Big, Bad City

One night in Caracas, a young man rang our door bell.

He was about our age and gave us a real sob story, the details of which I don’t remember. He was friendly, overly so as to make him even more suspicious. But I had just cooked dinner, which was rare as eating out was so cheap for us. I remember I had cooked pork chops. So we invited him to stay for dinner. He was definitely a character full of outlandish tales of adventure, all too good to be true and too much for one guy. And he talked about a girlfriend named Nieves who worked at the Holiday Inn Caracas.

I have no memory what he told us his name was but for the purposes of this story, let’s call him José.

José said he needed a place to stay for the night and so, Brent, my co-worker, and I conferred and felt we couldn’t turn him out. I had Brent entertain the guy while I went up stairs and locked up the very few valuables we had. I think we only had two things of any value, one of the very first laptops, a Zenith that had no hard drive and took the original floppy disk and a fax machine, I think, but maybe I’m getting anachronistic. No, it wouldn’t have been a fax machine in 1986. Anyway, we didn’t have much for people who lived in a manse with six or more bathrooms--I’ve lost count. If he wanted to steal something, he’d have been hard-pressed to find anything worth much.

I made up a bed in one of our huge spare rooms for him. I’m quite sure I slept with one eye open that night. At least, I never heard anything and when we woke up the next morning, he was still there. We had breakfast and he went on his way.

We’d seen the last of him.

Our landlady, Carmen, had a son, Victor, who was probably in his early 30s. When he couldn’t take his mother any more, which, knowing her, would be often, he would live in an apartment which was a part of our house but with a completely separate entrance. We rarely saw him.

Late one evening, Brent and I came home from having visited a family in the far suburbs of Caracas to find a desperate Victor waiting for us. He had been in the garage working on his car and a man, our José, was walking around the house and came upon Victor. Looking back, José was looking for a way to get in the house but Victor didn’t seem to notice this at the time because José took him by surprise and told him he was looking for Marty and Brent. So, Victor assumed he was our friend.

José, being the friendly guy he was, convinced Victor that he was “one of us” and then casually drew attention to Victor’s motor cycle, his pride and joy. He asked Victor if he could take his motorcycle around the block for a spin. Victor said, “Sure!”

When we got home and Victor wanted to know where we could find our friend, José. We had only one lead, Nieves at the Holiday Inn. Sure enough, she was real. And she said she didn’t know where José was but that she hoped he was dead.

As far as I know, Victor never saw his motorcycle again. When we told Victor the story and how we came to know José and that he wasn’t really our friend, Victor said, “You guys can’t trust people like that in this city. You have to be careful.”

Sí, Victor. We know that.

Poor indeed

This is a follow-up to my previous post.

Let me start this out by saying that there was a period of a few years when I couldn't tolerate the thought of eating an egg.

Since I didn't find a Venezuelan family to "bond" with in the summer of 1986 by moving in with a family, it was decided that I, along with my co-worker, Brent, should accompany a man in the neighborhood on a trip to his hometown in the interior of Venezuela.

We must have met Chuy during our first couple of days upon arrival in Venezuela. Chuy is the diminutive name in Latin America used for men named Jesus. Chuy was probably close to 60 years-old, a peasant man from the Andean mountain town of Merida. He and his wife were house-sitting in a mansion up the street from ours while the family who lived there were on an extended tour of Europe.

It so happened that a few weeks after our arrival, Chuy was going home to Merida for a few days. He didn't speak a lick of English so we'd be forced to communicate with him only in Spanish. We were to go there by bus, about an 18 hour ride.

So we arrived at the bus terminal in Caracas very early in the morning. That's my memory at least. It could have been as late as 9:00 a.m., which I still consider early. The bus to Merida was modern and clean and air-conditioned. We were the first to board and there weren't many people on when we left Caracas. This was the local bus, meaning that it stopped along the way at every city and town along the route.

