Application 2

All I´m doing here is applying what I´m learning. It´s a great way to learn Spanish. It´s also a wonderful way to charge my spiritual batteries before heading into what I´m sure will be an emotionally trying year. I´ve found myself spontaneously praying that I would learn the fruits of the Spirit, plus humility, which is a pre-requisite to any kind of learning.
Not knowing where you´ll be in a year has a way of making one´s faith (if one has faith) grow. I´ve found peace by trusting in Christ for my daily bread, and to order my days. I can honestly (and with as little pride as possible) say that I am trusting more in Christ and have more peace than any other time I can remember. This is the first period in my life when I´ve sat down to most meals and been truly thankful that I have food to eat. In Guatemala, this is not a given, and the small portions of meat are a reminder of that fact to this spoiled American.

Pray that God would make me (and you) a better scholar. William Romaine outlined how to do this in Letter Fifth in the book Select Letters of William Romaine, which I am now recommending to everyone reading this blog (Thanks Jeff!). He writes,

Read and pray for more self-knowledge: God´s Word and Spirit will teach you nothing about yourself but what will humble you to the dust, and keep you there. Read and pray for more knowledge of Jesus, of His person God-man -- His salvation-work infinitely and everlastingly perfect; He is yours, now He is received; and all He has, and all He is, as Jesus, yours in title; and so far as you believe, yours now in possession.
Read and pray for more faith, that what you have a title to, you may take possession of, and so make constant use of it. Your estate is great, immensely great. Use it and live up to it: as you do in temporals so do in spirituals. Your money, your land, your air, light, your meat and drink, and house and clothing, these you use; but you have not them in you; only being yours, they are used by you. So do by Christ. When the Spirit would glorify Jesus, He humbles you; when He would glorify His fulness, he makes you feel your emptiness; When He would bring you to rely on His strength, He convinces you of your weakness; when He would magnify the comforts of Jesus, He makes you sensible of your misery; when he would fix your heart on His heaven, He makes you feel you deserved hell; when He would exalt His righteousness, you find you are a poor miserable sinner... let Him be your salvation and all your desire.

Lord, humble us, help us see Jesus, and give us ever-increasing faith. This is the gospel. Repent and believe.

Story 4

Prison is only as boring as you let it become.
I speak not as an inmate, but as a worker tasked with a job worse in many ways than the life of an inmate.
But I only work enough to keep my ´´job.´´ The vast majority of the time I spend developing contacts, handing over anything the more powerful inmates need that I can get my hands on. My blooming relationship with the Guatemalan Army ensures that one of those things is weaponry (armas), a violent prison rebellion the presumed aim.
Guatemala is such a fun place.
In the past few weeks, my methods have shifted like the afternoon clouds of the rainy season. Among other things, I´ve learned to feel an audience out and to tailor my message accordingly. If you were to overhear one of my private meetings with a ganglord and a roundtable with a platoon of army regulars, you would probably think I take both sides of every issue. Yet I am merely diversifying my ideological portfolio.
Ideology is my currency.
What are these ´´issues?´´ you may be asking. For starters, we have the balance of power in a country with little power and less balance. For 90 años, until the mid-´80s, Guatemala was locked in a deadly and intractable guerra civil. Even now, drive in the wrong direction and you´ll run straight into a ragtag band of ex-freedom fighters who will query you to forfeit every dollar and quetzale.
These people really want power.
Most will follow anyone who convincingly promises them more power than the competitors. Ideological capitalism. Right now, I am Wal-Mart. Yet I couldn´t care less about the money. Or even the power. In fact, more and more, I found myself caring about... Mayans.
Many are so poor that they have never had enough money at one time to buy a decent cigar. I wanted to do everything to help them, to improve their lives, to bring them into the 21st century, to impose my culture and ideology on them with relentless energy and undiminished resources.
I will be the first to admit to mixed motives. The humanitarian in me lives in uneasy paz with the ideological imperialist. Yet aren´t we all walking ambiguities?
Health is another issue I´m tackling. I´ve mentioned my effort to educate every citizen in emergency medicine, better (and more euphoniously) known as Club de Lucha. A sister effort that is quickly taking hold here in Antigua and in a few other major cities in Central America is the Club de Drogas. Pharmaceutical companies, mostly Central American firms, drive up prices beyond the average citizen, soldier, and inmate´s ability to pay. Mayans can forget about anything but traditional remedies. Club de Drogas is my plan to fix that.

