Portrait of an Ex-pat.
“You look like you speak English!” said a terrifyingly tall and goofy old man wearing women´s sunglasses. “I do sir” and yes I´d love to continue this heavily one-sided conversation about your life experiences for the rest of our journey into Xela. and how convenient that you are sitting next to the bathroom, away from any and all air flow.
The man in the situation is Dean, a 71 year old Floridian who has spent the better half of 7 years in Xela. I have absolutely no clue what he has done on a day to day basis for these past 7 years but he does act like he is very busy. Another factor leading to my confusion with his presence here is his total lack of Spanish vocabulary. He may be the sole human being that can completely reject cultural immersion and create a microcosm of his own life wherever he is, and totally in English. He has forced the people around him to learn necessary phrases to communicate with him.
Now for the weird stuff. Dean mentioned at some point during his tornado of information thrown at me on our bus ride that he had a girlfriend here. He talked fondly about her and that he was excited to see her. He also went on to describe those reasons which I won´t include in this family appropriate blog. He also mentioned that she was 31 and had been emailing him during his time away, anxiously awaiting his arrival. (He had just spent 3 months in Florida visiting family and doing who knows what.)
I would come to find out later that his girlfriend was much younger than 31 and when I pursued the topic further I was told she was 20. She looked to me to be around 13 but I decided then and there that things were going to get awkward, quickly and decided to drop the topic entirely.
Polite conversation ensued between the two of us over lunch and instant coffee on more than one occasion and I am sincerely grateful for his help and guidance during my first two days in Xela. Dean told me a lot about himself, seemingly starved for a listener. He enlisted in the army when he was 17 and left when he was 20. He went on to be an engineer for Coca Cola and then really made his money installing coin laundry in campgrounds ( I guess it is, or was a big market in Central Florida in the 60´s and/or 70´s ). He also has lived a large part of his life in Central America, spending the majority of the 80´s in Mexico. He was married, but that didn´t work and has three children, one of whom he isn´t quite sure about his whereabouts. When you have a father like Dean, it isn´t hard to believe that you could disappear quite easily from his electronic reach.
It says something about a man that includes a microwave as part of his checked baggage to a developing country and brings his own instant coffee to a country that struggles to export the crop every season to international and national buyers.
“I have so much information inside this brain of mine, I don´t have anymore room for anything else.” replied Dean when I asked why he hasn´t picked up any of the Spanish language. Sadly, this attitude exists in people much younger than he and its what creates the tunnel vision many of us live with. I may be 50 years younger than him and been through much less but I hope at 71 I never lose the desire to fill my brain with new things and never close out the world around me for the comfort of hot instant coffee in an American made microwave.
