The Day the Music Died

Last night I had a test of detachment. I was fiddling around with my ipod and out of ignorance I accidentally synced my ipod with my computer and erased almost all of my music. I couldn’t believe it. I had spent years collecting this music. I had over 7,000 songs from friends all over the world—all gone. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

In light of this I have invited myself to take a step back and take the long view. This is not the end of the world and it gives me good reason to look at my life a little bit. I live here in Nicaragua and am confronted with realities of poverty everyday. That doesn’t mean I actually see it. For sure it’s always there but I don’t always choose to keep my eyes, ears, and heart open to it. I am reminded of a short story I read in college by Flannery O’Conner: A Good Man is Hard to Find. In the story, as in many of her stories, she uses violence as a catalyst for her character’s dynamic growth, and more importantly for grace to enter their lives—to experience metanoia, personal change, realization, or enlightenment.

Poverty is violence, and so if my life were like an O’Conner short story I would be changing and growing daily. But truthfully, I feel like I can get stuck or numbed by the day to day violence of poverty.

There are some days when it hits me hard. I can’t ignore nor forget certain imagines burned into my memory. Last week I was walking from my house to Metro Centro to catch my bus to Ciudad Sandino. It was 6:05AM. I went to cross the street and saw out of the corner of my eye a homeless man. Actually, all I could see was his bare ass and him wiping himself. It shocked me. What brings a man to defecate like that out in the open? That same day, on arriving to Ciudad Sandino, I was walking from the bus to school and saw two more things that shocked me. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the Save the Children ads on TV showing images of dirty naked children looking for your daily donation of 60 cents. I think one of those kids lives near my school. He stood by the road wearing nothing but a dirty cloth diaper, and his little hands clutching barbed wire. He looked up at me with red expressionless eyes. On the next block a group of four or five shirtless and raggedy men were sitting around on the ground passing a bottle of Guaro or cheap dirty liquor. A bottle of this stuff goes for about 2 dollars a pop and even the cheapest and most desperate college freshmen would turn their noses up at the stuff. These men were getting drunk at 7AM as their kids were heading to school and their wives and girlfriends to work. When I left school at 4PM they were still where I left them.

These experiences are not unique to this one day. There was something about the concentration of the events, all happening within an hour, that shocked me out of my stasis. It’s not easy to see suffering like this on a daily basis but it certainly puts my ipod woes into perspective. I hope I never become too accustomed or dulled to the realities around me, but perhaps I can use these experiences as catalysts for personal growth, enlightenment, and metanoia.