Change of perspective

Sometimes I get in a rut and I don't want out. It's a good rut after all, or at least appears so. It's comfortable, but perhaps the better term is another C word.

Complacency.

I'm excited for the year to come, yet all the preparation work involved before the actual doing work takes a lot out of me. I'll take a more tangible example from this past week. We were asked to help renovate a little of el Refugio in Las Violetas. I've been painting mostly. Yet before we paint, we need a couple hours to scrape the last of the previous years' paint(s--blue, yellow, pink and green. I joked with someone that the wall looks like you're looking at the inside of a Gobstopper), a quarter to half of an hour to prepare the paint, the brushes, and naturally, bring in the tarp or newspapers to protect the ground. Ugh.

But if you want the paint to last.. if you want to do a good job.. you've got to prepare. There's some Biblical lesson in that, but I will keep going.

I experienced the lack of the lack of the lack of desire to even help out much this week. Sure, I had one day in particular that was hard for me, the death of the mom of one of my best friends in life. But even the other days, when I was feeling better, I didn't always want to be there. Then two things happened.

The first was a small inspiration to look up the work of Charity:Water again to see if they had any Spanish resources. Just watching some of their videos was enough to be reminded of how easy I have it. I complain about working for three hours when people walk more than that just to get clean drinking water for the day? Something about thinking about this made it easier for me to wake up and get chugging.

The other was after this evening. Eze, JD and I went for the afternoon to continue the labor when Eze called out to a few boys in the neighborhood to help us out. I ended up getting paired with a kid named Leo, with whom I shared conversation about some of his dreams for life. He mainly wants to be a dancer or a soccer player, but I asked him what he would do if that didn't work out.

The thing about a lot of the kids in Las Violetas is they don't imagine life outside of it. The stigma attached to the barrio, well, even just this past week at the post office when I mentioned I volunteer there, the man looked at me in shock. He also proceeded to show me how I can receive my package without having to pay for it (I had told him the books were for sharing with people here). Taxis don't go there. Everyone walks in the middle of the street. I can't possibly describe to you what it is like, because you just have to experience it for yourself.

And yet, I've been more comfortable there recently. I had performed a personal experiment where I said "Hola" to almost everyone I passed from my neighborhood to Las Violetas adjacent. I noticed the responses getting colder and colder the closer I came, and that most people in the latter did not even make eye contact anymore. This is not always the case, but it was something that changed drastically today.

That is, when we finished our few hours of work I walked outside in my clothes, covered in paint and dust. Some of the older women were sweeping a nearby porch. "Hola, nena!" one of them said to me; the equivalent of "Hello, my daughter." Then I went to buy some juice to satisfy our thirst and more and more the people kept looking at me to give their salutations. I could tell that this time it wasn't because I was the gringa.

It's sort of like what I see in Rodrigo uno, who gives us more respect now after our consistency with him (Although, we still have to be careful that he doesn't manipulate us). And I still don't throw aside the possibility that there were more people outside when I went to buy the juice in Las Violetas. Nevertheless, I was walking alone, and I didn't feel afraid.

All this to say: if you're not willing to get dirty, you might never get any good work done in the first place. Puede ser...

Chau.