Single Serving Friend 2

It’s amazing how a single encounter with a person can linger in your memory for ages after a brief but significant exchange of pleasantries. I have had a decent number of these in my life, each of which has taught me a lesson I keep safely tucked deep inside, but I want to share three of these stories. This is the second in a series of three.

I met my second Single Serving Friend in Cuba on the beach. We’d arrived to the town of Guarda la Vaca the day before and were given a tour of the local school at which we’d be teaching the following morning. Coming from a third world country and having seen extreme poverty on many occasions I was surprised to find that even I was taken back by the living and learning conditions. Children lined the gravel court yard of the school with handed down hand me downs. Many had no shoes on and the ones that did had holes in them. They lined up and sang the national anthem in perfect unison with heads held high. They were not ashamed of the state their clothes were in or that the notebooks they were carrying around had been used by an older sibling. One after the next they sang songs with no commonality except the words Fidel and Cuba. When the presentation was over they charged towards us planting each and every one of us with a kiss on the cheek and a pamphlet printed on make shift paper with ink smudges with a type set that was far from centered. Some kids had desks on which they stood because they had no chairs while others sat and wrote on their laps because they had no desks. They shrilled in ecstatic joy when we announced that we had pizza and cola for everyone. The pizza and cola cost us approximately $3 dollars/ person an amount of money we later learned was a whole month's salary for most families. After a day at the school we decided to head to the beach where we met a woman in her 20s. The woman was dressed in clothes obviously falling apart due to wear and tear. She had sewn the holes in her garment and carried herself with a sense of pride. Her hair was neatly tied back and her fingernails perfectly clean but with obvious cracks and chips on her finger tips from what I assumed was washing dishes. She held in her hand a single bright orange of which she had peeled and gave pieces of it to us and her son as she spoke. She explained that she’d lived all her life in this little town and that though communism was an amazing idea on paper its realization comes with many short comings. She went on to tell us that she works all day and attempts to study at night and that she’d been saving up for months and months to be buy something of value for her son who was now engaged in a game of tag with the crashing waves on the beach. She explained that it was very important for her to give him something she thought would make all that she does tolerable. That if she could give him something that would bring a smile to his face then that expression itself would be worth it all. She told us about her wages and about how she sometimes had to borrow money from her sister to pay rent and how all that didn’t hinder her plight in obtaining the gift she got him. It's his birthday today she said with a gleeful smile. With curiosity getting the best of me and chewing on a not so succulent slice of her orange I asked her what she ended up getting her son. She shrugged the question off at first but with a little persuasion she let the cat out of the bag. She'd gotten her child a Florida orange. And just like that her unsurpassed kindness allowed me to eat half the orange without a second thought as though the mere fact that she'd attained her goal would suffice to melt away all the hardship she'd faced to get to it.