En Club de Drogas, hay 7 reglas.
I do not say this while standing on the edge of a packed dirt courtyard at twilight. Neither is it said on a daily basis. Women and men are both present, seated, and fully clothed. In black.
Regla Numero 1: No hablas sobre Club de Drogas.
Sometime past midnight on Thursdays, a hand-picked group of ex-patriots gathers in the old wine cellar just off the blood-stained, packed dirt courtyard, still warm from the evenings luchas.
Regla Numero 2: No hablas sobre Club de Drogas.
If you brought an outsider to Club de Lucha, all the newcomer had to do to clear himself of doubt was to fight, then treat and/or be treated for injuries. If a member of Club de Drogas was to bring an outsider, they and the newcomer would be promptly picked up, carried to the nearby horse manure compost pile, and rotisseried en caga.
Regla Numero 3: Traiga una arma.
No one has ever brought an outsider to Club de Drogas.
Regla Numero 4: Lleva negra.
The clubs are mostly Americans but a few Euros have been let in too. After a week, every member had broken federal -and some international- laws to advance the cause.
Regla Numero 5: Llega con un proyecto completo.
Every meeting started with a review of the previous week´s proyectos. These had to be considered as helpful to the cause of taking control of the Central American Pharmaceutical Industry. And they had to be complete. A few long-term proyectos were exceptions.
Regla Numero 6: Llega con dos proyectos en mente.
The meetings subsequently moved to nuevos proyectos para la semana. Everyone always came with two. Everyone always left with one, randomly selected from a hat at the end of each meeting.
Regla Numero 7: Nunca es fuera limite.
Nothing is out of bounds.

A few more weeks of arming inmates and priming the long-term proyectos for detonation, and Central America will explode in a flash of ideology.

Reflection 4

Preface to current Ridge Haven MOIs: I had a dirty blonde stache in honor of stache week all this week. Magic Max lives on in Central America!

Everybody else, sorry for that inside joke.

Update on Med School applications: I got UNC´s secondary application today. I also just filled out Wake Forest´s secondary application. Anyone know how to get a $55 money order in Guatemala?

Today´s main event was a soccer game between Antigua and a Guatemala City team named the Comunicaciones. Antigua fell, 4-2. A blocked PK did them in. But the real entertainment came from the borachos (drunks) who were sitting right beside us at midfield. One of them threw up so much it was reminiscent of Central Park´s fountain, one yelled, danced, sang, chanted, and beat a drum the ENTIRE time, and one kept having to urinate... directly onto the field at midfield. With thousands of fans and no one doing anything but throw beer cans at him. He also faceplanted directly into the other boracho´s vomit. Sorry if that´s gross. Todo es verdad. It was funny to me in a sad kinda way. Like a lot of other stuff that happens, like high-schooler fistfights.
I also learned how to make chiles rellenos from my house mom, Ana Luisa.
Anyways, tomorrow I´m off to Copan, rumored to be the most well-preserved Mayan ruin.

Sorry all, Story 4 is gonna have to wait a few days... I´ll give it a lot of thought in the 12 hours I´m in the van. It´s 11:33 here and I´m beat. Buenos.