I was so smart. I decided we should sit in the front because everyone knows the back of the bus can be uncomfortable, especially on bumpy, windy roads. What I didn't know is that the radio speaker was just above our heads and played what I would call Mariachi music for 18 hours straight except for the occasional 70s American pop song, which was always the same song, "ouga chaka, ouga chaka, ouga ouga ouga chaka...I can't fight this feeling" by Blue Swede. I like the song. I like it once every few months. Or years. It seemed to be on an hour loop. But I have to say, at this point, I loved it.

To be honest, I don't remember much about the trip during the day. I remember after dark, we stopped at someplace to eat. It seemed like a truck stop high in the mountains. And it seemed scary to me. But I think it was just that everything was completely unknown. We were given a menu but it quickly became clear that there was only one thing left, some kind of beef. It came served with black beans (caraotas), an arepa and it was delicious. It was like my mom and aunts cook when they cook a cheap cut of meat and slow cook it forever until it falls apart and is served with a rich gravy.

After dinner, the bus slowly emptied out at what seemed to be random stops in the middle of nowhere and there were some empty double seats. I decided to try to curl up and sleep. What I didn't realize is that by now, we were in the Andes. And the roads must have been hairpin, because every time I would get close to sleep, we'd round a curve and I'd practically be thrown out of my seat. It also appeared that the driver probably wanted to get to our destination very soon.

It was midnight by the time we arrived in Merida. Chuy splurged to take a cab to his home. We went up and up and up. And then the cab could go no further and we got out and walked up and up and up another ten or fifteen minutes.

When we arrived at his home, it was clear that Chuy was poorer than we had imagined. It was July but we were high in the mountains and it was cold, very cold, shivering cold, I-didn't-dress-for-this cold. There was no heat. He showed Brent and me to a double bed and we quickly crawled under the covers. It was like going to bed in my grandma's house when I was little. The bedrooms were cold in the winter and you just get under the covers and warm the space you're in and try not to move. But we were tired so we passed out.

In the morning we woke up to an empty house. Chuy was nowhere to be found. I found a bathroom. There was a long pipe sticking out of the wall with water pouring out of it. I wanted to wake up and get rid of my bed head. Without thinking, I stuck my head under it. Whoa! Immediate brain freeze. That water was freezing. I looked out the window and realized we were high in Alpine terrain. That water was coming right out of the mountain.

It had been weeks since I'd had cold, fresh water that hadn't been treated or boiled. So I drank that cold water for a long time. More brain freeze.

I then went to the front of the house and went out onto the front porch. Wow! This was a stunning view of snow peaked mountains as far as you could see. We were basically in a slum with a millionaire's view.

Chuy came home and brought us into the kitchen. He made us fresh arepas and fried eggs. Dread filled me. "Please don't eat with us," I was thinking. He served us each two eggs, very over easy, an arepa with a nice dollop of Underwood Deviled Ham.

Chuy didn't stay to eat with us or make sure that we ate every bite. I offered Brent my eggs and, being one of the nicest guys in the world, he took one. But I just couldn't bear to eat the other. What luck! A cat slinked into the kitchen. I "accidentally" dropped the egg on the floor which the cat made quick work of, with not a trace left. A ate the arepa and deviled ham, which was like ambrosia to me. In fact, I wish I had a can of it to eat right now.

Chuy had come home to Merida for some kind of business. Looking back, it now appears that it was probably some kind of legal issue so he was busy during the day and we were free to roam.

But as we accompanied Chuy from home to the city center, it appeared that this poor peasant must have been the most popular man in town. Everyone knew him and obviously loved him. People came out of their homes and businesses to greet him.

Merida has a cable car, the longest in the world by one way of counting, that takes you high into the Andes, higher than anywhere in the continental U.S. or Europe. Brent and I spent a day up there.

Our Spanish was not terrible for beginners. On one of the cable cars, we happened to be on a car with just two other people, two girls about our age. They assumed we didn't speak Spanish, which was a fairly good assumption and not completely inaccurate. But they were talking about us and how one could have one and one the other. This went on for awhile because the first segment up the mountain is pretty long. When we left them at the next stop, we made sure to say farewell to them in our best Spanish. They were mortified. Needless to say they did not get in the cable car with us for the next segment.

