A Dream: The Ambassadors

It took months for us to work out all the details – the visas, the airfare, the program stipulations, the itinerary and all the other boring crap and this was just so we could PAY to fly to an impoverished country and volunteer. This wasn’t missionary work – we were just done with college and had nothing better to do. The program we chose had more to do with tourism than charity, but it didn’t matter much. Business is charity and charity is business.

            Kyle and I chose Mexico because, why not? It wasn’t far and it seemed like a logical choice. We were sent emails from what seemed like a responsible, reputable organization and everything fell into place.

            As soon as we stepped off the plane, I realized that Mexico was far different from the Latino country I had remembered. All the buildings were bombed out, nothing more than shells and skeletal structures. Few people walked the streets and the only traffic was from carriages led by half-dead ponies.

            Our guide, a short man named L____ met us near a crushed taxi stand and shook out hands with his sweaty palms. He wore an Acapulco shirt and a baseball cap, assuring us that we’d enjoy our time here.

            I looked to Kyle. He looked back at me and shrugged. Either we’d been ripped off or there was gonna be a lot more work than we realized. Didn’t matter because we couldn’t go back now.

            The tourism center we were staying at was merely a compound of warehouses with the walls blown out. The floors were filled with green, white and black garbage bags. Flies crowded the air and underneath was a carpet of maggots.

            “What happened to your country?” I asked our guide.

            He laughed. “This isn’t my country.” He had a weird accent that wasn’t Hispanic.

            “Well, OK, fine. What happened?”

            “You Americans.” The guide shook our hand and walked away.

            “Was that an insult or an answer?” Kyle asked.

            We set our luggage against a busted wall near some crates and started digging through the trash. I’m not sure what we were looking for, but we started to find a lot of old VHS tapes, cartridge video games, trading cards and pre-teen horror books.

            I became excited. “I remember this and this and this from when I was a kid! It’s like I’m digging through my past!” I shouted.

            Kyle shrugged, his arms full of his own childhood. We shared a lot of the same memories and I kind of felt weird that they were so mass-produced. Like anyone could have shared them. Like they weren’t unique.

            And then we noticed some homeless kids rifling through our luggage. We chased them off and cursed at them until we were out of breath. Then, in the distance, we watched an American plane dropping bombs onto the city.

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            The next day, all the garbage was cleared out of the warehouse and thrown into the street, replaced with thousands of shelves of American brands of food.

            “We’re going to make this a booming tourism industry!” Our guide was ecstatic. “Built especially for people like you two. Built on your own garbage and the graves of a third world country.”

            I nodded and muttered, “I guess I preferred the garbage to this.”