Day 4 Continued - Past the Iron Bars

This blog might take longer to finish than I originally anticipated. I could trump it up to my work schedule, summer classes, and a million other commitments that eat up all my spare time, but I still manage to find myself regularly putting the final touches on a post at three o’clock in the morning before hitting the ‘PUBLISH’ button. Clearly I want to share this; normally I only lose sleep over things I care about very deeply. I just never thought that an experience so amazing would be so difficult to write about. Some nights I will finish a post and remember five minutes later a little miracle or interesting conversation that occurred, but I forgot to write down in the long run. It took me so long to recall those amazing memories that I don't want to risk losing them again.


So I am going to linger on Saturday, May sixteenth, for a little while longer. I hope you don't mind.


THAT AFTERNOON:


In the midst of getting to know everyone Denis took Cata, Areli, Crystal, and myself for a walk around the neighborhood. I was really impressed with the the way Denis successfully maneuvered Cata's stroller over the sidewalk. The concrete ended abruptly in some places where packed dirt and gravel took its place; at intersections the small hills we were walking on dipped and the sidewalk broke off completely, baring jagged concrete and metal scraps ready to catch stray toes unaware.


It made for slow going, but it was nice to be able to explore the neighborhood and take in its urban beauty. The sun was out and the smog wasn't too bad; I had a clear view of the Andes towering over a sea of shimmering tin and tile rooftops. The graffiti melted into itself, a cloud of undending and indecipherable red and white words thrown like strawberries and cream against the brick walls that separated shops, schools, homes, and people.



"Es muy linda,"* I said to Denis. He kept looking forward, keeping a watchful eye on Areli and Crystal hopping down the sidewalk about ten meters ahead of us.



"Florida?" he replied. He scoffed and shook his head. "No!"

I tried to explain how I'd never seen such huge mountains or colorful homes before. It was different, certainly, but that didn't mean that it wasn't beautiful.

"The smog is terrible," he said, and as if to affirm his complaint I coughed into my sleeve. "And it's very dangerous here. There is a lot of crime."

"Is that why there are so many fences?" I asked. The fences we were passing ended in sharp points, but we had passed concrete walls earlier whose tops were embedded with broken glass.

"Yes," he said. "Do you not have them where you live?"

"Well, in a few places. But I'm lucky. Where I live, it is very safe."

"What's it like?"

I spent the next few minutes attempting to explain the small coastal town where I grew up, the freezing clear water of the river that cut the town in two halves, the crowded, slanted house of my childhood and the giant redwoods that grew up all around where the homes ended and the wilderness began. I described to him how the beach was never sunny and the sand wasn't white, but how with the iron-gray waters and the rocks rising like mammoths from the surf, it was still one of the most beautiful places God could have chosen for me to call home.

He said that the America I described was very different from the America he had seen on television, so I told him that America was so big that just about every state is different from the next. How is one to know if they've never been, or never been told? We can only know what the media tells us unless we have the means to go to a place and see for ourselves what it is really like. I think the media has been painting a very skewed picture of Americans for a very long time, and the sad thing is that we let them, because for some reason we believe that strange portrait of ourselves is the ideal that we should live by and the kind of people that we should try to be. How many of us own a six-bedroom house with a pool in a sun-drenched suburb, or drive brand-new sports cars, or have the means to send our kids to Ivy League schools? Those of us who are fortunate enough to live where iron spikes and walls topped with jagged glass are uneccessary still struggle to find well-paying jobs and live on Ramen noodles for weeks at a time. And yet we still happily support that image and flaunt it to the rest of the world. Our blessings as Americans lie in our opportunities, not in our abundance. Any image of affluence that we might have is often borrowed, at best. So why do we lie to the rest of the world and make them feel like they have to attain that impossible ideal as well?





*"It's very beautiful." I'll write the rest of the conversations from here on in English, but unless I was speaking to a team member from NCU, about 90% of the conversations I had took place in Spanish. Poor, slow Spanish, on my part, but Spanish nonetheless.