To Love Justice

El Parque Central in Xela

They call Guatemala, “The Land of Eternal Spring,” and with it’s year-round 70 degree weather it lives up to it’s name. 

One summer, I was studying Spanish in Quetzeltenango (nicknamed Xela).  After Antigua, Xela is one of the top destinations in the country for perfecting one’s command of the language, and there are dozens of schools to choose from. 

This was my second trip to the nation, and I was there more for adventure than Spanish, but studying was a cheap way to find housing. 

I had been in town for about two weeks, and though there were many parts that felt unsafe, the walk home from school was on a main drag, and it wasn’t worrisome.

It was nearing dusk, and I was about 2 blocks from home.    I can still feel the horror in the pit of my stomach if I close my eyes.

A truck came careening down the street.  It was like a dream.  I COULD NOT figure out what I was seeing at first.  It looked like a large rag doll or scarecrow was being swung around on a pole off the bed of a pick-up.  There were a few people on the street near me and we all stopped and stiffened.  Something about the way the truck was moving, something about the scene felt unnervingly dangerous—before the realization hit.

The truck came to a stop at the corner of the street I was on.  In absolute horror, I realized the rag doll was a man.  An old, grandpa man.  The man who had been swinging him around threw him onto the street and then proceeded to jump out of the truck and beat him with the metal pole. 

None of us around did a thing.  When I realized what was happening, a desire to help washed over me, followed quickly by self-preservation, and the knowledge that a person who would beat an elderly man would just as quickly beat an American tourist.  Before I could recover from my stupor, the truck was gone.  Within a minute, a police car pulled up to the scene.

An ambulance quickly followed and a crowd gathered.  The police did not seek witnesses, or ask any of us at the scene what happened.  Thru some people in the crowd whose Spanish I could understand, it seems the man was a shopkeeper and he was dropped off in front of his shop.  It was not clear what his “crime” was or why he was attacked, but it was clear that it was business-related.

There’s no way to describe how horrific it was to see violence firsthand.  To watch someone helpless being hurt and feeling frozen and helpless is one of the worst feelings in the world.

I’d like to think that if I were to witness violence of this nature again, that I wouldn’t be frozen a second time.  I’d like to think that I would be angry enough, and love justice enough to act, even at personal cost.  That remains to be seen.

But what I do know?  What I can do? Is make a difference now.  I can love justice now.  Where I am.

I can give to the poor, I can teach my students to love what is right. I can stick up for people in the marketplace when their rights are not honored.  I can insist that parents be parents and “encourage” them towards this end within the educational system.  I can speak up for the rights of the unborn, and refuse to vote for anyone who is willing to let babies be killed.  I can give money to the homeless on corners, or go a step further and take them a meal.  I can teach my kids how to fight fair, and how to forgive.  I can serve on juries without trying to get out of them.  I can be a voice when no one else wants to be a voice.

What can you do?

We must, we must, love justice.

Illusion

La Merced

La Antigua, Guatemala

I never understood why Ana, our housemother, told us to be careful of Luis.  Nor did I understand why my friend Kim would parrot these words to me anytime he would come up in conversation.

For those of us living in the host home in Guatemala, Luis was simply “that shoeshine boy” or even “You know, that boy.”  We all knew who “that boy” was.  We passed him sitting on the stoop of La Merced every day on our way to language school.

I didn’t understand my friends’ precautions because after teaching four years in the South Bronx, no young hand-kissing, por-favor-buy-me-a-Pepsi-saying, mentally challenged teenage boy could pose a threat to me.

I loved to stop and chat with him, practicing my fledgling Spanish on him as he practiced his beginning English on me., saying carefully constructed pointed sentences such as, “HOW-ARE-YOU-MY-LOVE?” and kissing my hand, asking me to sit awhile and linger so he could read to me the sentences he had been copying and learning to read.  I never saw the harm in being near Luis.

Then, one moment in time, that will forever be landscaped in my inner eye, I saw a different Luis.  That day, as I made my way home from a café where I had sat eating my plate of papa fritas amidst a sea of stranger faces.  That day—

I saw Luis away from his usual corner.  He was standing in the middle of the street, a hugantic boulder clutched under each arm.  Across from him stood an annoying mosquito of a man who had obviously unfairly provoked him.  Luis, unsure of the growing emotion inside looked ready to pounce.

Around him a sea of people awaited his movements while the object of his wrath at times provoked him and at times attempted to pass. The boy vacillated between the choice of saving face through open aggression or backing down and staying alive, his face contorting as his body rocked back and forth considering his options.

The boy, in the eyes of the crowd, was beloved in an awkward sort of way and they stood watch over him to make sure he did not get hurt.  But to him in the intensity of the moment, the crowd was hostile—it turned him inward on himself and made him feel as though he must finish what had been started.

I too, know that feeling—that loathsome feeling of being watched, observed, and thereby judged.  Feeling all the world has stopped and awaits your movements—ready to render judgment whichever way you choose.  That turning inward on yourself which forces out of the imagination the possibility that the faces which appear so hostile might actually be friendly.

In that moment of vacillation, a stranger stepped up and gently removed the rocks from underneath Luis’s arms, pulling him gently to the side away from the gaze of the crowd.

I hope that in my moments, my strangers will rescue me the way his did him that day, removing the rocks of self-doubt from my demeanor, with which I’ll crush myself, if left alone.