friends with her and her family. They were refugees from Chalatenango. Part of her family stayed in the war zone, and part of her family moved to this other territory that a priest had basically gotten for them as a community, and they were all refugees from the same area. That's a place that I go back whenever I visit.

Participant: I try to visit her family. I always go back. I love to see them. I love to see how people have gotten married and had kids. It's like my family. I really feel like I'm at home with them. Her uncles who stayed up in the guerilla zone, I always like to go visit them as well to see how they're doing now too. That's one person who's not like a famous person. Adela, she was a combatant herself. I learned a lot about war trauma by living with her and all the things that she went through. That's a very important relationship that I built, and that's really important to me.

Participant: I would say that, in terms of other people, Santiago, who came here, I knew him during -- not well -- but during the war, I knew, of course, who he was, the voice of Radio Venceremos, and sometimes I did go to Morazan, which is the area that he worked in. We really got to know each other after the war more. But I was able to bring Santiago up to Chalatenango to meet Adela's uncle, who's really old, because he's trying to record all the memories of the generation, not the top comandantes of the guerillas but all the key people who were either middle comandantes or just combatants, who are elderly now and who are going to die soon. If their stories don't get recorded, it'll be a lost history. The FMLN was five different factions. They got together and made peace with one another in order to be united in the course of the war. But there were still rivalries and things. Sometimes there's a little bit of feeling like the ERP was in one part, and the FPL was in another. But Santiago was the kind of person that he doesn't care about any of those distinctions, he just wants to make sure that everybody's stories get remembered. That's really important.

Participant: Then there's another, there's a man who's a poet, Miguel Huezo Mixco, who was also a comandate that I met during that time. Now he works for the UNDP. I always see Miguel when I go to Central America. Then there's lots of other people that I love to see that are folks that were just my friends. My friend the singer, Celia Moran. I always try to see her when I go. Or Gene Palumbo, who was a journalist who stayed. He was there years before I arrived, and he's still there now, working both sometimes in journalism, but also he worked a lot with the priests at the UCA. Gene has been very instrumental with the students who come from Notre-Dame or from Georgetown, from the Jesuit universities here in the States who send students to do fieldwork or work down in Central America. He is a guide for them and welcomes them, oversees their stay, and helps to orient them to some of the history because he's so knowledgeable. I knew the Jesuit priests who were killed as well, and that was traumatic for me. There were many terrible situations where people that I knew or who I had interviewed ended up getting killed.

Participant: There's a lot of memories that are painful as well. I'm not sure what else to say about that. It's a whole another generation now, and because I continued to work there but then started working more on gangs, I shifted gears. A lot of the people I was coming into contact with were not those same people from the war years anymore as such. But I would say that Santiago and Miguel have remained really good friends. My friend, Celia, and Gene, those are the people that are still there that I would say that I'm closest to. I don't want to leave people out. There were lots of other people. When I went back in 2011 -- I brought a play, and also a theater group that did this play that's based on a story about an undocumented kid who gets deported to Guatemala and ends up being killed. A lot of the people came to see the play and came to see my show were people that I had known in those years who remembered me and were so glad that I was still coming to El Salvador, that I still cared. Because a lot of people pass through and then it became a part of their memories or their history, but I continued to have a commitment to the place, even if the direction of the stories and things that I was covering had changed.

Participant: I would say in Guatemala, my friend -- and this is not -- My friend Nancy McGirr from the 1980s who was photojournalist for Reuters, we first met covering El Salvador in the '80s. She had been based in Honduras, but she would often gets sent over. She started a wonderful project in Guatemala to teach kids photography, called Fotokids. Nancy, every time I go to Guatemala, I usually stay with her for a few days, at least in her home in Antigua. I sometimes do workshops, show my work, or do something to help out with the project. But she's someone who I consider a really good friend and whose work I really admire. She stayed there. She made her home in Guatemala and has really been committed to saving a generation of young people through photography, by keeping them in school and teaching them a skill that's for self-expression but also a skill that they can work with. A number of the young people that she's trained are now teachers in her program, or have studied cinema, or do work for NGOs doing graphic design work, or photography work, or video work.

