This is going to be a long one, but it’ll be worth it to read all the way through. Trust me.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It blows my mind that I can go literally weeks without unexpectedly bumping into someone in Elizabeth City, a town of 18,000 people, and yet in the 2,000,000-person city of Quito, I can’t walk down the street without running into multiple people I know. This phenomenon has resulted in being accompanied by friends on every single one of my bus rides for three days straight.
First Miguel rode with me back from Guajaló to my neighborhood, which resulted in another unexpected meeting with Roberto. Then the next morning I got on the Metro instead of my usual Trole adventure, and as I was standing in line, Jorge walked up. That one was definitely a God thing, because he explained to me that on the North-to-South route there is potentially more bus-changing involved than on the reverse trip. I wouldn’t have felt quite so much the master of Ecuadorian public transportation finding myself at the total opposite end of some random route I didn’t know I was on.
At the end of that ride, I walked into the tienda and just behind me was Maria Jose (who had apparently been chasing me… I need to take off my headphones when I get off the bus). I had just been wondering when I’d get to see her, having already run into her brother and sister more than two weeks before, so it was just another bit of amazing timing. And then at the end of that same day, I was thinking it strange that I still hadn’t run into her mom, Maggi. But after hanging out upstairs with Adrian that afternoon, I “happened” to choose the 30 seconds that Maggi was downstairs to leave. Lo and behold, Maggi became my third consecutive Bus Buddy for the week, as she was taking the Ecovia almost as far North as I was.
There are several reasons that it’s fun to have someone to ride the bus with, especially since I take these long rides on a regular basis. Not the least of these reasons is that if you are talking to someone, you are much less likely to get asked to give up your seat (being a young, male, gringo, I’m at the very, very bottom of the pecking order for seats on the bus, regardless of the fact that I’m riding it literally from one end of the city to the other). But more than that, you just get to have some real conversations and find out what’s going on in people’s lives. I thought I was tired the other day until Maggi mentioned she had been off one job just long enough to go home for a bit, but now it was 5:30ish PM and she was heading to her other job at the hospital until 6:00 AM (Oish!).
Now we’re getting to the reason that this post has such a Tolkien-esque title: because it’s almost two separate trains of thought. Just pretend it’s a Family Guy episode, where the second half is always completely unrelated to the first.
Anyway, The time that I’ve spent on the bus/Trole system this week has remnded me a lot of the time I spent on it last year. And I spent a lot of time on it last year. In fact, as I was fond of saying, I spent my life on the Trole. And in one of my meetings with Brad (director of Youth World, and one of my supervisors last year) we were talking about that. He said something that I really took to heart, which was pointing out that I wasn’t exactly driving for my commute to and from the office. I was not, in fact, doing anything other than sitting (or hanging on to the “‘Oh, crap!’ bar,” before I figured out how to get a seat that old ladies wouldn’t take from me1). The point was, especially since the Trole isn’t really book- or laptop-friendly for various reasons, it was (is) a great opportunity to take some quiet time.
“Quiet time” is, of course, a very relative term here. The Trole is never quiet. Aside from the honking and squealy brakes and the recorded voice telling you the next stop (which I now have memorized thanks to hearing it so much), there are people talking, and generally someone selling something or singing. And when I say they are selling something or singing, I don’t mean in an unintrusive way. It’s generally at the top of said someone’s lungs, and prefaced with a long story, and ends with them shoving their way through the way-too-crowded space collecting money. You can’t possibly hold a conversation while this is going on, or even attempt to ignore it without headphones. So even as easily-distracted as I can be, that was why I started taking my iPod on the Trole.
I know I can probably sound a little cynical when I talk about “ignoring” people and “tuning out.” And I certainly don’t want to seem that way, either to the two of you who read my blog anymore, or to the people I’m talking about. But that is an entirely different post, so suffice it to say that it’s on my mind, both as a topic to write about and as a conscious effort in my life. So back to the “quiet” time.
After the multiple times I’ve been pick-pocketed and held up in Quito, taking my iPod on the Trole is probably slightly stupid. But I figure if I’m actually listening to it, I’ll know if someone messes with it when I suddenly go from listening to “The Sound of Silence” to the literal sound of silence. So I throw on some Hillsong or Jeremy Camp, cram my earbuds in to the point that I’ll have no sense of hearing by my 32nd Birthday (I picked a number more random than 30 so people wouldn’t think I was implying that that’s old), and bask in the lack of overly highly-pitched sales pitches.
