A Bolivian Encounter

A dusty work site and sweat on his brow didn’t stop him from noticing me, vigorously scrubbing the walls inside the new classroom across the way.

The seventeen year old boy approached me with a reluctance that I learned to be characteristic of shy Bolivians, and I beamed at him a smile that I would only know to be characteristic of Canadians because I had been one my whole life. That is, until that moment, when I realized that there was so much more.

He started speaking to me, handing me his tool, and then giggled and looked down as he realized that I couldn’t understand him. He did this many times from then on, and eventually the sign language that we had developed to communicate between working shifts was no longer needed as I began to understand the nuances of what he had to say.

I never let on. He would tell me that he thought I was pretty, and that I confused him, in Spanish, and would never falter because he believed that I didn’t know.

It wasn’t until the school was finished, after my hair had been braided by all of the little girls that would attend it, and after the dancing had ceased in time for a community supper of peas and cheese that I discovered Rodrigo was an orphan. A seventeen year old orphan that had never attended school himself, but that volunteered to build a school for the younger Bolivian children in his village.

He met me at the airport later that day, and with his hands made a motion to the departure screen, indicating that he would meet me in Canada someday. He said “goodbye, you have taught me well” in English, and watched me as I walked away with the faintest smile on his tanned, rugged face.

It angered me that I had a way out of the poverty, that a simple plane ride would take me a world away from the civility of Rodrigo and the workers, but even in his rapid and hushed Spanish had he been able to teach me better than I could have ever done for him.

I think of Bolivia and my heart floats right back, to the place where I left it.