Reflection 3

I am now literally taking a deep breath and trying to reflect on the second week of volunteering (which is now over... tomorrow is an Antiguan fiesta, sort of their version of Independence Day). Firstly, I am thankful that I finally got a better volunteering assignment. This morning was fairly interesting, at least for the first hour of the four hours. I took blood pressure and weighed patients. Not exactly surgery, but it`s better than standing around in a 2-room clinic hoping I get a chance to take out a couple stitches or give a few shots (which I did... but only a few).
The afternoons have also been long at the school. ``La Union`` is basically a converted old courtyard-style house a few blocks from the Central Park of Antigua (where everything happens and where I am right now). There are a bunch of little tables everywhere with 2 or 3 chairs around each one of them, mostly filled by Guatemaltecas, Americans, and Europeans chatting away at some level of español. I am paired with another guy from State named Alex who is at about the same level as me. We talk Spanish for 4 hours, although there`s a 30 minute break in the middle. We mostly just talk about random stuff, writing down words that we come across that we don´t know. We also go over some verb tenses.
I realized early on how amazingly hard it is to become good enough at Spanish to be able to actually understand most of what native speakers say. They are working from an incredibly large database of words and with a comfort and familiarity with verb tenses and constructions which a gringo like me will simply never attain. I just have to keep telling myself that I need to focus on building my vocabulary one word at a time and not try to think too much about the big picture. Kinda like life.
Tonight I had a first-bench seat in Central Park for a high-schooler fist-fight among a group of Antiguan high schoolers whom I had been besumingly observing off and on for about half an hour. It`s just amazing how they are exactly like McDowell High students and high school students I`ve seen everywhere I`ve been in the U.S. They apparently even have emo kids down here.
Kinda funny, considering their great-grandparents were probably Mayans living in the hills just 50 years ago.
Speaking of my views of the locals, I want to figure out how much ``real`` Christianity is actually down here. There are tons of old cathedrals or ruins of cathedrals (from an earthquake in 1773 which still has not been cleaned up...), and everyone claims to be catolico. Yet much like catholicism everywhere else I`ve been, the Catholics only half-believe their own church. It`s as if they don`t really buy what the church is selling, but are content to rent- for a lifetime- an identity, comfort, and social network from the church. Which is about like the state of mainline evangelical churches in America today.
I asked my Spanish teacher, a catolico, today (in the future conditional tense) what he would like heaven to be like. His answer included a lot of feel-goodery but not God. I pointed this out to him. He said of course, it`s all about God, too.
God is apparently just a footnote.
I have seen a few evangelicals and pentecostals... basically, non-catolicos. It`s distracting in a funny way that their word for the Lord is El Señor. Anyways, I will hopefully get a chance to talk to some of them before I leave, but we are doing stuff every Sunday so I don`t know if I`m going to get a chance to go anywhere. This weekend, we`re going to the Mayan ruins of Copan. Next weekend, the Pacific beach. The next and last weekend, Lake Atitlan, which is surrounded by three volcanoes and apparently one of the most breathtaking spots in the hemisphere.
Tomorrow I watch Fight Club at a local theater. So get ready for some more ridiculosity. Story 4 is gonna be extra-special, I can feel it.

Story 3

The jungle air, coupled with arduous days of hiking, gave me time to do some major thinking. The vast tracts of fertile rain forest made me believe that a return to nature was possible, that it wasn´t just the pipe dream of hippies and cultists. Yet rather than adopt their hermit ethos, I planned on engaging the enemy who dressed in the alluring robes of Progress. Mayhem was the order of the hour. All-out warfare against an ideology. Bringing back the guillotine and decapitating materialism, that`s what this is about.
On the week-long hike back to Antigua, we only lost Meredith. To malaria, mostly. Jaguars finished her off. Oh yeah, everyone also lost an average of 20 pounds and toned up what was left. I took advantage of their status as a captive audience. As we walked along, I would recite, ``We do NOT seek redistribution of weath. We do NOT seek redress. We do NOT seek justice. We seek to turn restlessness into reaction, ideology into an imperialism, frustration into fighting.`` Though they may not have understood everything at the moment, they would.
At nights, I would send them out individually with one candle, raw meat, and a machete to attract whatever jungle animals lurked in the darkness. There were a few maulings of the Guatemalans, but the total bag for the 6 nights in the jungle was 18 jaguars, 12 coyotes, 4 wolves, 2 foxes, and an albatross. Madeleine killed the albatross, and subsequently contracted face cancer. Lesson learned: leave albatrosses alone. She should have read Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
It has now been 7 weeks since the return to Antigua. Our first order of business was to sell the pelts of our prey on the black market. The first night in town, we tried to find the black market, but learned that all of the real business was done from inside large Guatemalan prisons, where even guards don´t dare venture. Prision Federal Numero 7 half an hour south of Antigua was such a prison.
Yet one does not just walk into a Guatemalan prison and ask a few people if they would like to purchase 18 jaguar pelts. No, one had to have contacts to even get in. To develop contacts, one needed currency.
Ideology is my currency.
On Monday of the first week, I traveled to the prison and began a conversation in my fluent Spanish with the disgruntled day manager of the prison. It took several days of conversation, but finally he relented and granted me a job as a janitor at Prision Federal Numero 7. The fruits of my labor there are multiplying each day. I am also getting more and more time as a speaker at the local army base in Chichicastenango. These crucial elements of the plan will be described in a later post.
I return to Antigua by camioneta each day, usually arriving at our courtyard-style compound just after 6. I spend precisely 15 minutes eating the meal prepared for me by my classmates-turned-guerillas. At dusk, which starts at about 6:30 here, ``Club de Lucha`` begins.
In the jungle, you can pick a fight with wild beasts and kill them with a machete. In the city, you must pick fights with other human beings,.
The most productive fights have always been physical. Mano a mano.
This is something that postmoderns have never learned. Men spend their lives cramped in cubicles, staring at computer screens and taking their anger out in far less satisfying ways. Journaling. Litigation. Verbal abuse. Drugs and alcohol. Some make themselves believe they don´t have any anger, and drift through their lives with a plastered smile on their faces, preoccupied with making their houses pretty, their kids obedient, and their bodies stronger with less work.
Maybe those ab vibrators can take off that 10 pounds from last winter.
This is how bad your life has become.

