Sunday, December 20, 2009

That Ain't Right

Last week, one of my dearest students missed camp for a day because her mom's cousin had passed away. Thirty-one year old man found dead on the side of the new road going through Piedras Negras at 3 in the morning. And absolutely no one new what happened. If you dig deeper, if you snitch more, you can always get to the bottom of things. It must be that suppresed desire to become a homicide detective coming out in me. Actually, it wasn't that hard to find out what happend, or what supposedly happened. Another student's dad is also related to the guy and says that he was driving his motorcyle at that time, and of course, we are in the hills so there's tons of fog at that time. Apparently there was a truck parked on the side of the road and he smacked straight into it. Sigh. He was supposed to be getting married in a few weeks. The mom of my student told me she saw her (fiance) on the bus the other day (her boyfriend used to pick her up from work everyday so now she was riding the bus) and she was crying and crying. Poor lady.

Yesterday, Profe tells me that his friend's sister "la iban a pedir," which is the formality of the boyfriend asking the parents' for the daughter's hand in marriage. The tradition was that the boyfriend and his family would go to the girlfriend's house with all kinds of food (tamales, bread, fruit, sometimes alcohol) as a gift to the family. Many ladino families don't follow that tradition anymore, but its more common for the indigenous. So this man was supposed to go propose yesterday. He gets into an accident on Thursday on his way out of Huehue to another city and dies. Days away. And, come to find out, the girlfriend is pregnant.