To the independent reader:

I have responded below to a series of posts presumably by Sherif El Dibani (Dibany), who I believe to be a Canadian living in Nicaragua, whom I have never met. The posts originally appeared on a separate forum, nicaliving.com. I respond here because Mr. Phil Hughes, the owner and administrator of that site, has in my opinion failed to maintain administrative integrity on nicaliving.com. Mr. El Dibani's statements are libelous attempts to damage my reputation.

I encourage users to respond in the following forums: Central America Forum (central-america-forum.com) or http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nicaraguaforum/, if they wish to respond publicly, or to me privately at CONTACT @At PETERCHRISTOPHER dot COM, and I encourage users to avoid any participation in the website nicaliving.com, by which they implicitly support its pattern of censorship, misinformation and slander.

-Peter Christopher, September 18, 2008

[ADDENDUM - NOVEMBER 2008 - Find and read the quote from Jon Berger, (a real estate agent and nicaliving website administrator) who attempted to verify anything at all about Sherif's rumors and found no validity to them whatsoever.]

The following messages were posted on the website nicaliving.com at http://www.nicaliving.com/node/2735#comment-58945 on the date indicated. There are other related messages that were posted on the original website that may or may not now be available online.

She had a baby

[...]

September 18, 2008

Hello Mr. Sherif El Dibani of Computers Mean Business of Ontario, Canada, and Jinotepe, Nicaragua,

It was with a sad heart that I originally read your relation of assorted rumors that had apparently been relayed to you, as you detailed on the website nicaliving.com.  For one thing, it was sad for me because it reminded me how mistreated I had been by some workers and neighbors for whom I had in fact made sacrifices and taken risks during the two years I lived in Nicarauga full-time.  I lived and worked alongside dozens of poor campesinos.  I lived for two years in housing that I renovated and built very comparable to their housing, sleeping in a tijera bed I made myself and eating the same foods. At the farm, I allowed workers to work as few or as many days as they wished at my farm, depending on their needs.  I employed every person who came and asked for work, mostly men, some of them old and nearly crippled, some women, sometimes children. I sought to find them tasks suited to their abilities and personalities. I employed them as long as they wanted provided they were working in good faith. I never once fired anyone who continued working in good faith. I held worker celebration days.  I allowed workers to rent land.  I allowed workers to have higher-paying positions managing specific plantings if they wished to and showed initiative and minimal competence.  I paid a slightly higher daily wage than neighboring farms, because I paid on a daily basis, rather than a vacation-accrual basis.  I was clear with my first group of about fifteen workers that we had the choice when we started the farm, and we made the decision about it together (vacation accrual versus higher daily wage).  I gave gifts of machetes, food, shoes, etc, from time to time.  I sought to help the workers get to know volunteer foreigners who worked at the farm.  I taught them and learned from them.  I provided warm soup when it was raining, cold lemonade when it was sunny, and whenever I asked someone to do something and he said it was too dangerous, I did it myself.  (This only happened twice: once limbing a tree with chainsaw, once limbing a tree with a machete.)  Many of those workers did have good relationships with me for weeks and even months.  I am sad to report that the majority of the workers ultimately fell into the temptation to bite the hand that fed them.  I did ultimately decide to close and sell the farm, due in part to my inability to find/nourish a culture of workers there that matched well with my values and abilities.  (I had already decided to sell the farm when the machete assault occurred.  I was also not involved with anyone whatsoever in any intimate relationship at the time of the machete assault.)  It was not the case that every working relationship I had with Nicaraguans ended with frustration on one or both sides, but it is true that quite a few of them did end that way.  You have missed a great deal in your "investigations" of my relationships with workers which were clearly not done carefully or cleverly or thoroughly.  (Do you even understand the local dialect of Spanish, much less speak it?)  Among other things, for instance, you missed learning of the many mutually satisfactory relationships I had with many locals who were my friends (some of whom worked at the farm, and some of whom did not). 

It was also disappointing and painful to me to read your report that I had sexually abused anyone in Nicaragua.  This is untrue.  The reality is that over the years I lived in Nicaragua full-time and part-time, that I was only sexually involved with one person, that it was a consensual relationship with a person over sixteen years old who had years of prior conjugal sexual experience, including live-in relationships, and that it was she who sought out the relationship with me, with her parents' permission and encouragement.  I never sexually abused any minor or adult woman, girl, man, or boy in any way in Nicaragua when I lived there, or at any other time in my life in any place.  Previous to that one relationship, over the course of about a year I had asked a few women in Nicaragua whether they would like to be my girlfriend.  All refused but one.  The one who accepted (with her parents' permission), as soon as she'd given me a few kisses, broke it off and ran off with someone else (without her parents' permission).

