Two days ago I got a call from my friend Brock, who was at the time, in Guat City. He had been spending his day taking a young handicapped boy from Buena Vista from Doctor to Doctor in order to have tests done. Brock needed me to quickly go to “Esbins” home and get his mother on the phone so that they could relay some info. Well, as many of you know, I am currently learning Spanish and am very far from being able to communicate clearly. Nevertheless, off I went with my son Eli. The errand for Brock went very smoothly and on that end, mission accomplished. This is where it starts to get interesting…
As I got back in my car and started backing up, I noticed a bump under my tire, but assumed it was the curb. As I continued to back up, 3 of the village boys were running towards me, yelling something in Spanish which I couldn’t understand. I stopped… got out, and that is when they took me over to a huge bag of corn, which apparently a lady had placed next to my car (unnoticed by me) and as I backed up, I had run over it, causing the entire 50 lbs of corn to spill out into the road. As I I stood there, I now had attracted a larger group of children who were all telling me different things, and of course the woman who had just come back to the village with her bag of corn, was now standing there as well, all staring at me waiting for me to speak.
My mind of course was screaming all kinds of things and trying to get something to come out of my mouth in spanish became the next challenge. All I could think of was getting her a new bag and trying to salvage whatever we could. You have to understand that this bag of corn represented many days of food for this womans family. She had just spent a good portion of her day, traveling by bus to get the corn, and had finally gotten home, unloaded the bag, and now this… All I kept saying was “lo siento”, which is sorry… My 7 year old was by my side staring at me the whole time as if he were saying, “can’t wait to see Dad get out of this one…” After standing there cleaning up corn for a good bit of time, I apologized again and simply said, “LOCO GRINGO”, which for those of you who don’t know would be something like, “crazy white guy”, and you should have heard everyone laughing. As I walked to my car to leave, all the children were running after me pointing and repeating, “loco gringo, loco gringo…” Hoping this doesn’t become my nickname in Buena Vista, but for that moment it was.
While there isn’t too deep of a point to this blog other than to relay the things that I often get myself into it here in Guatemala, there was a couple of lessons learned…
1) Always check under your tire for bags of corn, prior to backing up.
2) Go to the village with someone who speaks spanish!
3) Seriously, always remember the value of things. This bag of corn didn’t look like all that much to me, but you could tell that to this woman and to every child there, they knew it meant food for a family, for children, a mom and a dad.
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