Tables, cows and movie stars
I cried after Felix left my house. He had invited himself over at 8, and arrived promptly, wearing in a collared shirt and carrying a box of pizza. We spent the evening talking primarily about our work. He’s a great kid, reminds me of many of my friends back home whose combination of intelligence and motivation are making them doctors, lawyers, teachers, therapists.

At age 13 Felix decided to learn a skill that would guarantee him work, and enrolled in a special high school to learn to operate factory machinery. The school is a 2-hour commute from Guasmo Sur, so for the next six years he commuted 4 hours a day, and in the evenings he went to his factory internship before going home. Since graduating, he has been working 12 hour days 7 days a week in a metal can and bottle-making factory. His contract is for an 8 hour work day with 3 hours of mandatory overtime. Because of the machines the factory is well over 100 degrees all the time.

As we were eating dinner told me how earlier that day the metal lid of a tuna can flew off the belt at him. He caught it in his gloved hand before it hit is neck. He laughed, telling me the story, “Good thing I caught it, or we wouldn’t be sitting here eating pizza right now.” There are safety valves on his machinery, but workers get paid based on their production, so he shrugged his shoulders at the idea of using them. He normally makes about $300 a month, which is better than most people here, but still a meager amount. He is happy he has a steady income, and is trying to save money to buy a car, house, to travel, but he complained how he never has time to spend with friends or family as he arrives from work exhausted, to sleep.

Before he left my apartment, he pulled a gift out of his backpack for me. A piggy bank that says in English “Baby’s First Bank.” The price tag was still on, and it was this sum plus the cost of the pizza compared to his salary that made me cry.

He didn’t like my barrel table, and the following week kept asking to bring over an extra table he had for me. I was busy and rarely home, and we never found a time until one evening I got back from grocery shopping to find him sitting on the cement slab in front of my apartment next to a hand-crafted wooden table. “Felix! How long have you been here? It’s raining. And you made me a table?”

“Oh, it was nothing,” he said, “I want to make you a bigger one, and cabinets, but I ran out of material.” I grabbed my head with my hands. “Felix, it’s really beautiful, thank you so much. But you can’t make me more things.” I tried reasoning with him, he kept insisting he would build me more furniture.

I breathed a sigh of relief thinking of him the next day as mud-caked shoes mounted the 3 busses needed to get to the beach. I went to Palmar, a fishing village just off road that runs between the popular beaches of Ecuador’s South coast. The Peace Corps placed my friend Daniel there in el Santuario “the Sanctuary,” a beautiful Catholic church and grounds that sit on a cliff overlooking the ocean.

It is beautiful. Whether sitting in the church, watching the blue of the sea from the edge of the cliff, or floating on the waves in the ocean, an inner stillness invades you. Father Pablo, the priest at el Santuario, moved to Palmar from South Korea 23 years ago, and has done much interesting work there. We had a lively conversation, in which he recruited me first for nun-ship, and then to help him think and pray about a community he is thinking of starting in the US. He is almost 70 years old, now beginning an on-line degree program after just completing a PhD, and he talks about preparing himself for his future. He loves to think, I think, and Daniel was laughing that Padre had recruited me to his think tank to think about things.

I was not just recruited in Palmar for my mind or prayers, however. One afternoon I was given a tour of a quail egg farm and artisan shop, both very promising micro enterprises Daniel helped the youth group in Palmar establish. After the tours and a long meeting with the youth about their projects, we were getting ready to head back to the santuario. One of the guys in the group called Daniel back over. There was some laughter at the table, and when Daniel returned to where I was waiting I asked, “What was that about?”

“Well, Jorge told me that he would trade me all of his women for you.” His eyebrows rose; he looked down at me. “And he has a lot of women. Kids too.”

As I was chuckling, he told me a story of his college travels in Nairobi. After a hassle crossing the border, the tour guide informed the group that the guards wanted to trade one of the women on the bus for 25 cows. As she laughingly asked if that was all and they could go now, the guide looked at her very seriously and said, “Maybe you don’t know it, but 25 is a lot of cows.”