Your later assertion in separate posts are equally mistaken. You state that I left Yasmina with very little money. At the time you made this assertion, I had already contributed well over ten thousand dollars to the establishment of her farm and the maintenance of Yasmina and Gloria, not to mention my own time and transportation costs. And, although I was not in Nicaragua at the time you wrote in April of 2007, I was back during August 2007. I have always supported Yasmina and her family, from before the time Gloria was born, and continuing through to the present. This includes direct financial support on a regular basis, as well as helping them to maintain a guest-volunteer business. Yasmina and I ultimately were not able to resolve obstacles we encountered in our personality match in a way that allowed us to have a life-long relationship as life partners. But we worked together to build her a house, and a guest house for volunteers. We worked together to buy her land (I provided almost all the money, and she provided most of the coordination). We worked together equally in planting that land several times. We worked together in digging a well. (I provided part of the labor and all of the money, and she provided some supervision of workers.) We decided together to have our child in Costa Rica, and we went there together, and Gloria was born in San Jose. I lived in Nicaragua with them for the first three months of Gloria's life. I also returned later for one month later (August 2007) to try yet again to make the relationship with Yasmina work but we could not make it work. (By the way, when I arrive in Nicaragua that time, I discovered then that you had posted your libel on the website, Mr. El Dibani, and it provided additional tension that certainly did not make our time together any easier - although don't flatter yourself by thinking you were the cause of our breakup.) Yasmina and I applied together for Gloria's US citizenship, and after considerable effort on my part with the Nicaraguan and Costa Rican consulates of the US, it was granted. Ultimately, I did decide to marry someone else, but I have never taken lightly my responsibilities as Gloria's father. Yasmina refused all my invitations I continued making regurly over the past year when I asked her to bring Gloria to visit Asia (at my expense of course) and potentially live there. Now my wife and I have moved to Costa Rica, where we hope Yasmina will feel more comfortable coming for a visit or to live.

If you had taken the time to investigate before you began spreading rumors, you could have avoided tarnishing my reputation and yours, and you could have avoided the bad publicity you caused of the business that Yasmina and I built up, bad publicity that has made it more difficult for her to experience the dignity of honest work, than it was before your libelous rumors spread like wildfire through the foreign community in Nicaragua.  You could have avoided spreading misinformation about Nicaragua, a place that already suffers from such a disproportionate deluge of inaccurate, biased misinformation.  You could have helped to add to the accurate information instead of adding to the country's intractability.

If there is any person living in the Diriamba-Jinotepe area who speaks good Spanish I would welcome them to go investigate the actual reality of the relations I had with workers, and other locals, during the time I lived in Nicaragua.  Last time I checked, it is not against the law to fire workers who steal.  Last time I checked, it was not against the law to frequent barrios where business contacts, friends, and loved ones live.  Last time I checked, it is not immoral to visit other countries, or even to live there.

I tried many times in private to politely request you and the owner of the nicaliving.com site to take a closer look and repair as best as possible the ongoing damage you have caused by your inaccurate posts.  How have we arrived at this place, where neither you nor the owner of this site has taken steps to reflect and correct as best you can the misinformation you have spread? You haven't even managed the common courtesy to respond to my contacts through email, nor when Yasmina followed up the email by visiting your home.

What did it mean when Dante said, "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality?"  Would Dante argue that a person is behaving morally, or immorally, if he heroically relates false rumors while supposedly professing neutrality - "I have no way of confirming this . apologize in advance . "  ? Do you realize that in modern moral and legal epistemology, that "slander" includes any public sharing of inaccurate, character-damaging materials, whether or not they are couched as hearsay? What would Dante think of a slandered who further maintained his neutrality to the truth or falsehood of his slander? Perhaps more to the point, how does it make you feel to recognize that this is the kind of person you may be in the process of discovering yourself to be?

