During my high school years, I spent a couple of summers in the Upward Bound program, part of LBJ's vision of the Great Society. As a result, I was eligible to apply for an all-expenses paid trip to a foreign country under the auspices of the Experiment in International Living. A few months after I applied, I was called into the principal's office (he was one of my uncles) and asked if I would settle for Mexico, rather than Brazil, which I had requested. It took me as long as it took our guidance counselor to say the words for me to decide.
I knew no Spanish at all, so I borrowed an old Spanish textbook from my uncle to get a birds' eye view. After some problem in getting a delayed birth certificate (there was no proof I was really born), I obtained my tourist visa for Mexico. At age 18, I took my first plane flight to San Antonio, Texas (note to self: remember to tip the cab driver the next time), and then took a bus with others of my language-challenged kind to Laredo the next day. We had about two weeks to learn the Spanish language.
The train trip from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, to Mexico City was my first, and longest. There were nine in our particular group, and we spent our few days in the city (during which I got lost for a while from our group) living so high on the hog that we ran out of bacon. The hotel actually impounded our bags until our team leader, Fred, went to beg for more money from the EIL country representaive.
Our final destination was the town of Tuxtepec, Oaxaca, several hours south of Mexico City by bus. I stayed with a young couple and their three children, ranging from four to twelve in age. They were very nice to me, but I was not very talkative at that point in my life, and didn't make for very good company. One of the highpoints of my stay there was visiting an English class in a local school, and the low one was a basketball game we had to play against the local team. An athlete I'm not
While in Tuxtepec. we visited Oaxaca City, where I got drunk for the first and only time in my life, and afterward we went to Vera Cruz, Guanajuato, Guadalajara, and Acapulco (where I almost drowned), and back to Mexico City. It was in Mecico that I first learned Spanish, which has been so central to so much of my life, and first gained an appreciation of Hispanic culture.
It's impossible to do justice to five weeks packed with experiences in such a small space, but my trip to Chile easily qualifies as one of the highlights of my life. In late 1994, I was approached by a friend at church and asked if I would be interested in a free trip to Chile, sponsored by Rotary International. It was an offer I could hardly refuse. After 15 years (at that point) married to a Puerto Rican lady, I had good fluency in Spanish. That was my main advantage; the other four in our group, including our leader, had little or no knoiwledge of the language.
After a brief period of language training, we left Cincinnati for Santiago, Chile, in early March 1995. The flight took eight hours, and to say we were tired when we arrived was a gross understatement. I spent time with several Chilean families there, either alone or with others in our group. Without exception, we were treated with great kindness and solicitude. As part of our duty to Rotary, we attended numerous Rotary Club meetings. The pace of the meals we ate was always very leisurely; they never lasted less than two hours, and the ones at night didn't even begin until 9:00 or 10:00. One thing my hosts had trouble understanding was my refusal to engage in social drinking.
We also had plenty of time for leisure. We visited ranches, farms, orchards, fruit packing plants, factories, wineries, and liquor distilleries. We also went to museums, colleges, government offices, parks, a zoo, and even a posh beach resort. One very vivid memory I have is the great distances involved in traveling from one town to another; we went by bus, and it was not all unusual for a trip to take five or six hours. One trip we took, to a park in the lower ranges of the Andes, ended in disaster. One of our team members, Tim, was riding a cable car that went across a gorge, when he accidentially caught his hand in the wheel that moved along the cable. His hand was severely injured, and he was rushed back to Santiago. where he spent over a week in surgery and recovery. After he rejoined, another of our team members, the only woman in our group, had to return to Kentucky for the death of her grandfather.
My other memories of the trip include two very unpleasant smells. One was of rotting fish in a fish market in a seaside town; the other was a pig farm, which takes the prize for the stinkiest place I've ever been. Mostly, though, I remember faces and places, in a long, lovely country on the far side of the world. God blessed me with a multitude of memories and experiences, unsought. Like all of life's blessings, this one was undeserved, and memorable only because of the greatest blessing of all, my salvation in Christ.