Participant: There's just a lot of people that I met. It was a special time, I think. For our generation who went there and were changed by the place, there are quite a number of people who made that a commitment of their life. I have tremendous respect for those folks. Nancy's another one that I want to mention, specifically. Nicaragua, I've gone back. I love Nicaragua, but it's the country I know the least. I mentioned that I spent a little bit of time there in the early -- The early 1987, especially, when I was doing stories in this village where these nuns were working. I covered Nicaragua. It was the place I would go for R&R, because El Salvador was so intense. Nicaragua, even though the Contra war was terrible, it was limited to certain sections of the country. If you went to Managua, you could really relax. You felt -- It was funny because this was the country that the United States was saying was the Communist Haven. It's where we, all the journalists, went to just take a deep breath and feel normal again. That you could just go to a cafe, have a beer, have a conversation, and not be paranoid about what might be going on.

Participant: The people that I got to know there were mostly foreign journalists who happened to be there at the time. I really don't have close friends from those years. There's a lot of Nicaraguans that I respect, but I don't have very close friends from those years who are still living there. A lot of the people I knew who were living there were from El Salvador, and they were there, and then now they've gone to Australia, or they've gone to other places, or they've gone back to El Salvador. I don't have anything specific about Nicaragua really to add except that I have been able to go back on stories. When Hurricane Mitch happened, I went there. Every time I go there, I remember why I love Nicaragua so much. It really is a very romantic culture.

Participant: Salvadorans are a little more stoic and a little more severe in some way. They're very friendly and generous, and I said that as well, but Nicaraguans, the difference I felt between those two cultures when I was living there, being there, especially during the war years, was that if you went to Nicaragua, everybody wanted to have their picture taken. They would practically kiss the lens, they loved being photographed. They were really warm, and welcoming, and just also very poetic and romantic. I remember covering that terrible mud slide in Nicaragua that happened after Hurricane Mitch. We were walking and the man from Save the Children, who was their aid worker, he'd even lost some members of his family, but then he looked at the moon and he started reciting poetry. I just thought, "This is a culture of people who really, they love words, they love poetry." They express themselves that way. It's very special. In Salvador, the people would be at least initially more reserved.

Participant: You had the feeling too, moving from Nicaragua to El Salvador, a place where everybody was really open to you immediately to a place where everyone had their head down, and they wouldn't look you in the eye because they didn't know. I say that, and that's like a generalization because I'm talking about when you cross the border, and you're driving, and there's army troops all around, and of course, that's how they're going to respond. Then you get into a village, and people do, when they figure out that you're someone that they can trust, then they're extremely welcoming the same way. But it really was different. It was such a much more of oppressive situation in El Salvador, and Guatemala was even worse.

Participant: I think my feeling when I went there, I remember going to -- This was a period that was later, and I went with journalists from "Der Spiegel," and we went to Nebaj, which is an indigenous village in the Ixil triangle, that was -- A lot of massacres there. That was a part of the country that really, really suffered a great deal. We were doing a story about the growth of Evangelical Christianity there, and people were just reluctant to say anything to you. It was really impenetrable. You really felt that it would take a lot of time to penetrate through because people were just been so beaten down by that situation. The repression was so bad, and they were terrified. They didn't know who to trust, and if you come in like that from the outside for just a couple of days. I found it much harder to photograph there. Laterally, it's different. I don't find that in Guatemala. I find that I can work there just as easily as any place else, but the first time I went in, I really felt like there's a very sharp difference from El Salvador, and El Salvador had a sharp difference from Nicaragua.

Participant: But it was getting progressively more that nobody would hitchhike. In Nicaragua, everybody hitchhiked. The soldiers, everybody. You'd pick anybody up, and that would be part of the fun. It'd be an event. You could pick up some hitchhikers, and then you'd have a conversation, you'd learn what's going on in that part of the country. We didn't worry about anyone wanting to harm us or rob us at all, never would worry about that, and they didn't worry about you either. It was such a more relaxed -- I guess, just a little image to -- The first time I flew into Nicaragua, it was in this little tiny airplane, and we had to climb. They didn't have those -- You know, now when you go to the airport, you have to climb down the stairs, and it was pouring rain. The Nicaraguan Army came out to greet us with umbrellas. They didn't have guns. They just had umbrellas, and they escorted us into the place.

Participant: All of the stuff they say in the United States about these horrible people, and it just was so different. So different. It's important to remember these things because otherwise the history that gets written leaves out these details that just hit you over the head immediately, like a ton of bricks when you come in with an image that it's going to be guys with guns and dangerous, and then you see all these 15-year-old kids with umbrellas, smiling at you. It's totally not quite what people up here we're thinking.

Interviewer: Oh, great, and I think that honestly that covers everything. Absolutely.

Participant: Okay, good. I hope I --