Your apology is not yet accepted.  Maybe you should be the one to investigate this more fully. If you ever want to merit any respect from me, or wish to deserve any respect from anyone, you would be wise to follow these instructions. Get some people who speak better Spanish than you do, who have a better understanding of Nicaraguan culture than you do, who are more clever in their ability to unearth Latin-style fabricated reality, and who can and will truthfully and fully translate for you. Go with them to San Vicente, San Gregorio, El Aguacate, and Las Mercedes (and any other barrio anywhere in Nicaragua, though I haven't frequented any others).  Ask twenty or thirty random people at houses you choose randomly in each town to relate everything they know about me.  Then ask them who would know more.  Then ask them about the specific individuals who had originally told you their version of history.  Ask about their history in the communities, ask about their histories with other employers, ask about their family's alliances, ask about what interest they might have in spreading inaccurate information about me.  Ask about who assaulted me, and why.  Ask about the implications of my history for their community.  Then (after hearing their initial information) ask about your specific allegations - child abuse, abuse of workers, etc.  When you hear about anything specific, follow it up - "Who exactly can tell me first-hand what happened?" Then go find that person.  See whether you find even one genuine, first-hand instance of the supposed many offences you reported. and of course, go find the people who originally made the allegations to you, and go directly to any place they recommend. Do me a favor, please make public all the results of your properly conducted investigation, publicly and to the police in Diriamba. And please don't forget to explain in public how you intend to make it up to Yasmina and Gloria and I, not to mention the other people you have indirectly damaged with your misinformation.

If you do not speak and understand Nicaraguan rural Spanish well enough to conduct that investigation and comprehensively understand the responses to your questions, were you ever qualified to act as judge and jury in the first place? And rest assured, in this internet age when most computer literate people use their search engines to research their acquaintances, neighbors, friends, and family members, you have put yourself in that position. Do you think that persons who read that their neighbors were reported by supposedly independent sources on supposedly independent occasions to a supposedly impartial and supposedly well-meaning and supposedly perceptive Mr. El Dibani with the nickname GranadaSherif, do you think that those person ask their neighbor, "Oh, by the way, did you abuse workers and abuse chidren and is that the reason for the scars on your face, hands, arm and leg? Mr. El Dibani, I can tell you that they don't do that. On a few lucky occasions, maybe their departure from ones life will be marked by a final Freudian truth-disclosure, like, "Oh, and did you say you had owned a farm in Nicaragua, it must have been fascinating!" But the rest of them, the majority, who don't take quite as seriously the caution you presented about the supposed "unverifiability" of your "independently verified" facts... they simply disappear. Those resumes get shuffled directly to the back. Those neighbors no longer meet your glance when you see them. Those family members no longer call. Those friends no longer respond to emails, perhaps thinking, "Now I understand what was so unique about my former friend." You made yourself into judge and jury, Mr. El Dibani. You acted prematurely on incomplete information. And your judgment was wrong.

To do a genuine investigation of this will take a week or two of your time.  And you ought to do it in as short a time-span as possible, in order to not lose reality under one more layer of interwoven complication due to your own involvement. But if you don't do this investigation, you will repeat the same mistakes again and again in your life: believing those whom you should not believe and maltreating those who you would be better served to learn from. Every time you run away from this mistake, it will become more painful for you to live with yourself, more difficult for you to work past these patterns you picked up when you were young and innocent.

After learning of your accusations, I have taken over one year to allow my frustrations to settle before responding to you publicly. During this time, I have attempted several times to contact you and the website owner of the site where you posted the slander, and both of you have ignored all my requests through email, personal messenger, and phone. I have have not fully moved beyond the initial sadness I experienced, or the bitterness that followed, but I have been blessed by grace that has allowed me to transcend most of it. I have during this year had to deal with nontrivial complications to my personal and business relationships that were clearly directly arising from your libel of me, and others that were likely related to your libel but where I could not be sure. I have accepted that I have little control over the ultimate outcome of this situation. And tragically, just as there was no way for you or me to turn back the clock two years ago and undo the machete wounds, financial damage, and related fears from a night in Carazo, neither is there any way for me or you to undo the damages you have caused with your slander sitting at your laptop computer.

Without any hope that you would actually do it, I have told you and will now tell you again what to do to try to find some blessing in this tragedy.

Go, Mr. El Dibani, instead of being part of the problem of spreading rumors designed to destroy, be a part of the solution.  Find the real story.

If you investigate thoroughly, you won't find any history of abuse of workers by me.  You won't find any victims of sexual abuse by me.  What you will find is the final thing that made me so sad when I read your text - that you were a naïve tool who was divided and separated from me and from others like the parts of France before Caesar. What a sad history, when we could have had the resilience of the Chinese to unite as the Americas fall apart.  You, like me, you will will see, if you open your eyes, that you too have now become the brunt of the jokes of the guarando campesinos en las calles de los pueblos.  "!Y asiii 'hora se van peleando entre su' mi'mo' --  Fijese,  'bre, 'l gringo feo negron salió igual como lo' gringo' bonito' chele', cr'yendo que con su' cerebrito' norteamericano' s'cabaron de ser ma' li'to que uno!"

Peter Christopher