The gates of Hades shall not overcome it

Originally posted Sunday, August 17, 2008 at 3:08am

The last(?) installment of my adventures in Guadalajara.

We had some changes in the house I was staying at. The medical students left after I was there for two weeks; one went back to El Paso, and the other bought his own house in the city so he could attend medical school here for the next four years.
We also had a new arrival, a Texan named Garrett who is only just beginning his journey towards fluency. He was here for two weeks before leaving to spend a fortnight in Puerto Vallarta with his family. Garrett was not good for my Spanish because his functional vocabulary was basically limited to "hello," "goodbye," "yes," "no," "please," "thank you," and "beer," but Josh and I still enjoyed having him around, and honestly, translating between him and the señora was downright invigorating. I could have said whatever I wanted, and they wouldn't have known.

The ironic thing is that Josh and I are actually good at Spanish, but we're both whiter than ghosts, whereas Garrett can pass as Mexican until he starts talking.

The other ironic thing is that Garrett was the only one of us who actually landed a date with a real live Mexican girl. You may be wondering how he pulled that off, and the answer is: he macked on an 18-year-old Starbucks barista that speaks really good English. The date didn't end up happening, because they planned on meeting at a bar later than her parents would allow, but that's not the point.

I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure there are a million Starbucks in Guadalajara. I think I passed three of them just on the way to church.

On Saturday, August 2, Garrett and Josh and I forayed downtown on a sightseeing expedition. We took the bus to Calle Pedro Moreno and walked to the San Juan de Dios market, which Josh and Garrett wanted to explore. Now, for the past two Sundays I had attended a Presbyterian church run by American missionaries in the suburb of Bugambilias, and laboring under the impression that they held a service on Saturday afternoons on a nearby street called Aldama, I left Josh and Garrett to their own devices for half an hour and set off to find it.
I was in a hurry because I was running late, but strangely enough, I ran into someone I knew. Are you ready, children? Because it's story-within-a-story time!

***
So, the previous Saturday I also visited San Juan de Dios and was approached by a man we'll call Donatello, who told me in impeccable English that he had lived almost all of his life in the U.S., but was born in Mexico and had been deported recently, and had just found himself the reluctant beneficiary of an 18-hour bus ride to Guadalajara. He even showed me a file with some pictures and documents from Immigration and Naturalization Services. He said he needed money for dinner and a bus ticket to the state of Michoacan to find his family, so I ended up giving him a small fortune in pesos. He gave me a phone number and an address for his sister in California, who he said would pay me back later, and also took seven or eight pictures for me of various mariachis posing with me.
***

Don was trying to use a pay phone when he saw me walk past and started yelling until he got my attention. He seemed surprised I was still in Guadalajara, and told me that the police had confiscated the money I gave him. He didn't ask for any more, however, and assured me again that his sister would reimburse me. I should have asked him what he could possibly have been up to for the past week, but like I said, I was kind of in a hurry. I still haven't tried to contact his sister, but I'm thinking Donatello lied to me maybe.

Anyway, I found Aldama and turned onto it. Now, it so happens that Aldama leads to a REALLY bad neighborhood. The kind of place you should go to at night if you're interested in getting shot. As I was walking down the street, I passed a couple guys and a girl who started saying something to me about Bugambilias and missionaries. I interpreted this as a sign that I was on the right track, and that is indeed one way of looking at it. Another way is: these people know exactly what I am here for just by looking at me. I stick out like a man with no thumbs.

Because I am both stupid and crazy, I pressed on.

The girl led me for several blocks and then told me the place was two and a half doors down on the left. I saw some little shops, but I didn't see anything that looked like it wanted to be a church service. One set of doors was slightly ajar and had a long hallway behind it, and it appeared to be either a flea market, or possibly what I was looking for.
I walked in, but I didn't see a flea market. All I saw was three or four women sitting at a table 15 or 20 feet away. I began to wonder if I had just committed a major faux pas and walked into somebody's house uninvited, but they didn't say anything.
Suddenly a man yelled to me from the doorway, "Hey, do you speak English?" I said yes, and then he said to me, "Do you have any idea where you are?"

This man's name was John, and he was an American from Texas who had been living in the neighborhood for the past year. I forgot to ask him why on earth he would do that. It turns out he also knew Paul Fisher, the music director from the church in Bugambilias, who was exactly the person I was hoping to meet, and who was running the mission in Aldama. John kept telling me how dangerous the neighborhood was as he led me out of it, and that an American friend of his had been shot there. He did show me the place I was trying to find, but it was closed up.
John also told me that two years ago he was shot in the chest six times and still has two bullets lodged in his heart. I forgot to ask him how or why. He lifted up his shirt, but I couldn't see the scars very well.

So a few minutes later, I reunited with Josh and Garrett, and we set out on a long walk to see the Expiatory Temple, an enormous Catholic church where tiny mechanical representations of the Twelve Apostles make an appearance on the balcony three times a day, like a holy cuckoo clock.

