Tino

I no longer know what to do about Tino. It’s easy when he’s sprawled out on the side of the street, drooling unconscious with the merciless rays of high noon beating upon his face. The children sidestep him like a fallen tree branch on their way home from school.

Sometimes I see him walking up the hill from our colonia, our paths due to intersect. As he wobbles towards me I tell myself I won’t even acknowledge his existence. He doesn’t even deserve that. But whether it’s guilt or curiosity, I often end up making eye contact with him. His glassy eyes brighten as a smile shoots out across his face. It’s a smile of desperation, a smile that seems forced yet somehow genuine. It’s as if he wants me to smile back like we’re old friends, as if he hadn’t burned his life to the ground and that he won’t die alone after all.

A greeting always escapes my mouth.

If he were to ever stand straight he’d be close to six feet tall. His jeans and sloppily tucked in buttonups do little to hide the frail figure that a lifetime of neglect and abuse has given him. A permanent gray and black scruff clings to his face, his sunken eyes hidden beneath the brow of his dirtied white sombrero.

I always wonder where he goes. How he manages to scrape his cents together to go and buy his vices. The woman I live with is named Catalina. One time she said he propositioned her, “I’ll give you $40 if you come to my house right now.” She scoffed as she told me this. “I’m worth much more than $40.” she exclaimed, only half joking.

All the houses in my neighborhood were donated after the civil war. They’re all identical tiny squares with black tiles, dusty gray cinderblocks and tired red and yellow tiles. Many times a family of eight or more will share the same four walls, yet Tino lives alone.

Our lives are intertwined by proximity. I could underhand a mango and hit the roof of his house from my front door. I can’t help but see him as I walk by, swinging in his filthy hammock, a blaring radio his only company.

Late last year his advances at Catalina became more persistent. With her husband having left more than a decade ago, he must feel like she’s an easy target. The propositions continued, along with the catcalls intermingled with outright insults until early one morning he found her alone at the restaurant where she works. It appeared as if he hadn’t slept but spent the night drinking instead. He ordered a liter of beer. He quickly drained the bottle and then tried to make an advance only to be told off. Enraged, he curled a fist and threw it into Catalina. In one swift movement she grabbed the bottle off the table and shattered it over the side of his head. Catalina called her brothers and sisters and as Tino stumbled, bleeding back to his house, they intercepted him. Fists and feet rained upon him until he managed to get away and lock himself in his house. He didn’t come out for two days.

It was then I decided to never speak to him again. And I didn’t. When he finally emerged with the tattered bandages covering the side of his head, I went by him without a word. And so did a lot of people. Drunks are normally ignored and ridiculed here, but Tino managed to find a level below worthlessness and moved right in.

Soon his unreturned greetings began to show pangs of desperation. With watery eyes and a child like expression he would call my name out. This gets me because very few people actually call me by my name, opting for “Gringo”. I don’t necessarily mind being called gringo but sometimes it irks me. Any American could move here tomorrow and they would call him the same name. It’s to say me living and working here for the past year has done nothing to embellish my identity in their minds, I’m just an interchangeable “Gringo” and not “Daniel” the person. So when Tino calls out my name it naturally makes me stop.

This man is a predator, a sleaze, and a drunk. In large part he is the author to his own demise. He has repeatedly hurt and terrorized one of the kindest people I know. So why is it that I can’t ignore him?

Maybe it’s like how I feel with my name. I dream of being more than the “Gringo”, for someone to recognize my humanity. Maybe by the same token, maybe he wishes to be more than the invisible bolo (drunk). Because despite all of his faults and all the terrible things he’s done, he is still a human being capable of feeling pain. Pain that is so palpable that when you look into his welling, sullen eyes you both know that the best he can wish for is that someone simply acknowledges that he’s still alive.

The End of Suffering

Note: I originally wrote this for the PC publication, hence it's geared to an audience of volunteers.

It took me awhile to realize it was there. Training is a steam whistle, continuous and intense until one day, it stops. You’re dropped off in your site with the ringing in your ears.

Homesickness, culture shock, doubt, isolation, and devastating boredom all hit in waves. But while these all come and go, this, it sits with you, hard and unmoving.