We were not with Chuy during the daytimes so we ate on our own, probably pasta or pizza, always easy to find in Venezuela. But at breakfast and dinner we were with him and it was always the dreaded egg, a freshly fried arepa and some sort of canned meat product. I know that Chuy was giving us the best that he could afford. I wonder if he noticed the cat getting fatter. But I still crave Underwood Deviled Ham on an arepa.

I don't know exactly how long we stayed with Chuy, I think three full days. We met some of his family. If I remember correctly, he had eight children.

Most of the population of Merida lived in the valley. But poor Chuy lived high up on the mountain with a view of the highest peaks of the Andes and fresh mountain air and cold pure water running right into his house. Poor indeed!

On the trip home, which I dreaded terribly, Chuy suggested that we go by taxi. It isn't uncommon in Latin America to hire a taxi to take you very long distances. It was a shorter trip but I'm not sure it was more comfortable. I sat on the hump the entire 700 miles.

My First Kidney Stone

You never forget your first kidney stone. You never plan to because you never intend to have another.

Actually, what I remember as my first kidney stone wasn't actually my first, but I didn't know that at the time.

It was July of 1986. I was twenty-two years-old and had been in Caracas, Venezuela for just under two weeks. There were a dozen of us, mostly Bible college students on a venture to start a new church in this city of over 4 million people. This venture was in some ways my baby. It was to be my internship and was up to me to recruit enough people to make it happen. So I did. I didn't recruit everyone but did recruit about half.

We had spent the previous month in San Jose, Costa Rica learning Spanish. In that month alone, I'd already experienced food-poisoning and amoebas. But hey, I had lost weight so it wasn't that bad. I could use an amoeba right now.

So, we had rented a large house, a mansion or as they call them there, a quinta, in an upper class neighborhood in Caracas where 75% of the people lived in high-rise apartment buildings. Our Quinta was called La Fundación. In Caracas and some other parts of the Caribbean, they don't number houses. They name them. And you can name your house Jacqueline if you want, even if the house next door to you is Jacqueline. And while JFK was President of the United States, he and Jackie made a trip to Venezuela. The Venezuelans loved them. There were Quinta Jacquelines everywhere. Have you ever tried to find a house on a street by name? Well, in Caracas they had a huge, six-inch thick book like the yellow pages that lists every house by name so you can kind of find the house you're looking for. It is very clever. Who ever thought it was better to number them?

It was a two-story house, not counting the basement, which was huge. There were three large bedrooms upstairs and three large rooms downstairs with a maid's quarter. In all there were six bathrooms, the three main bathrooms all had bidets. There were two big mango trees in the backyard. There was no grass. The yard was brick, which I think is ideal. If I ever have a yard, I want it to be brick. But I don't want a mango tree, even though I adore mangoes, but when they fall from high onto the brick yard, they make a terrible mess that attracts bees.

We rented La Fundación from a really tall, eccentric woman named Carmen Pereira who spoke so fast that even her fellow Venezuelans said they couldn't understand her. And she seemed to take joy in telling you something and then asking you what she just said. I got drunk at her house one night but that's a story for later.

I was living in La Fundación. We weren't supposed to be living there. We were supposed to be “building bridges” by living with Venezuelan families. All but two of us had managed to find a place. I don't know about the other guy, but I didn't look too diligently. I'd just spent a month living with a wonderful Costa Rican family but living on my own in a mansion seemed more appealing. And just let me say right here, “Doug, I'm sorry, I didn't really look for a family to live with.” There. That's off my chest.

So one Friday morning I was showering and, I'm not kidding you, I dropped the soap. I bent to pick it up and a pain shot through my back. No big deal. But the pain didn't go away and over the next half hour, got worse and became unbearable. We say “unbearable,” but most of us who say “unbearable” bore it somehow, so I guess it was just really intense.

