The Idea of an Essay, Volume 3

76 The Idea of an Essay: Volume 3 Immediately, her expression changed from confused to euphoric. She dashed toward our group leader, hugging and kissing him. She then ran toward the rest of the group to do the same. She hugged me, and I had to bend down to let her kiss me on the cheek. In Spanish, she jabbered, “My children, my brothers, my sisters. I am so happy to have my family here!” Suddenly, a lighthearted mood replaced the tense one that had lingered over the whole day. I knew there was something special about Rosa. She invited us into her home and prompted us to have a seat near the back wall. The chair I sat on was a plastic bucket sitting upside-down on her dirt floor. A mattress sat on the floor against the wall opposite from me. A wooden table stood to my right, cluttered with dirty and broken knick-knacks she had scavenged from the city and landfills. We gave her the fruit we had purchased earlier in the day as a gift. Without hesitation, she cut and peeled it and served all of it to us. Then, she spun out the back entrance and returned momentarily with cups of soup and beans. I had grown weary from all of the walking we had already done, so I was grateful for the food. The soup was warm and delicious, but when I took my first bite of beans, my insides cringed. They were cold and I couldn’t tell if they were even cooked. In my hunger, I craved warm, delectable beans, not the chilled beans lumped together in my cup. But I soon grasped the scope of what she was doing for us, and I realized the enormity of my own selfishness. Rosa just gave away all of the food she had for the week, and she would now have to go to extra lengths to make up for it. I had never seen such sacrificial giving before, and I was now thankful for each individual bean I forced down my gullet. As we ate, she told us the story of how she ended up in Milagro. “My husband and I lived in a poor rural community in the mountains.” She began. “When he got a job in the city, we were both so happy. The government owned this plot of land just outside of the city, and if enough people paid them fifty dollars, they would build a new community there. It would be called ‘Milagro de Dios’. They would build nice clean houses, and there would be shipments of clean water every week. We sold everything we had to get the money, and we paid our fifty dollars. Over a thousand people paid the money to live in this new community, and we were all there on the day they were going to start building, but no one showed up to