Border Town – Sunset Observer #45
January 6, 2017 Victor El-Khouri 0 Comments
…By Whitney Farmer
@farmer_whitney (Twitter/FLICKR) or farmerwhitney (Instagram) and whitney.farmer.146 (Facebook)
#edcmooc #edcmooc3 #edcmoocrocks #ESL #TESOL #SoCalTESOL
Un Pop Culture
Something warm and soft pushed against my leg as the woman cried and told us her story. When I looked down, I saw a pit-bull so big that I didn’t have to bend down to scratch his velvet ears. He was outside in the cold with the rest of us, at the dark playground on the edge of the dark beehive of the public housing project that rose above the parking lot that cut into the side of the hill.
The dog was like the others there in the dry city. He had stopped trying to win the attention and treats from humans who had promised his kind a place by the fire in exchange for their freedom. Now both desolate species walk past each other on asphalt or dirt without making eye contact, like in any city. Both dogs and humans commute wherever they go to do what they must do to not die that day.
But this dog understood what the woman was saying somehow, and his quiet heart wanted somehow to comfort her. So he came close to Judith, Alejandra and I and gave all that he had: his warm shoulder and soft ears on a cold night.
That was the night when I learned that it is a miracle to not be hated. One boy who lived there named Diego decided to be my ambassador when I got separated from my team as night fell. He spoke English as well as Spanish, and led me up and down staircases where the steps crumbled under our feet or that had strips of plywood covering holes that looked down to the ground three floors below. Each door that we knocked on opened up for us, something that wouldn’t happen in my town. I told them all that I was a Christian and an American and that I didn’t speak Spanish – all reasons to make me target practice – and then Diego helped me tell them that our church was going to show a movie for the kids. We had set up the laptop, projector, and speakers in the parking lot and were going to project the film against the outside wall of one of the buildings that rose above the dark playground.
One group of about eight guys partying with untold amounts of the name-brand beer of this company town and ranchera music blasting from two pickups at first acted in the standard way, but then treated me with gentle respect and shook my hand, saying ‘Dios te bendiga’ before Diego and I continued on. Later, I got to meet the mother of the remarkable Diego, and she was remarkable. We shared stories that women must tell each other that made a homeless pit-bull want to give comfort. At the end of the stories we all have is the suspicion that we have reached the end of the love of God. It is the last silent lie that tries to take root after we first hear His voice. It helps to test that lie with someone else. When our ears hear our voices say it, it dissolves. In its place, peace settles. And then joy starts to push its way up and out.
Laughter went in front and behind us everywhere. Our host renamed ‘La salsa dos niños” – basically tomatoes and oregano – to “La Salsa de Whitney” porque soy blanca. As we posed for a photo at the city name sign, a guy on a bike in a cowboy hat did a drive-by exhortation to “Say QUESO!” and rode into the sunset with a smile before our laughter ended. On our last night, ranchera music blasted until 5am from the house next door to the tower of the church building where we slept. But by then, our souls felt rich enough to pity the pigeons and rats who came through our broken windows, trying to get a good night’s sleep. And the human roommates were able in the morning over tortillas and instant coffee to share with each other which songs we recognized that had squeezed past our earplugs and into our dreams.
The economics of serving the children of the poor in a poor city are impossible. Our host church doesn’t have enough adults who can help with the workload, or protect the work. Where we stayed has been robbed five times, and one of the more recent events lost them their boiler. Not being able to sterilize water in a city where a monopoly on water rights has been granted to a private company to make cheap beer makes life complicated. That is only one part of one equation that breaks a calculator. And yet…they give. They work. They laugh. They sing. They plan. They hope. And they served me a large portion at this feast, covered in La Salsa de Whitney.
After we came back across the border heading for home, I read the news about the bombing at the church in Cairo. The next day in the English class for immigrants, a student from Egypt brought me a rose.
Quote of the Blog, from Damaris, from one of the ESL classes in Huntington Beach: “No give? No bless.”
Picture from my cell phone, of the wall at ‘the Colony’ public housing complex in Tecate. While we set up for the movie, the children who live there played in the light of the projection.
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