Interviewer: Okay.

Participant: I think that in the case of Nicaragua, the assumption on the part of people who were opposed to the Sandinistas, I think, was that Americans who were in the country were likely pro-Sandinista and Sandinista supporters. Developing confidence among people who were part of the opposition or indeed people who were Contra supporters -- There, what was important was trying to get rid of people's assumption that I was simply blindly a government supporter and allowing them the opportunity to convince me that there were problems with the revolution.

Participant: In El Salvador, it was somewhat the opposite. The opposite in the sense that the entrée -- The assumption was different depending on who I was meeting with. The U.S. government folks and the the Salvadoran government folks in the country were at first suspicious that I was some kind of solidarity activist. It took some time to allow them to decide. If I was, I was at least one that was open to their point of view. In the case of the guerrillas, of course, it was a matter of being suspicious that any given American who was there might very well be really working for the U.S. government in some way or other and so being very cautious about development. Of course, what that meant was that the entrees through the people you knew in the human rights organizations or otherwise were -- It took some time to be able to move step by step to begin to meet people more directly involved with the revolutionary effort.

Interviewer: Then finally, on a personal level, how was your work there spending almost two decades? How did it affect you, change your personality?

Participant: I would say a couple of things. It's always a little difficult to say because I think the Civil Rights movement for me was probably the one that first had the most profound impact on me. Again, I would say the revolution in El Salvador, that period in El Salvador, was -- personally, had the most profound effect on me in terms of just the people I knew, the sense of risk, the people who got killed, and the sense of frustration I had both as a person and as an academic. We talk a lot in academia about the culture shock. But the culture shock for me wasn't prime. Of course, in part was the culture shock of encountering the cultures that I was coming into contact with, but the most frustrating -- and in some ways -- culture shock was when you would come back to the United States and be trying to explain what you'd seen because you couldn't possibly convey it.

Interviewer: Certainly. Thank you very much.

Participant: Sorry about that.

Interviewer: No. No. No. It's --