CLEANING UP
In this darkest, coldest time of year when we officially celebrate giving and good will, I want to tell you about Carlos whose only brush with Buddhism and Bodhisattvas was shining up a San Francisco monastery before His Holiness Karmapa set foot in it. That was because he is a custodian, an immigrant who gets paid to clean the lobbies and hallways of luxury apartment buildings, and I hired him for that special job.
Frankly, no other custodian cleans like Carlos. He is only 5’4” and slight of build, but he is a macho gaucho with fiery dark eyes, slicked hair and pointed cowboy boots that stick out under uniformly stiff and spotless jeans. To him, dirt and disfigurement are affronts that must be addressed as quickly and fiercely as disrespect. He whips buildings and apartments into shape with the intense focus and vigor he uses to train horses. "Look at that!" he will sneer after running a finger along wainscoting, light bulbs or picture frames. “Dust!”
He was in fact so appalled by the “dirty” Tibetan monastery, he spent ten nonstop, lunchless hours high and low scrubbing, polishing, replacing dead bulbs and missing cabinet door screws nobody even knew about. Everybody who came after commented on the sparkle.
Carlos is openly proud of his work and has good reason to be. In the two decades he’s been here, he has built a thriving janitorial business, one so steady and sought after that he employs half a dozen other immigrants to vacuum, shine and swab where he cannot. Despite these extra hands, he still works six, sometimes seven days a week, and has an income in six figures to show for it.
In addition to his business and his horses, Carlos has a son he is now raising alone, a sulky teenager he is desperate to keep on a college bound track. Two weeks ago when he told me we had to talk, something important, I thought he might be losing Minor to high school gangs. But it turned out to be trouble with other children.
“I need your help,” he said and whipped out photos he’d just brought back from Guatemala. “I want to make a school… in my village. I want these children to have a proper school. My sister, she is the principal and she tell me how much the children learn, how far some of them walk just to get to the one room you see here. The government, it does nothing, so I want to make the children a school. Can you help me?”
Carlos said the judge and the businessman who live in the most luxurious building he cleans had already volunteered to contribute something if he set it up right. What did that mean? I explained people in this country didn’t give freely with lots of ho ho ho. They aren’t Buddhists practicing transcendent generosity. They are Americans who want to get back a 501C3 charitable tax deduction so the giving gets something beneficial for the donor too.
Carlos immediately hired extra help and took a day off to drive to the state capital to wait for bureaucrats to provide the papers that charter official charity. He did this because he heard it was six weeks faster than filing through the mail, and he had a mess to clean up.
Carlos was racing the clock not only to beat next summer’s rains by getting a new roof on the old building and channeling raw sewage toward a proposed septic site. He wanted to help a particular 7-year-old girl. He showed me several snapshots of her, and she had the makings of a pageant beauty except for the enormous black fan of fungus growing out of the middle of her face. As it spread, she was going blind. Eventually it would asphyxiate her.
“Carlos, you’ve got to do something… before she’s totally blind for life!” I heard myself shouting. “We can’t…we can’t let that little girl suffer. This can be cured, no?”
Carlos nodded sadly. Of course it could be fixed, surgically. As soon as he saw her, he wanted to take her maybe to Guatemala City to a proper hospital but “the parents…the parents…they don’t want.”
“How can they not want their own child to stop suffering?” I was horrified, not only by the sight of such abominable suffering, but by the realization that the parents had done nothing to help their own child. Somewhere in the southern mountains of Guatemala, there was a beautiful 7-year-old girl needlessly losing her face and going blind. All she needed was a surgeon’s scalpel to cut out the giant fungus--and evidently somebody to cut through her father's machismo.
“The people from my village, some are very backward. They live a long time the same way, hundreds of years. They don’t want to do anything different than they know. They don’t want anyone to tell them do this or don’t do that… But I tell my sister I am going to try.”
Haunted by that little girl’s disappearing face, I went right home and Googled medical assistance in Guatemala. At 6:00 PM Pacific Time on a Friday night, I called Carlos to say I’d found a charity of volunteer doctors who go down there four times a year to bring medical help to rural areas, and their next foray was in weeks. He called them right away, 9:30 PM on a Friday night. They told him they would help that little girl. He told them he would pay any bill.
Carlos gave this news to his sister back in his village in Guatemala, the one who is the school principal. She trekked out to tell the little girl this good news but that was all she could do. The parents adamantly refused any interference in their family.
“That’s how they are,” Carlos said, shaking his head sadly when he told me. “They are ignorant, scared people. That’s why I have to build a school. You have to help me build this school so the children will know better and everything will change for good.”
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posted by Sandy Garson @ 1:29 PM
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