I don’t think I’m crazy to say that all of us have it. While we piss and moan about the stems and even the roots we can’t even seem to mention the trunk. What lays at the center of it all.

Because after the pages have fallen off the calendar, and as the time that I’ve spent with myself day after day has grown, I’ve finally begun to scrape it all away and I know now it’s been there this entire time.

It’s this overwhelming, all-enveloping and complete sadness.

I can already hear my phone ringing a few days after this is published. Also, I can see some eyes glaze over as this is chalked up to a pity piece. Trust me (staff), I am fine. I’m actually so good that I am writing this.

It’s that feeling when you look at trainees. After the initial exchange of pleasantries and genuine excitement. You look at their face and you think “You poor bastard”.

It’s laying in the hammock during a sweltering afternoon, your eyes fixed on a spot on the wall, lost in the screams of the chicharras.

It’s the bitterness, the feeling of being underappreciated, misunderstood and treated as “El Gringo” and not as a human-being with family, friends and emotional needs.

Yes, there are tremendous highs and we are all lucky to be here. I’ve just been feeling like we aren’t calling it for what it is. What’s at the base of cliches like “It’s the hardest job you’ll ever love!”.

Hard. Hardness.Hardship. Sadness. Pain.

I used to think that this was just PC, but I now know that it’s larger than that. Staring at that point on the wall, I’ve discovered two things:

1. Sadness is the foundation of life.
2. Pain is beauty.

Let’s see if I can express this without sounding like a brooding teenager, spilling his soul on his livejournal account.

Life is trauma from the first day. We spend nine months floating in the warm, secure darkness of our mother. Then, the fluid we’ve come to understand as an extension of ourselves is flushed from around us, sending us falling, mercilessly pressed through a tiny hole, impossibly large figures grabbing at us, the lights burning our eyes. It is then that we learn to cry.

It makes me think of the Buddhist belief of nirvana. Nirvana is unlike the pursuit of happiness, or the Christian belief of eternal bliss as the reward for terrestrial life. It is not learning to be joyful, it is learning how to stop the pain.

“The search for a spiritual path is born out of suffering. It does not start with lights and ecstasy but with the hard tacks of pain, disappointment and confusion. However, for suffering to give birth to a genuine spiritual search, it must amount to more than something passively received from without. It has to trigger an inner realization, a perception that pierces through the facile complacency of our usual encounter with the world to glimpse the insecurity perpetually gaping underfoot.”

-Chapter 1, The Noble Eightfold Path: The Way to End Suffering

To glimpse the insecurity perpetually gaping underfoot.

In other worlds, while we focus on how quirky our lives can be at times (Everyone laughed when I tried to eat a pupusa with a fork!) or our daily struggles (No one showed up from my English class...again) these experiences are secondary. At the core of this entire experience is an immense body of pain and suffering.

Feels good, don’t it?

But in our endless quest to find a Disney-quality happy ending, there is hope.

Which takes me to my second point: Pain is beauty.

Enter Louis Armstrong. On the checklist of the requirements needed to have a shitty life, Louis managed to hit all boxes. Abandoned by father, check. Born black in the United States, check. Mother is a prostitute, check. Lives in squalor, check. So how is it that this man managed to overcome impossible obstacles to become one of the most renowned and celebrated musicians of his time? (Hint: it wasn’t his happy-go-lucky attitude or his “go-gettem” spirit).

Like many black musicians born into a society designed to see them fail, he used what he had and what he had was an abundance of pain and misery. Slave hymns that turned into the Blues, Jazz, and Rock&Roll aren’t “happy” songs. They speak of devastating pain and desolation. Yet something happens when these songs reach the ear of another humanbeing. This misery set to tune resonates with the listener, fills them with those emotions. This experience can be so profound that the oddest thing happens. That misery beings to trigger feelings of pure, elated joy.

Just like crying your eyes out to a good drama, or swapping war stories with another volunteer, pain is beautiful when shared.

In a sense, that is why I am sharing this with you. So we can actually express ourselves and not fear that if we acknowledge the insecurity perpetually gaping underfoot that we are depressed or unfit for this job. Rather, the crushing lows that we all face should band us together, remind us of the foundation that we all share. Only through manifesting this suffering, sharing, can we begin to convert our misery to joy.