On the way there we passed a random Mexican man who started speaking to me in English. At first he was just making small talk, but then he tried to offer me his two female cousins, or “primas,” as we like to call them. I rejected his offer. Prima Man seemed disappointed and asked me why not. I told him his primas didn't interest me, and he, in turn, asked if I was gay. Come to think of it, Donatello had also questioned my sexuality the week before after he asked if I had a girlfriend.

So anyway, Prima Man wasn't taking no for an answer, but he finally told me that he was only joking, and I like to think that he meant that. Josh said he liked to think that Prima Man was NOT in fact joking, but rather, intended to kidnap and rape us. He quickly amended this statement to say that while he did not in fact LIKE to think this, he found himself compelled to consider the possibility. I reflected that being kidnapped might not be so bad, as long as there were cousins involved.

So anyway, the church was pretty cool, although the twelve Apostles were a lot shorter than I expected. In the courtyard of the Expiatory Temple there is a large fountain with a statue in the center of the plant you make tequila out of. There’s also a small picture inside the door of the church of Moses with horns, a sad state of affairs which originated with a medieval mistranslation of Exodus 34:29 as saying “Moses had horns” instead of “Moses’ face shone.”

In front of the church an older man approached me, but I could barely understood a word he said. Something about food and a bus ride, I think, so I gave him a few pesos.

We walked back to San Juan de Dios so we could take the subway home, and Josh was not so much approached as physically accosted by a random stranger, who bumped into him on purpose and then grabbed his arm. I’m not sure what this guy was selling, but it was probably stolen. Josh managed at last to extricate himself from his predicament, and we proceeded on our merry way.

You can buy tons of American movies and TV shows inside San Juan de Dios, and they’re already dirt cheap because they’re all pirated, but I’ve often wondered what would happen if you were to just flat-out steal one. I mean, they’re already stolen, right? And they’re all American shows, so in a sense, it would be sort of like you were stealing them back*.

I'm guessing they can't really call the police, so they probably just beat the crap out of you. This sounds like a good project for the next time I visit Mexico.

The next morning I went back to Cristo Redentor, the Presbyterian church in Bugambilias, and finally met Paul Fisher.

I only knew about this church in the first place because I found out by chance that a friend of a friend had recently gone to Guadalajara on a mission trip, and she told me about it. Paul was the guy her church group had been working with, which was why I wanted to meet him.

I'm glad I did find the church, because there are few things better than finding a great Christian community to be a part of. That, and I didn't really want to become Catholic for a month.

After church I went out with three other American college students working in Mexico as missionaries this summer. We went to a long narrow one-story mall with a courtyard in the center called the Plaza del Sol, bought some food at a grocery store inside the mall, and then ate lunch in the courtyard.

Two of us sat on a bench and the other two sat on the floor across from them. We were eating rice and other foods with our bare hands, and the three missionaries bought a six-pack to share amongst themselves, although they were kind of sheepish about actually drinking it, and one of the guys even put his bottle inside a brown paper bag. We weren't sure if you were technically allowed to drink inside the mall or not.

It turns out you’re not, but at least the police were nice about it.

We must have cut quite the ridiculous figure. I like to imagine the following conversation:

Mall Shopper: Just look at all of these dirty homeless Americans.
Us: Actually, we’re missionaries.

I hope I am not bringing the church into disrepute by sharing that anecdote. Discretion is the better part of valor and all, but really, I have a lot of respect for the work my three friends were doing in Mexico and for the fact that they are willing to go out and share the gospel on the streets. I sometimes wished that I myself were there for something more meaningful than merely studying Spanish at the university.

After lunch we hung out at a coffee shop and talked for a few hours, and then we went back to Aldama, because the mission I had tried to visit the previous day was actually having its inaugural service that evening. Paul was leading worship on guitar, and John was playing drums. We sang some worship songs in Spanish and a few people shared short personal testimonies. John talked more about when he had been shot and had been laid up in the hospital for two months, breathing through a tube in his mouth and eating through a tube in his nose. He said that to this day half his heart doesn't work at all. The doctors told him he would never think the same or walk the same, but God saved his life.

Afterwards, when I spoke with Paul Fisher again, he said the locals told him a skinny gringo had been wandering around the neighborhood looking for him the day before, and he replied, “I think I met him this morning.”

Incidentally, I have decided that if I were a Mexican superhero, I would call myself the Skinny Gringo, and my superpowers would include extreme paleness and the ability to flop around like a fish out of water.

I would have to say that all in all, that Sunday was the most fun I had in Guadalajara. I did have some problems getting home, though. Despite knowing where I was and which bus I wanted, it was getting dark and hard to see the buses or vice versa, and I had a little trouble finding the bus stop. Some guy did start trying to help me; he even flagged down a bus for me and boarded it with me, but I really couldn’t understand anything he was saying. I asked him to write it down at one point, but I don’t think he knew how to read.

It wasn't the right bus, but the bus I actually wanted somehow ended up right in front of the bus I was actually on, so I did the needful and was on my way.

*I don't actually condone stealing.