Sometimes it’s still pretty hard to shut things out. There might be somebody leaning on me (we’ll come back to this example momentarily), or making out directly in front of me (and I do mean directly, and not far enough away), or I might see something out the window that sends my A.D.D. mind in another direction, or I might just get too caught up I the words to the song that’s damaging my eardrums so. But the goal is to tune all of that out. Because as Quito Quest reminds me, I don’t ever want to waste a day when I can be growing or just worshipping. And as Mrs. Dwan taught me, having God time is less about taking the time you have, but about intentionally making time and setting that aside just for Him. Because there are tons of other things Brad could have suggested I do in all that commute time. And sure, God doesn’t function on my schedule. But when was the last time I made time for something other than a song and a half of Taylor Swift between Winfield and Ehringhaus Street back in Elizabeth City? I can’t think about ridiculously long bus rides now without having the positive thought of “Hey… God time” now, and that is a great thing.
So I’ll round this one out with a return to the “Bus Buddies” subject and the aforementioned potential somebody leaning on me.
I’ve been super unlucky with the Trole rides since my string of bus buddies that I actually know ran out on Thursday. I accidentally hit on a girl on the Trole today (Si estás leyendo esto en Español por Google Chrome o algo así, el frase “hit on” en Inglés significa “coquetear,” o “flirtear,” no “golpear”). But still much worse than that was the guy who sat down next to me yesterday afternoon.
This guy took the seat next to me when its previous occupant got off the Trole. The previous occupant was a rather large woman with a baby. I don’t know how, but this single old man took up literally twice as much space as two people, one of whom was twice as wide as him. I guess it’s just one more way that the Trole is not real life. Conventional physics do not apply. So aside from the fact that this guy was leaning on me and had no “bubble” whatsoever, he had a briefcase of sorts with him, which he felt the need to open. This necessitated throwing his elbows out to either side. The side I cared about, obviously, was the side that meant his right elbow was basically up my left nostril. And my right ear was already up against the window, so it’s not like I could have done anything to rectify the situation short of saying something to him.
Now, something that I learned from my dad (despite my mom’s best efforts) is that you never ever ever ever ever complain to someone, no matter how obnoxious they are or how uncomfortable they are making you. And I also recognized the war going on in my heart and my head between his culture and mine. My culture has large personal bubbles his culture has very small bubbles. In his particular case, no bubble. Now the fact that he was old could have pushed me either way. Because I think you should just be nice and respectful to old people. However, you know how some old people are just cute? This guy… Not so much. The words that come to mind were more like “chapped” and “oozing.” (Aren’t you glad you’re still reading at this point?) So while agedness was pushing me not to say anything to him, gnarliness was pushing me to say something. Gnarliness won out, but it won out in the sense that I didn’t say anything for fear of his potentially gnarly reaction. But at this point I was quite simply seething and I had to do something.
So I started praying. And it might have been the most selfish prayer of my life. Rather than asking for patience or some other virtue that would mean I had to continue putting up with this situation while I learned that patience, I asked God to impart the knowledge directly into this man’s brain that gringos have bubbles and he was all up in mine. I truly believe that God was listening and answering, because a few seconds later, oozey geezer man put away his briefcase, and fell asleep. On me.
So God taught me some patience after all. And fear. Because the old man got really still for a while. And I started thinking, “What if this guy dies right here on the Trole… on me?!” It may sound like a leap of logic, but you didn’t see this guy. So there I am frantically praying that God’s sense of humor not be as sick as those of a couple members of my family, and scanning this guy for any movement at all. His fingers twitched a couple times, but that just made me worry that these motions were really tiny death throes. Finally, as it was becoming more and more likely that I’d be the one having a heart attack or something, he grunted and titled his head to the other side, and from there on out he’d open one eye and check our location out the window every time the Trole stopped, so at least I knew he was alive up to the point I had to climb over him to get off at La “Y.”
All that to say, he became my most recent Trole Buddy to encourage my relationship with God. And extra 25 cents or not, I’m sticking to the Ecovia route from now on.
1You try properly punctuating that parenthetical sentence on an iPad!