That woman was not traded in the end, and luckily, neither was I, but I arrived back in Guayaquil refreshed, sunburnt, and in time to meet a different sort of man. On Wednesday I accompanied some of my animadores to the “School of Leaders of the New Millennium” (one of Mi Cometa’s projects) in the city center. When I came back after their class to pick them up, there was a good-looking man who was asking a line of girls their names and writing them on scraps of paper, I assumed signing them up for something. He looked at me hard when I walked in and introduced himself, Juan Fernando.

He talked to me as he wrote, asking me what I do, where I’m from, and when I asked him the same, he replied with a smile that he’s an actor, producer, and film professor. After a few more minutes of him talking about this and showing me his Hollywood key chain, I squinted my eyes, cocked my head, and asked, “Are you really famous and I just don’t know who you are?” explaining that I don’t keep up with movie stars. He shrugged his shoulders modestly, and gave me a list of his work. It seems he has been/is on several TV series and just made a movie with the “Rico Suave” guy. When I left he asked for my number, and we agreed to get together sometime.

I received 5 text messages from him that day, 3 more plus a phone call the next day, and on Friday I met him at McDonalds where he had invited me for an ice cream sundae. I opted not to give my normal I-hate-McDonalds speech in order to get the full cultural experience of going out with an Ecuadorian TV star.

I was sitting on a bench next to a plastic Ronald McDonald when he walked up in a tight sleeveless shirt, swinging his arms in that slightly unnatural way that men do when self-conscious of their muscles. We ate our sundaes, he talking a lot about his acting career and asking me how single I am. He made a comment about how “I am an actor and you are a volunteer,” as we left McDonalds, but then informed me we had something in common, that he spent a month in Kosovo filming a documentary.

As he wanted to stay in air conditioning, we walked through the nearby mall where he would ask me a question, then interrupt with a different topic as his eye or mind caught something else. Astounded to hear that I haven’t been to the malls in Guayaquil, and have only been to the movies once, he promised to show me around. “I’m going to spoil you,” he smiled at me. I bit my lip, and paused to smile at a little girl with pigtails, as he kept his stride.

Exiting the mall, he said he wanted to take me to a certain area of the Malecon, the boardwalk that runs along the river through downtown Guayaquil. We squinted stepping into the sun. “What do you do for fun?” he asked. I was in the middle of listing off things when he interrupted. “Oh, you like the gym. Me too. The gym is my hobby. Yes, the gym is…my hobby.”

As we walked, several teenage girls called out his TV persona’s name at him, and eventually one came over to talk to him. “What are you doing here?” she asked him.

“I’m out with my friend…” he looked over at me, raised his eyebrows and his voice deepened, “…with my friend Dana.”

We soon arrived at where he had wanted to take me, a playground. We sat on a bench drinking lemonades. He put his bottle down eventually and said, “I do gymnastics.” He got up, stretched, said, “I don’t know if I can do this any more,” and pulled himself up on the rings, muscles bulging. He dismounted. “I’m too old for this shit.”

I sighed, paused, then said, “I used to do gymnastics too.” I climbed onto the bar and threw myself spinning around its cool metal. I dismounted. He did a handstand. I walked on my hands. I laughed in between acrobatics. I was doing gymnastics in the middle of the Malecon with a soap opera star.

Finally my watch said three o’clock, time for him to go film and for me to go buy art supplies for my PAIC kids. We arrived at his car, parked in the shade, and I pushed my sunglasses back on my head. He looked at me. “I like it better when you don’t wear your sunglasses,” he said. “I like your eyes.”

I replied matter-of-factly, “Yes, they’re a lot like my mom’s eyes.”

“But I don’t like your mom’s eyes, I like your eyes.”

I took a deep breath. “Thank you.” Patting his shoulder I said, “Well, you’d better go, I don’t want you to be late for filming.”

“I don’t want to go,” he whined. I smiled at him.

A block away my phone sounded. A text message. “I had a really great time. Thank you. Juan Fernando.” Once again I took a deep breath, exhaled slowly.

“It will make a good story,” I thought, putting my phone back in my purse and pulling out my shopping list: poster board, staples, glue, and a table cloth.
- posted by little monk @ 7:41 PM