Andrew Klavan: If We Survive

I’ll give you an example. Once, shortly after we arrived in the village, Pastor Ron saw a little kid threatening a bigger kid with a stick. The little kid had his back against a cottage wall. The big kid—a big, fat hulking monster of a guy—was hovering over him, his hands balled into fists and his face darkening like a rain cloud. The little guy was holding a stick in front of him with both hands. He was so scared, you could see the stick vibrating as his hands shook.

Now, see, to me, it was pretty clear that the little kid was defending himself against the big kid in the only way he knew how. But Pastor Ron went hurrying over to the two of them and quickly pulled the stick out of his hands.

“No, no, mi amigo,” Pastor Ron said in his flat, American-accented Spanish.

He knelt down between the boys and put a hand on a shoulder of each. He began talking to them in the quiet, patient, friendly way he had. I don’t speak much Spanish myself, but I could make out some of what he was saying. He was telling the boys how wrong it was to do violence, and how it was especially dangerous to fight with sticks because you could take someone’s eye out and leave him blind. He said the boys had to learn to be friends and give up fighting… and so on.

“Comprendez, amigos?” he asked. Do you understand, my friends?

The boys nodded, their big round eyes staring into the friendly stranger’s face.

“Bueno,” said Pastor Ron.

He patted them on the shoulders and stood up. And looking very satisfied with himself, he walked off to our tents, carrying the stick with him.

You can probably guess what happened then. In fact, I’m sure you can. The minute Pastor Ron ducked into our tent and was out of sight, the big kid—seeing the little kid had lost his only means of defense—hauled off and punched that poor little mite so hard, the boy literally left his feet before he thumped down to the ground in a cloud of brown dust. Man, that punch even made me see stars and hear the birdies sing, and I was standing nearly twenty yards away.

Happy then, the big kid went tromping off down the road, leaving the little kid sitting in the dirt, sobbing and rubbing his eyes with his fists.

That’s all I’m saying about Pastor Ron. Nice guy. Good intentions. Just a little clueless, that’s all.

Then there was Nicki—Nicki Wilson. Or—as I sometimes called her secretly, in my own thoughts—High School Barbie. Which was maybe a little unfair. I mean, Nicki had a lot of sweetness to her, she really did. And she was glamorous: pretty in a sort of flashy way with wavy blond-brown hair and big, deep-blue eyes that could blink innocently at you and send your heart reeling. Her makeup was always perfect, even out there in the middle of nowhere. Her clothes likewise were always neat and elegant, even in the wilting heat of noon before the thunderstorms started. When she walked up the little dirt path to our worksite, the people of Santiago actually stopped and stared at her with awe, as if she were a visiting princess or something. The little girls in the village—they loved her especially. And she was great with them, always ready to sit down with them on a bench and show them how to decorate their clothes with ribbons and rhinestones she had with her or how to tie up their hair in different ways.

So Nicki was sweet like that, but she was also just a little bit… what’s the word I want? Shallow , I guess. She was seventeen, had just finished eleventh grade, and had left her Public Service credits till the last minute. She had come on this mission to Costa Verdes, as I overheard her say once, because she just couldn’t stand the horror of having to waste her senior year doing some dreary something-or-other in a homeless shelter when everyone knew twelfth grade was supposed to be one long party.

She wasn’t a lot of help with the wall either. It was a hard job. We had to dig a huge pit for the old debris, clear the rubble away, and cover it over. Then we had to haul the cinder blocks up the hill from the plaza where the truck had left them. We had to reset the big footer in the foundation, mix the mortar in a wheelbarrow, and so forth. And Nicki—well, just being honest here: she had a tendency to dog it a little, if you know what I mean. She’d sort of delicately lay some mortar on top of one of the blocks, wrinkling her nose at the yucky stuff as if it were a dead animal and handling the trowel as if it were the ten-foot pole she didn’t want to touch it with. And then, the first second she thought she could get away with it, she’d heave a humongous sigh, blowing a stray curl off her pretty forehead, and she’d say, “I have to take a break! I’m just exhausted!”

On top of that, she had absolutely zero appreciation for how blessed we Americans are—you know, how nice our homes are, even the small ones, how much we have, even when we think we don’t have that much. The people in Santiago—they had nothing. I mean, nothing. Their houses were clay boxes roofed in thatch. Most of them didn’t have electricity or running water. The dads worked in the fields all day and the moms literally had to do the laundry at the river, down on their knees, scrubbing the clothes in the water.

“How could anyone live this way?” I once heard Nicki whisper under her breath. “You can’t even get online!”

And okay, it was sort of weird—our cell phones didn’t work and the Internet was only available at the cantina. We were all suffering Facebook withdrawal. But it didn’t occur to Nicki that a whole lot of the world lives like that, you know. In fact, we in America, with all the stuff and gadgets and connections we have, we’re the exceptions, the lucky ones—oh, and by the way, most of us didn’t have a lot to do with making that happen.

Listen, I don’t want to be all critical and pick on Nicki, because as I said, she was a sweet girl really, with a true depth of kindness in her… but I do have to tell this one story on her just because it makes me laugh.

One day, toward the end of our visit, when the wall was just about finished, the natives invited us to a ceremony. This was a big compliment—an honor really. The people of Costa Verdes are Christians—Catholics—but the country’s original religion is some kind of ancient Mayan thing, and it still survives under the surface of the culture. That is, the people go to the church in the plaza every Sunday and all, but they still have a couple of festivals and ceremonies from the old days—part of that religion they surrendered when the Spanish explorers came and converted them.

Most of the time, they didn’t let strangers come to these ceremonies. But I guess they were grateful to us for fixing their school and all, so they invited us along. And let me tell you, it was cool. I mean, hypercool, cool to the magnitude of awesome. We all gathered very solemnly in this cave—really, a cave hidden under vegetation in a side of one of the mountains. We sat against the cave wall and the only light was the flickering flame from a torch this old priest was carrying. The priest looked like he was about two hundred years old, he was so stooped and brown and wrinkled. He moved around the cave in front of us, lighting a bunch of candles with his torch so that the whole place glowed with this sort of wavering yellow light.

Then this big wooden statue was carried in by two of the men from the village. A carved, painted statue of some sort of grinning skeleton man. Very cool. Like some kind of Batman villain. I guess he was the god they were worshipping.

The men set the statue in the center of the cave. Then the priest—and I swear I’m not making this up—gave the god a cigar to smoke. No, really. He stuck the cigar in the god’s grinning mouth and lit it for him with one of the candles! Then, when the god was comfortably enjoying a smoke, the priest moved around among the candles, swinging this balled cloth that spread a sweet smell everywhere like incense. And all the people clapped and sang and chanted, with their eyes shining and their faces looking kind of rapt and devout and happy. Very, very, very cool. Made me wish we did stuff like that in our church sometimes! Well, not really. But you know what I mean.