Just like Spanish, Club de Luchar has a lot of rules.
En Club de Lucha, hay 7 reglas. I say this every day at 6:30, as I stand in the fading light of the packed dirt courtyard.
Regla Numero 1. No hablas sobre Club de Lucha.
The first week, the only ones who knew about Club de Lucha were my guerillas. Yet despite Regla Numero 1, new people began showing up.
Americanos.
Europeos.
Guatemaltecas.
Las semillas de revolucion.
Regla Numero 2. No hablas sobre Club de Lucha.
After the first week, men and women had their separate fight clubs. Becca led the females. I led the first group of males. Yet by week 4, both groups had to split up into 3 different clubs.
Regla Numero 3. Dos hombres (or mujeres) por lucha.
At Club de Lucha, you fight someone until one or both of you has a medically significant injury.
Regla Numero 4. Una lucha a la vez.
Everyone else watches and waits their turn. The more spectators, the better you fight. Boxers have always known this.
Regla Numero 5. Si tu eres nuevo, necesitas luchar.
No one is a spectator for long.
Regla Numero 6. La lucha continua hasta un luchador dice ``Cesa`` o va inconsciente.
It`s the same in the jungle. Someone always wins, and someone always loses.
Regla Numero 7. Los dos luchadores asisten el uno a otro.
Unless one of the fighters dies on the spot, it`s the responsibility of the person who inflicted the wounds to heal them on the spot as best they can. There are plenty of medical supplies available from a few pilferings the guerillas have done at the Hospital Viejo and other clinics.
At first, they fight like they are just beginning to learn Spanish, clumsily, so ineffectually it looks deliberately careless. Yet as the weeks crash by, their minds become trained to recognize a right uppercut (just like an irregular future imperfect verb) in time to dodge right and take advantage of the position with a right cross to the side of the face.

The violence at fight club is a picture of the warfare that is in the making. Nothing can stop it. It`s going to be bloody, but at the end, if you survive, you`ll be meaner, calmer, faster, stronger.

Application 1

In life, like in the Ridge Haven Low Ropes Course, a useful exercise is to occasionally pause for spiritual applications. Here are mine:
The beauty of the Guatemalan landscape, formed by prehistorical geological upheaval and topped by a diversity of species presumably millions of years in the making, sharply contrasts with the squalor of the tenements built by agricultural laborers that consist of mud, block, metal siding, and rotting wood. I`ve seen pigeons, chickens, pigs, and cows (yes, vacas) living inside homes no bigger than the room you`re sitting in right now.
This contrast is a picture of the way humanity has been for untold millenia: we just don`t seem to fit in too well, just like a cow in a house. Look around: something inside your soul tells you that pre-fab housing material is not what you were meant to live in. Something true somewhere in your psyche tells you that, unlike the ruminations of beasts, your thoughts matter, cosmically. We all have a sense that we are fully responsible for the choices we make, unlike the behavior necessitated by Kingdom Animalia`s genetic programming.
Something inside me makes me ashamed of the bad choices I`ve made. Like that one presuming structure that mars an otherwise breathtaking Appalachian overlook, humanity`s frailties- my frailties- anger me, sadden me, and spark a sense of unfulfilled longing that C.S. Lewis refers to as ``joy.``
We should ask ourselves why we have these feelings. Why is my heart so stabbed at the memory of dad, who has now been gone over 10 years?
God has put these reminders in our hearts to keep us dissatisfied with what we have, with this fallen world. When a person loses this sense, he becomes like an animal and enters his own hell, never to feel joy again.
My prayer for the church today (in addition to my prayer that we would become readers and thinkers) is that we would become less comfortable with ourselves; that God would give us the grandly nostalgic yearning for Something and Someone, which is the only thing that can stir us to love and good works, works that God will accept because they have actually been offered to Him.

Poetry 1

These are the first haikus I`ve written in years. My apologies.