Finally, our leader, Doug Lucas, was summoned to my bedside. He asked me what was wrong. I replied, “I'm dying.” And I really thought I was and I think he really believed me too. I had gone through it all my mind already. I had been a major part of organizing this new venture, and I wasn't even going to make it through the first month. I was going to be a martyr. And I didn't even have any major quotes for future generations to quote about me or to grace the back cover of my biography, which would become standard in missions classes. They would name a dormitory after me at a Bible college.

There were already great quotes from the summer, the best being, “It's cool,” spoken by fellow-intern, Jon Spalding. When things didn't go as planned (and things never go as planned), Jon would nonchalantly say, “It's cool.” But that wasn't my quote.

So after Doug, was summoned to my deathbed, he consulted with Leslie Penhollow, who was on our team and was a nurse and who spoke fluent Spanish. It was decided to take me to the hospital. We got into a cab, Leslie, Jim (her husband) and I.. On the way, the pain moved from my back to my front. And a light went on in my head. I said, “I'm having a kidney stone. The pain just moved.” I don't even know how I knew this. I don't ever remember knowing anything about kidney stones.

Well, at least I wasn't going to die.

Leslie confirmed that it sounded like that was what I was happening. Jim confirmed that he had had them before and it sounded like I might not be dying after all.

We got to the hospital. And though my Spanish was pretty good for two years in high school and a month-long crash course in Costa Rica and having listened to tapes of Venezuelan Spanish for almost a year (“Al pasarse la esponga el jabon hace burbujas.”) my hospital Spanish was just not there.

The rest is a blur. They put me on IV liquid and pain killer and in a short while, say, fewer than three hours, the stone had passed and they sent me home. They sent me with pain killer in case it happened again. But they didn't send me with a nice bottle of pills, no. They sent me with syringes and vials of liquid to inject myself with painkiller. I never had to use them and I'm not sure what I would have done had I needed to. Leslie showed how to do it and had me practice on an orange. But I knew that I was not an orange and having always hated shots, I probably was incapable of shooting up. The other option was that I could go to a pharmacy and someone there would inject me.

On this internship, we pretty much did everything by twos. So the next day as everyone went out to pass out brochures about our upcoming evangelistic campaign, “Cruzada de la Familia.” The telephone number of the house was on the brochure so it was decided that someone should always stay at the house if anyone called with questions such as, “Which La Fundación is that?” Not that I would have understood the question nor would I have been able to give a decent answer. Since I had been under the weather, I was elected to stay back that day to man the phone and since were doing things by twos, someone had to stay with me. The person who got the job that day said, “I came here to save souls not to babysit.” He actually said that.

I realized that back in May, a few weeks before I left for Latin America, I had had a kidney stone on a Saturday night at my parents' house. I had terrible back pain and my mother had some kind of pain killer for something or the other and had given it to me and I must have passed the stone in my sleep. Now that I'm practically an expert, it makes sense. Almost all of my stones have come in pairs. The first one must have been a chip off the old block. The other one hung around to give me this wonderful memory.

And for the record, that guy did get to save souls later. Or at least he want back there as a missionary for several years. I'm not sure how many souls he saved. And I guess we'll never know how many were lost because he got stuck babysitting me.

Incident on the M100

This morning what I really needed was to get home and sleep as soon as I could. But I had to go to the bank. Then I headed home. Normally I would walk but I thought the bus would be faster and I saw an M100 coming so I decided to hop on.

As the bus approached, the driver honked twice. I looked up and there was a man standing in the street, about a foot off the curb. He was wearing a suit and he will hereinafter be referred to as "the suit." He had ear-buds in his ears, as that’s where ear-buds usually go. He appeared to be talking on the phone. He heard the horn and looked up. And you could see that he consciously made a decision to stay standing in the street. The bus could go around him. The driver honked again and I guess even the suit’s hubris wasn’t as big as the bus so he finally relented and gently stepped on the curb.

But his pride was hurt. So he decided to berate the bus driver. “You couldn’t go around me? You had to get that close?”

“Yes,” the driver said, “I’m supposed to get as close to the curb as I can so that passengers can get on.”

The suit said more words but I didn’t hear.

