UNFORGETABLE LESSON

Pallatanga-The main square and the hill behind

After we buried mom, and for the following months and even today, she has been permanently present in my mind, I always think a lot about her life, her relentless dedication to her family, her permanent compassion for the poor in her village, her passion for the education of her children, her strong believe in God and His presence in our lives, her amazing strength to endure the duress of her life in poverty and hard work, but more than anything else, about her lessons of integrity and honesty in all the acts of our lives. There is one of those lessons I’d like to share with all of you because I believe it is emblematic of her character and her personality:

In January, 1950, in a foggy day after school, when I hadn´t reached eight yet, I was sent by my mom to bring the milk from the dairy farmer’s place. Carrying a tin pail I was walking slowly through a muddy, shadowy and solitary trail which snaked up a hill that was about one third of a mile up and a mile and a half away from our home. Suddenly, I bumped into a small bundle wrapped in an old and dirty looking handkerchief which was probably white long ago, when it was clean and new. I picked the bundle; it was kind of heavy, and when I unfolded it, I found it contained exactly ten sucres and ninety five cents in small change. “Gee”, I said to myself, “this is a lot of money, almost a fortune” (it really was like the equivalent of five dollars today), and I felt it was all mine, I had never owned so much money in my whole life… When I got back home with the pail full of milk, I told my mom what I had found, as I felt as happy as a morning bird, and I was sure she would share my happiness.

She was very happy too, indeed, but for a very different reason than mine. She took the little bundle and said “my dear son, what you have just found, most likely somebody very poor, has lost it, and must be looking for it, that person must be suffering for his or her loss and what we need to do is try to find who that person is”. After a moment of confusion, my answer was, “but mom, how are we going to find that person?”. “Don’t you worry my little son”, she said, “I will find a way to do it”. I was shocked, and at the time I was even a bit upset with my mom, because I did not understand what she was up to, but I let her manage the situation. I had no choice after all.

The next Sunday morning, my mom went to the church and talked to the priest and requested him to ask from the pulpit for the owner of the little bundle and the money in it. Sure enough, a very poor and old little lady approached the priest after mass and claimed for the little bundle and its content. Now it was the old little lady who was as happy as a morning bird, because the money she had lost was what she needed for her weekly shopping at the village´s market. That same day, before dinner, my mom said a prayer thanking God for allowing this very poor little lady to have recovered what was rightfully hers, and praising me for having found it and returned it. That night I understood the immense meaning of this lesson of integrity and compassion, which I will never forget.

On the day of her burial, we, the four brothers, her male children, took the casket with mom’s remains to their final site in the cemetery on our shoulders. My dad was crying as a motherless child and was being consoled by my sisters who followed right behind us. In our way we could see a long line of people we knew, wearing mourning clothing, but we also saw a great number of people who just did not have any mourning clothing to wear, and were just wearing what they could, those were the people from our village, the people my mother loved so much, the men and women who consider her as their benefactor, their healer, their provider and their mentor. I was so proud of her; that it is not an exaggeration to say that my pain was being alleviated as we approached her tomb and left her mortal body to rest. I was eye witnessing the caliber of her charisma, I was seeing and feeling the love she inspired in all those people whose only possession was their loyalty and their love for this woman they considered their big mom. I was then as I am today, and as I always will be, proud of being her son, proud of having her blood running in my veins!


The "Kitchen Room" in a peasant's house in Pallatanga, where guinea pigs were always a part of it.

A week after my mom was buried I was flying to Bogota, the Colombian Capital, where I took the first training in Auditing, it was actually a light introduction to Auditing, a preparation for the heavy one to be taken in Mexico City during the following four weeks. Before I took off from Guayaquil, my sister Lilita, the one of my three sisters who was the closest to my mom, asked me to come and live with her and her family upon my return from my training in September, which I accepted with enormous gratitude. In a way, she adopted me as a son, in fact, for the following four years, her five children grew up with me just as if was their big brother.

The Auditing training in Mexico City was a tough one too, but having successfully endured the Cali training, we were all prepared for it and I absorbed it as a sponge would’ve. The faculty at this training was made up mostly by AA& CO’s Mexican partners and managers whose experience in the field was a guarantee of success. Since I had some auditing field experience in the months of January thru May, mainly with Jerry Windham, I was a lot better prepared for this course than for the Cali training.

In the Mexico City Training, believe it or not, I learned more from the students than from the faculty itself, and it is not that I did not learn much from the latter, which I did, but my experience of befriending with young people of almost all Latin American countries (except Brazil), left me a very enduring knowledge of the idiosyncrasy of young Latin people. I learned that, barring some minor, almost unnoticeable differences, we are almost the same throughout the continent; after all, we all come from the same roots, and we share the same culture, we share our love for the music, we all love Cervantes as much as we love Pablo Neruda, we loved Los Panchos as much as we loved the Hermanos Silva, we loved the Peruvian Valses as much as we all loved Tangos, we loved Cumbias as much as we loved Boleros, and, of course, we all loved the Rancheras from Mexico. We all have a common past, a common History, a common present and hopefully a common future of democracy without extremism. Many of the friends I made in Mexico City in 1969,still remain my friends today, we do not see one another very much, but every time we have a chance to get together, we turn the clock 40 years back and return to our mid 20’s. We enjoy ourselves like little pigs in the mud. Such is the magic of true friendship!
In late September I returned from my training courses. I felt like having graduated from college for the second time. I felt like a pure breed horse that had been trained and was ready to start running in the racing tracks.

The technical knowledge I acquired between June and September 1969, was so transcendental and of such weight in my professional development, that I do not hesitate to say that this, coupled by my field experience in the firm, was my real college education. My theoretical training in Colombia and Mexico was immediately followed up by very well supervised, hands on work in Guayaquil, Quito and Cuenca where our clients were located. In addition to the formal technical education, we learned many other things from our instructors and professors, including business and social manners. I wouldn’t hesitate to say that when I returned from Mexico in late September, in many ways I was a quite different person from the young, a bit arrogant individual, who went out for training at the beginning of June. I went there as a junior staff member, fresh out of school, and returned as a junior professional, aware of my short comings and eager to continue my professional development. Ironic as it may sound, I was now a more humble person, aware of my limitations and more open to understand and be patient with the limitations of others around me.
In my next posting: BIG BROTHER FOR THE FIRST TIME