Lot in Life

Have you ever wondered why you are in the position you are in life?? I do not mean why you are not the VP of a company and “Joe” is instead of you. I mean why is it that YOU are not the man in the street carving little statues out of soap just to earn money to buy food for the day.

I think about this often. Here in Mexico there are different “lots in life”. There are the poor squatters who live in cardboard shelters; or no shelters at all. They just wander the streets. Even the laborers here, which I have mentioned earlier, live in such simplicity that it is very humbling. We are setting up our bodega and I know our temporary home here is a dream castle for many. This makes me sad. I am a little embarrassed about what we have. And you know what is a real eye opener?….it’s that “everyone” here is so happy. Always smiling, always positive, even when you tell them that you have no work for them. They thank you and continue on their way.

Since we are unpacking our things for the bodega we have lots of cardboard to go to the dump. We have been to the dump numerous times. It is not a nice trip. First of all people live there. At the entrance, which does close and has proper hours, they live. It appears to be a family. A family with children and dogs. Imagine taking a piece of spare wood, a bed spring, a chunk of metal, anything that is thrown away by others, and than making a house out of it. This is what you see on the right when you cross the threshold into the dump. They have compiled years and years of scraps that fill in the area they call home. It is hard to even look at, yet alone imagine living in it.

When you drive in you always drive over aluminum cans. They place the ones they find on the “road” so when you drive in you crush them with your tires. Than they collect the smashed ones and place down fresh ones. They get money for these.

When you turn off the highway, over the threshold into the dump, and over the cans, there is a long road you drive down to get to the actual dump. The road is straight, and continues over a km until it curves to the left. All along this way there is garbage. There are tires, cans, clothing, and burnt piles of rubbish. We knew this was not really the place to dump and we usually drove down to the curve and left our stuff. In our minds we thought this would be a proper place to leave our garbage. The only garbage we have really had is construction stuff. Our food waste is placed in proper cans to be picked up weekly by the garbage truck.

So last time we went to the dump we drove down to the curve and left our things. On the way out the woman who lives there stopped us and told us that the “real” dump is around two more corners. How she even knew we did not go all the way we were not sure. We did not even know we had not gone all the way! It was impossible to see us. We thought maybe she knew by the time it took us to get “there and back”. What was weird is that she had silver teeth. It looked like she placed aluminum foil over her teeth. A lot of money was spent on those teeth. Not pretty, but silver is expensive! That was strange.

So yesterday we had a lot of cardboard to go to the dump. I was giving a ride home to Tomas, one of Maurice’s “friends” who has helped us go through Maurice’s tools the last couple of days. We were really late and since the bed of the truck was already filled I decided that after I dropped him off I would go to the dump before it closed. Remembering what that woman with the silver teeth told us, when I entered, drove over the aluminum cans, smashed 20 or 30 for them, I continued down the road. I was so tempted to pull over and pull all the cardboard off the back of the truck. I didn’t. I continued around the first curve, down the road another ¼ km and turned around another curve.

Even now writing this I find it hard to breathe and my eyes are swelling up. What I saw when I went around this corner was piles, upon, piles of garbage. The piles went on as far as I could see. At the same instant hundreds of flies flew into the truck. All at once I was covered in flies. There were hundreds of them inside the truck. But there were two things worse than this. The first thing was the smell. I seriously could not breathe. The stench was so bad that I fought off throwing up. I have never in my life smelled anything like this and I will NEVER go back there again. NEVER.

The second worse thing - and one of the worse things I have ever seen in my whole life - was that while I was spinning around, cardboard still in back, trying to escape the smell and the flies, my one arm that was not on the steering wheel swatting the air around my head and mouth, I saw people there digging through the garbage. In the middle of the flies and the stench were dirty, sad, people digging, looking for things to help them survive.

What got these poor people to their lot in life?? What in their birth right got them to this horrible destiny???

We need to thank our lucky stars, as my Aunt Delores would say, that we are blessed with what we have. Family, health, happiness and enough money that we can go to sleep every night under clean sheets, with a full stomach, and with a roof over our heads.