We all got on but the suit got in front of the bus and started taking pictures of the driver and his bus number.

Well! It is on!

So the bus driver called his supervisor. The people on the bus weren’t too happy so the driver gave them transfer slips to get on another bus which had just pulled up.

As I started to get off, I asked the driver if he needed a witness. He said that it would be great. So another gentleman and I waited.

The suit stood on the sidewalk talking on his phone. I snapped some pictures of him, just for fun.

We waited about 15 minutes for the proper MTA authority to arrive. Just before he did (you could see the MTA car coming) the suit asked the driver to open the door. The driver refused. Then the suit said, “I’m a city employee too. And I could make this much worse for you. I was standing on the curb and you came very close to me.”

“No," I said, “You were standing with both feet in the street." At that he looked a little defeated.

And then he crossed the street and went down into the subway. Coward!

Well that sealed it for me. I was definitely going to tell what really happened.

The MTA supervisor got on and what a timid little mouse he was. But I made sure he got my story and gave them all my information.I hope they call.

I hate bullies.

On The Hunger Games

What baffles me about the popularity of The Hunger Games is how many people are opposed to young people reading it. Now, I must point out that every one that I have personally spoken with who has voiced opposition to it has not read it. One lady was going on and on about how bad it was for her grandson to read it. I asked her, “So you didn’t like it?” “Oh, I haven’t read it,” she said without a thought. I knew that already because I know that this lady, who is a teacher, doesn’t read books. She only watches reality TV.

It reminds me of a friend, who is also a teacher. A parent voiced her opposition to her teenage child reading To Kill a Mockingbird because it uses the word “nigger” and talks about rape. My friend asked the lady if she had read it and the lady admitted that she had not. Now, before I move on, I should say that I don’t know this lady and I don’t know where or if she went to school but if she went through school and was never required to read To Kill a Mockingbird, then that school needs to be punished. And that lady needs to be locked in a room and forced to read it. And any teenager needs to know that we live in a world where people say “nigger” and girls get raped.

Now, The Hunger Games is no To Kill a Mockingbird. But it is compelling reading for teens and adults. And I think it has value.

The biggest opposition I hear about The Hunger Games is that “sending children out to kill each other until only one is left standing” should not be looked upon as sport. That’s true. It shouldn’t. And I think that that is the point.

I think the crux of The Hunger Games series may have been spoken by the character, Plutarch, near the end of Mockingjay, the last book, “We’re fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.” You don’t have to look far back into our long history on earth, only the past hundred years to see how bent on self-destruction we are and how quickly we forget it.

And that is why I think teens need to read this series. And then they need to move on from there to reading the history of the last 100 years (and of course, back to the beginning of time). As I write this, children are forced to murder in Africa. Not for sport? For what other reason? It is sport for sadists like Joseph Kony. But it is nothing new. I read in a history of the Holocaust how as the Nazis were cleaning out one of the large ghettos in Poland. A 14 year-old boy in a Nazi uniform was allowed to spear babies on his bayonet as they were tossed from hospital windows. The story went that he was having quite a fun time of it until he realized how messy it was and that’s what made him stop. It wasn’t the murder and suffering that made him stop it seems, but he didn’t like getting his uniform messy.

It’s a bad world we live in. Do we want our children to read nothing more unpleasant than Little House on the Prairie where evil Nellie Oleson is as bad as it gets? We live in a world where children are enslaved and forced to kill. We live in a world where there is starvation. We live in a world where many children, like the children in The Hunger Games have very few choices. And perhaps that is our problem in the West. We have so many choices that we forget how few choices some in our world have. To them the best we in the West often have to say is, “May the odds be ever in your favor,” perhaps a new way of saying, “Be warm and well fed.”

I’m often tempted to look at the world with complete cynicism and fear. But it was the evil President Snow who said what is true in The Hunger Games movie (I can’t remember if he said it in the book): “Hope, it is the only thing that is stronger than fear.” Snow misjudged how true that really is and it was his downfall.

“And now abideth faith, hope, charity.”