It is the desert,
Not the fruitful oasis,
Which is the mirage.

Brine-surfaced waters
And crowded exhaust-choked streets
Still reflect heaven.

Labor and trouble
Topped by disease, fear, and loss:
Sin outside and in.

Who wants to be him?
Poor, Scowling moto Mayan.
I can´t see myself.

Minds sharp as a blade
Open my envious side,
Wish I could. I can?

Bacteria wait;
Most parasites are patient.
They`ll outlive us all.

We labor to sleep,
We sleep to work or sleep.
We must escape this.

We can´t escape this:
Our failures become our norms;
Dying, are you surprised?

Living, are you surprised?
Quick, find out what separates
You from animals.

Reflection 2

So I´ll just hit the high points. This week I´ve learned a TON of Spanish, since I´ve had to function in Spanish about 75% of the time. Picking up a lot of words has been the best thing about the experience so far. I´ve been really bored at my morning volunteering at a ¨Puesto De Salud¨north of Antigua in a community calleed Pastores. It is basically a 4-room, 1-nurse, ill-equipped clinic in an economically depressed part of an economically depressed nation. So, lots of paracitismo y infecciones. I have gotten to give a few vacunas (vaccinations) and take out a few stitches (quitar puntas) which have been cool experiences I couldn´t have had in the States without a little training.
Two days ago, a classmate Lee and I moved to another house, and it has turned out to be a good decision. The family we live with now is really cool and talks to us all the time. I am finding I love Guatemalan food, which is basically tortillas or pan (bread) with everything. However, I´m still scared of the bathroom at the house. Fact: the toilet bowl has not been clean for several generations. On that note, lots of classmates have been coming down with diarrhea and other mild sicknesses this week, but I´m still holding out. I´m feeling like I might be getting sick now, so I´m going to take it easy tonight and finish reading Fight Club. And study if I feel so inclined.
Yeah, the reality is a lot less exciting than the fiction. So I think I´ll go back to fictionalizing for a while... ¡Feliz dia a todos!

Reflection 1

I think it´s time to take a break from my creative writing pursuits and let everyone know what I´ve been doing the last 8 days. My first 1.5 days were spent in Antigua getting familiar with the city and with my classmates. The next day, last Wednesday, we trekked to Semuc Champey, a rough 7 hour drive to north-central Guatemala. We stayed at a rugged outpost called Las Marias and did some hiking, swimming, jumping off stuff, swimming, and spelunking. I appreciated the opportunity to simply relax and get to know people. We made the return odyssey to Antigua on Saturday.
Saturday night was an odyssey of a different sort. Since there are only 8 guys on the trip and 25 ladies, we men had a lot of females to take home at 1 AM, which wouldn´t have been so bad if they had known where they lived. It was also raining. So we basically wandered around Antigua for a while until the guys (like me) figured out where some of the girls lived. To be fair, some of the girls knew where their house was...
Anyways, the last two days, I´ve been volunteering in the AM and learning Spanish in the PM. Volunteering has been a huge struggle because I´m super bored while other people got much better assignments. I´m hoping I can change but I´m not sure if the leader will let me.
Tonight, I´m watching Kite Runner. More later.

