The Other Side of the Bridge

To get to school Stephen and I have to cross this sort of tunneled off part of a bridge. There’s some trash on one end of it and it smells of urine (we live in the lower income part of town so this is to be expected) but it’s overlooking a pretty, green part of the river. Yesterday while we were shopping with some friends we were walking on the other side of the bridge. It’s the same river, but these banks are completely covered in garbage, except for where very primitive shacks have been constructed of various pieces of colorful tin. People have to live in these. I try to imagine what their lives must be like but I still cannot. And the worst part is knowing that I am the problem. They live like this because I take more than I need. But, as Mother Theresa said, “In the poor we meet Jesus in his most distressing disguises.”
I think I met him yesterday in an 11-year-old boy. In the morning we had a mini-lecture in which we got a list of 25 things we should do while we are here. It’s kind of a lofty goal, and my friends and I are fairly certain we won’t make it through all of them (a little bit because we have to do this whole school thing but mostly because to do all of them would require more funds than we have) but the combination of a challenge and adventure (these tasks are all over the country, which is okay since it’s smaller than Michigan…) leaves me itching to start it right now! Anyway, going to see the murals in the monument was one of the things on this list (check!) and after we did that we decided to venture in the city on our own since we had some free time in the afternoon. We were feeling ready to conquer the big city since we had a “búsqueda de Tesoro” that morning which means we were let loose in the bustling city in teams of four to find various important places and things. While riding in the conchos I was vaguely reminded of the Knight bus in The Prisoner of Azkaban that somehow manages to physically squeeze itself through two cars that are only a lane apart…
Anyway, back to my point. We wanted ice cream. And apparently we didn’t learn enough on our scavenger hunt to know where it was so we enlisted the help of a little boy. Instead of just telling us where to go he took us there himself. Afterwards he wanted something, but the thing about little kids is that they don’t understand that we can’t understand them if they don’t talk slowly and take out all sorts of parts of words. Which is wonderful if you really want to learn Dominican Spanish because they’re not afraid to laugh at you. But bad if they need something. We assumed he wanted a tip for taking us so we obliged. But he just sat there and watched us eat ice cream. He was adorable. So naturally I went over to him, asked if he wanted ice cream, and got him some. There was another man there begging from us who clearly had various mental and physical disabilities, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on which. The boy ate a couple bites of his ice cream while I made small talk with him, then brought the rest over to the man to let him have it. It was such a beautiful picture of Jesus to me.
After talking to him some more we figured out that he actually had been asking for paper for school-that’s why he stayed there for so long while we were eating our ice cream. He didn’t have any pens/pencils or paper for school and needed 100 pesos to buy some paper (that’s about US$2.50). By this point I had started to really connect with and care about this boy, so I wanted to walk with him to find some paper so I wasn’t just handing out money. We walked to the paper store, but it was closed. Since we had led him on so far I felt obligated to give him the money. There was no way I could say no to that face :). Others agreed and Stephen gave him money for paper. Maybe that was a good decision, maybe it wasn’t, but we couldn’t help ourselves. I had seen Jesus in this boy’s face! This reminded me of this one time I was coming back from Meijer and saw an injured man in tattered clothes asking for money and I got that feeling-the one where there’s no option but to help out without feeling tremendously guilty-so I gave him a 20, the only bill I had and tried to say something but traffic was moving and I had to go with it. I spent the rest of the day wondering if that was the right decision and feeling terrible for not stopping to get to know him. For the next 2 days I prayed that the money went to a good use and that God would work in his life. I couldn’t take the money back or go back and find him, but I could pray for God’s work in him. So I can do for this boy.
Today was a lot of fun-we went to Santo Domingo! We learned a lot of cool history things (Dad and Kate would have loved it!) and we went to a couple ruins of slave mills. Santo Domingo is bigger and busier than Santiago, as it’s the capital. Fun fact: Dominicans, no matter where in the Dominican Republic they actually live, will often say that they are from Santo Domingo because it’s the biggest city. What we call Hispaniola (so this includes Haiti) they would often call Santo Domingo. So, since so many Dominicans live in New York and it’s an important city, they will ask us what part of New York we are from. It doesn’t faze them when the answer is Portland, Oregon or Houston, TX because the United States and New York are interchangeable. End of culture lesson for the day :)