Where have all the good people gone?
Sam Roberts, you really do say it best. Where have all the good people gone? I am certainly not meeting many recently. In fact, I am specifically meeting bad people. Okay, I’m exaggerating – I met one bad person and I’m being dramatic about it. But still, it was pretty bad. I’m actually embarrassed to tell the story, because it’s just as much about how naïve I am as it is about how bad people can be. Anyway, here it goes:
So I’m sitting in the Vancouver bus station, minding my own business, wrapped up in my book, and this young British guy comes over talking on his phone to his ‘Nana’ and sounding very upset. When he gets off the phone he asks me to watch his stuff for a minute, and I oblige. He then comes back and obviously wants to talk, so I let him, and he tells me his sob story. It was very long and complicated, but the basic jist is that he was supposed to fly back to the UK that afternoon but he needed to pay some airport taxes that he didn’t have money for. Starting to get the picture of what went down? Anyway, I talked to him a bit about his dilemma, as well as chatting about his travels in Canada and my year in the UK. Finally he went for it. His proposal was that I keep his digital video camera as a deposit and he would send for it when he got back to the UK. He also offered to phone his Nana and let me speak to her and do about everything else under the sun that a desperate guy could do. Anyway, I explained to him that I was on my way to El Salvador and I really didn’t have room to haul a video camera around with me. Then Stupid Bleeding Heart Ashley kicked in and told him that I had a bank account in the UK and I could lend him the money and he could just deposit it in my account when he got home. So that’s what I did. Go ahead, roll your eyes. Get it over with.
Needless to say, when I arrived in El Salvador and attempted to email him, it failed to send. Bogus email address, or very coincidental mistake. I still have a phone number and address to go, but my hopes have been all but dashed. In retrospect, I really should have drilled him more, perhaps taken him up on phoning Nana, or, even better, flat out refused, but at the time that wasn’t what I wanted to do. I had decided to help the guy, and I didn’t want to have to have to second-guess myself, or him. When you decide to help someone, shouldn’t you just do it and not worry about the consequences? Well, that worked until the moment of truth arrived and I realized I wasn’t going to see my 50 bucks ever again (most of you probably know how tight-ass I am with my money and how much it hurts to have shelled out $50 to a lying, cheating, Limey, b%#&ard).
Anyway, in the grand scheme of things I guess $50 isn’t such a big deal, no matter how poor I feel at the moment. My conscience is still in tact, and who knows, maybe some good karma might come back to me, someday. It will be hard, however, not to be condemned to a life of hating English people and refusing to do good deeds for people in need…
My first 48 hours in San Salvador have been very nice. Xavi and his roommate, Miguel, cooked up a scheme for a driver from Miguel’s office to pick me up at the airport. It required me to pose as a Telecom consultant, but it was worth it to walk out of the airport and be able to cut right through the mob of shouting taxi drivers to a man holding up a piece of paper with my name on it. I didn’t say much to the poor driver on the way in, for fear he would ask me unanswerable questions about ‘work’, but the silence was a great way to take in the incredible views. So far, El Salvador strikes me as the greenest place I have ever been. The lush trees and jagged, emerald hills are stunning. Being back in a developing country is also amazing because there is so much… real life happening everywhere. That sound silly, but it feels true. Life is so public here, so tangible. Anyway, I won’t begin to wax poetic; I’m too tired for that.
I’m housebound at the moment, and probably will be for much of the time I am here unless, as one of the girls on my CIL training course suggested, I hire armed guards to escort me places. I don’t think I’m up for that, however, and am happily looking forward to days of reading books, lying by the pool, listening to music, and soaking up the breathtaking views from Xavi and Miguel’s balcony.
So I’m sitting in the Vancouver bus station, minding my own business, wrapped up in my book, and this young British guy comes over talking on his phone to his ‘Nana’ and sounding very upset. When he gets off the phone he asks me to watch his stuff for a minute, and I oblige. He then comes back and obviously wants to talk, so I let him, and he tells me his sob story. It was very long and complicated, but the basic jist is that he was supposed to fly back to the UK that afternoon but he needed to pay some airport taxes that he didn’t have money for. Starting to get the picture of what went down? Anyway, I talked to him a bit about his dilemma, as well as chatting about his travels in Canada and my year in the UK. Finally he went for it. His proposal was that I keep his digital video camera as a deposit and he would send for it when he got back to the UK. He also offered to phone his Nana and let me speak to her and do about everything else under the sun that a desperate guy could do. Anyway, I explained to him that I was on my way to El Salvador and I really didn’t have room to haul a video camera around with me. Then Stupid Bleeding Heart Ashley kicked in and told him that I had a bank account in the UK and I could lend him the money and he could just deposit it in my account when he got home. So that’s what I did. Go ahead, roll your eyes. Get it over with.
Needless to say, when I arrived in El Salvador and attempted to email him, it failed to send. Bogus email address, or very coincidental mistake. I still have a phone number and address to go, but my hopes have been all but dashed. In retrospect, I really should have drilled him more, perhaps taken him up on phoning Nana, or, even better, flat out refused, but at the time that wasn’t what I wanted to do. I had decided to help the guy, and I didn’t want to have to have to second-guess myself, or him. When you decide to help someone, shouldn’t you just do it and not worry about the consequences? Well, that worked until the moment of truth arrived and I realized I wasn’t going to see my 50 bucks ever again (most of you probably know how tight-ass I am with my money and how much it hurts to have shelled out $50 to a lying, cheating, Limey, b%#&ard).
Anyway, in the grand scheme of things I guess $50 isn’t such a big deal, no matter how poor I feel at the moment. My conscience is still in tact, and who knows, maybe some good karma might come back to me, someday. It will be hard, however, not to be condemned to a life of hating English people and refusing to do good deeds for people in need…
My first 48 hours in San Salvador have been very nice. Xavi and his roommate, Miguel, cooked up a scheme for a driver from Miguel’s office to pick me up at the airport. It required me to pose as a Telecom consultant, but it was worth it to walk out of the airport and be able to cut right through the mob of shouting taxi drivers to a man holding up a piece of paper with my name on it. I didn’t say much to the poor driver on the way in, for fear he would ask me unanswerable questions about ‘work’, but the silence was a great way to take in the incredible views. So far, El Salvador strikes me as the greenest place I have ever been. The lush trees and jagged, emerald hills are stunning. Being back in a developing country is also amazing because there is so much… real life happening everywhere. That sound silly, but it feels true. Life is so public here, so tangible. Anyway, I won’t begin to wax poetic; I’m too tired for that.
I’m housebound at the moment, and probably will be for much of the time I am here unless, as one of the girls on my CIL training course suggested, I hire armed guards to escort me places. I don’t think I’m up for that, however, and am happily looking forward to days of reading books, lying by the pool, listening to music, and soaking up the breathtaking views from Xavi and Miguel’s balcony.
posted by ash at 9:21 PM
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