Teresan News Summer 2012 - Alumnae Association of the College ...

Finding familiar faces 3,000 miles away from home
By Jerome Christenson
I thought it was my first trip into the Third World.
It wasn’t a neighborhood featured in the tourist guides. Sister Margaret Kiefer OSF ’46 - we just
called her Marg - was taking us to visit her friend, a young man she visited every week and who she
was certain we wanted to meet. His name is Luis. He’s 29, lives with his mother, and according to
Marg, dreams of someday becoming a lawyer.
The street in front of their home, carved into the Andean mountainside, offers spectacular glimpses of
Bogotá and the surrounding mountains. “A million-dollar view,” Marg calls it.
We hadn’t been 24 hours in Colombia when we climbed into the white school van and nosed out into
the traffic-jammed streets of the capital city, past shopping malls, Subaru dealerships, high-rise apartment
blocks and into the pages of National Geographic.
The gouges and potholes grew in depth and number as the narrowing street switchbacked across the
face of the mountain, past an endless jumble of tiny eateries, second-hand shops, mechanics, metal
workers, grocers and bars. Homes and commercial buildings rose flush to the narrow sidewalk or, often,
to the very edge of the street - the steeply rising mountainside itself often providing a solid, if windowless,
back wall.
Luis’ home is built like that. Driving past, Marg pointed to it, but our eyes saw only a dirty plastic tarp
and some sheets of corrugated roofing wedged into the muddy mountainside. We pulled up, and only
then saw the unpainted door hung askew in a scrap lumber frame.
Marg knocked, and Luis’ mother greeted us graciously in Spanish and escorted us along the short,
steep, dirt-floored hallway, past the rust-red chicken tethered by its right leg to a table overloaded with
bags and cartons of the discards and scraps she gathered to sell and recycle.
Luis smiled broadly, looking up from his pillow. A strapping 6-footer, he had been confined to his bed
since the day years ago he came to Bogotá on a visit from his home in the countryside and a stray bullet,
fired by someone for some reason no one knows, tore into his spine, leaving his body useless much
below his shoulders.
Still, every day he studies. Marg and his tutor bring him schoolbooks. Turning the pages with painfully
crippled arms, his fists permanently and involuntarily clenched, he fights for the education he hopes,
believes offers him a future beyond the mountainside.
Our visit was short. We had places to go, people to see. Luis had to study and his mother had much to
do, as she does every day. The van jostled us down the mountainside, dodging buses and dump trucks
with inches to spare, passing mothers and children, old men and young, dogs trotting alongside, sniffing
for tidbits in the mud.
That evening we crossed the street from our guest house to pick up some snacks and sundries at the
neighborhood shopping mall — three stories of American-style merchandising, Budweiser and pretzels
priced in Colombian pesos. It felt so much like home.
And for some reason I thought of a man I’d driven past back home just days before. He was standing by
the highway, holding a hand-lettered sign fashioned from the side panel of a corrugated cardboard box.
Our eyes met for a moment, before I motored across the intersection and out of his life, leaving him
there with his bedroll and sign that read, “Homeless. Please help.”
Of course that mall in Bogotá felt like home. I’d traveled 3,000 miles to see faces, hear voices I manage
to look past nearly every day.
The Third World, it seems, is where you find it. We only have to look.
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