Story 2

I admit, I was nervous. My twelve gangsters- turned- jungle guerrillas were in position around the porch, but our radio silence necessitated perfect timing. An easy task during broad daylight, but fraught with difficulty at 10 PM. Radio silence, a necessary prerequisite to any ambush, was especially necessitated by our lack of radios. I couldn´t have understood them anyway. Guatemalans talk way too fast. And in a language I don´t actually understand, at least not very much. Even if I could, I felt viscerally-- and racistly-- that I should never trust Guatemalans. That this particular group of twelve Guatemalans was adolescent, perfectly godless, circumspectly nonhygienic, meticulously unscrupulous, and addicted to various pharmaceuticals did not help their case. Perhaps that sentiment was why I felt like I needed to add at least as many civilized gringos to my incipient militia to balance matters.
The erudite reader may find himself wondering, ¿why would a self-respecting American ever want to join a rag-tag band of roving Guatemalan thieves? I dismiss this question, however, by pointing out two facts which I have not yet mentioned. One: I have an appealing ideology. Two: I also have guns, and they didn´t.
The ^they^ in question you have met before, dear reader. My target was the same group of college students on a study abroad trip with whom I, in another life, was supposed to be classmates. Because I had their entire itenerary, I knew that they were finishing up a relaxing stay at the Hotel Las Marias, a rustic hostel near Semuc Champey, an area of beautiful waterfalls, pools, and caves. On their last night, they debaucherous late adolescents would be partying large on the porch of Las Marias, and the lightly armed staff would be distracted by the steady stream of Gallo and other merriments. Sitting ducks.
Yet in my moment of crisis, I realized that if my chicos` timing was off, the mistakes- and bodies- would begin to pile up. Loose college students in the jungle. Dead locals. The involvement of authorities. And, worst of all, despite my most extreme injunctions, dead American students and an international incident.
It wasn´t until the ball was already rolling that I seriously considered these distinct possibilities. One would think that, at some point on my four-day hike through the rugged badlands of central Guatemala, I would have thought through some contingency plans. Yet, visionary that I am, I had no time for anything but Plan A. In Guatemala, after all, Plan B was always quite simple. ¡CORRES!
My tardy prescience, though offering no practical advantage, nevertheless prepared me psychologically for the unravelling of my plan. Only moments before I was going to give the signal for the attack, Las Marias` large perro, Polka, woke from his slumber on the front porch, gave off three distinct woofs, and made a beeline for my second-in-command Juan Carlos, hidden in the bushes off to one side of the party porch. Once he fired his weapon at the animal, the night`s glassy reverie was shattered. Automatic gunfire, oddly reminiscent of Gideon`s 300 clay pots, set off a panic among the employees and clientele of Las Marias upon which volumes of social commentary could be written. Friends who may have just expressed their fondness for one another immediately began using each other as human shields or, as the case may be, rugs to be trampled. Ironically, the kitchen became the destination of choice for the group, which was exactly where I was headed.
I emptied a few rounds into the back door to clear a space for me to enter. When I closed the door behind me and turned to face the panicked fray, I saw the light of recognition dawn upon about half of the faces before me. Rhett and Lee, in positions reminiscent of mother hens, seemed to barely believe their eyes. Alex, David, Patrick, and Andrew all peered around various kitchen implements with varying degrees of trauma registering on their pale faces. John was screaming hysterically in the back of the kitchen, but was quickly silenced by the butt of Juan Carlos` rifle. The screams of females seemed to fill the air to bursting, until finally I settled them down with a few dozen rounds into random porcelain and stainless steel pots and pans. I spent the next few hours in impassioned discourse about such diverse topics as drugs, guns, infectious disease, jungle medicine, pollution, violent crime, and other forms of pillaging, eventually taking every conceivable stance on each of these topics. Although the college students had long lost any discernible train of thought, I felt my passion sway them to my cause at about 5 AM.
Mission accomplished. As I write this, it is now time to head back to the peaceful city of Antigua, a city rife with ideologies and ripe for pillaging.
Although daylight would prove that I had lost half of my Guatemalans, I recovered enough automatic weaponry from the area to arm my new recruits.

Story 1

As I stepped out of the airport double-doors onto Guatemalan pavement, diesel exhaust stung my nostrils. I took in hectic, rushed panorama of this hectic, rushed environment, yet from the faces of the people asking me if I wanted a ride to Antigua or illicit drugs, I sensed a calm, almost perfunctory acceptance of Guatemalan life. No one seemed to mind the air pollution, litter, stray dogs, or murders. The guy who got stabbed two paces in front of me wasn´t even surprised at the development, and gangsters across the street firing rusty pistols at each other seemed almost bored with the enterprise. As I drew near to the study abroad group with whom I was supposed to rendezvous, the sounds of gunshots faded. Yet it was not because the gangsters were moving away. They were actually approaching me... sprinting at me, in fact. No, the sound of gunfire receded in my ears because my sense of time and space had slowed down for what must have just been a split second. For me, it was almost an eternity. I was having my first epiphany.
In my dreamlike (and perhaps narcotics-induced) state, I sensed a dark, foreboding Question that gradually took the incarnate form of a dark brown genie on a gilded throne. It posed a question to me from which I had no escape: Who will you follow? I knew what it meant... and I knew what it wanted me to do. Rashly, I replied to the fiend, ¨They will follow ME!¨ Stopping in my tracks, I ignored the cries and screams of my study abroad classmates. I slowly turned to face the gangsters with a calm I had never previously known. I called them to follow, and they silently complied. Shifting from a sprint to a jog, they followed my lead into the adjoining jungle. One of them handed me an assault rifle. I had made my choice.