Bullets, bad luck and brujeria

Don Felipe, the gardener at the Dreaming House, got shot on Sunday. He was in San Juan with his combi van at 6 am at the combi stop to pick up his sons, and some guys came up and wanted to steal the van and as he's jumping out and flinging the keys, they shot him. They hit him in the face and twice in the legs. Somehow he survived, although he still his a bullet lodged somewhere in his head, so who knows what will happen. The poor guy has horrible luck, because apparently this is the 3 rd time he's been assaulted for that damn van, as if it was something that special. Granted, Mexico has horrible statistics - its number one in the world for kidnapping, and 3rd for violent armed robbery, and is generally classified as about the 5th most dangerous place in the world to live, probably after places like Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan, and Mexico isn't even officially at war, except maybe the pretend war on corruption, drugs and crime. But aside from the statistics, Don Felipe has bad luck in general and it sucks because he's such a nice guy. He's what people here call "noble" - a friendly, mellow, honest, mild-mannered, polite, and respectful person. But he has crappy luck.

Don Felipe works for the railroad from about 5 am till 3 pm, then he comes over to the Dreaming House and does lawn and garden maintenance till about 7 pm, and then in his spare time he does other odd jobs around town, and drives his son's combi van, which is basically like a local bus service. He works hard. He singlehandedly managed to get the tree trunks out of the entry way at my house where numerous people had tried before and failed. But Don Felipe just took an ax and hacked away at them for 2 days unrelentlessly and got them out. He laid the paving stones in my driveway and put the laminate roof on the car deck at my house as well. He has to work so much because of another bit of bad luck he had - since he works on the railroad, he encounters many of the illegal immigrants that ride by on the freight train on their way up north. On any given day, you can count 60 to 70 immigrants perched on the roof of any one of the many trains that pass. They're coming from Central America - from Honduras, from Nicaragua - and they often hop off here in San Sebastian since its a good spot where the tracks intersect with a village. They walk the streets knocking on doors, begging for a piece of bread or a glass of water, offering to work for a meal or a change of clothes. I've handed out cartons of milk and juice, a few pesos, some old pants that Nikis doesn't wear anymore. A lot of them are kids, 15 or 16 years old, without a cent to their name, nothing more than the clothes on their back, and they've often been assaulted by gangs along the line, separated from their companions, often on their way back down to Honduras because they never made it to the border and they're just plain worn out.

Anyway, Don Felipe would often give these guys a hand - give them something to eat, let them sleep the night in his little shack, give them a little odd job so they could earn a peso or two. Well, one day the Migracion officials caught up with him, and threw him in jail for about a year or two, and let him go finally with a huge debt to pay in fines, all for having been "noble" and trying to help out some poor Central American kid on his way to the American Dream. (And you thought illegal immigration was a problem in the States!) So basically Don Felipe has no hope of ever paying off this debt on his Mexican salary, but he has it hanging over his head with the threat to return to prison, the Mexican funked-out-way-worse-than-American prison, if he doesn't pay up his debt. So he keeps adding on more bit jobs, and ponders going to the U.S. illegally to work in the hopes of making a higher salary to pay the debt for helping someone who was going to the U.S. illegally - the irony of it! And the bad luck of it. So we all pray that Don Felipe is going to be ok and hopefully some day be able to pay his debt.

Of course, you know how the Mexicans think - that there is witchcraft involved in his bad luck. Apparently some 11 years ago, Don Felipe left his wife and took up with Yolanda, who works in the Dreaming House cooking and cleaning and who is my father-in-law's cousin. Don Felipe takes care of his kids, however many of them there are, and apparently to keep up appearances with his former wife, never officially divorced the woman. So he lives part of the time with Yolanda and part of the time in his railroad shack, but technically is still married to the ex. And he has bad luck. So the Mexican way of thinking assumes that his ex-wife must have put a hex on him as punishment for leaving her - some sort of brujeria that not only keeps him bound to her as her legal husband, but punishes him with horrendous events like prison or assault or a bullet in the head every time he goes off with Yolanda. Because now that he's in the hospital in a semi-conscious state, he's once again in the fold of his ex-wife's family, and Yolanda can't even go visit him. The wife probably gave him toloatche tea, a wicked brew made from a big pungent leaf, that is said to drive a man crazy and bind him to the woman who fed it to him forever. (And coincidentally, the leaf is also good wrapped around an infection because it sucks out the "evil" - I put it on an infected ingrown toenail once and walked around all day sporting a bulky green bandage on my foot.) Now Yolanda is a big ol' bruja witch in her own right (she's the one who licked my baby's forehead in the shape of the cross the time she insisted his crying was the result of the evil eye instead of colic), but obviously she's got to step it up a notch if she's going to keep her man, and if Don Felipe is going to get the bullet out of his head.