Third day of writing and publishing 1000 words. For the sake of honesty I have to say, my energy and enthusiasm today are not as high as they were during my first two days of this challenge, and for that reason I wasn’t able to post this in the morning as usual. I won’t let this sudden mood change kill my determination though, so I have to get 1000 words together no matter what, and I will post them before midnight for sure. One of the main reasons for this goal, apart from exercising my writing ability, is to work on my self-control and determination. I haven’t set a date for how long I’ll write 1000 words for, I’m just going to keep writing indefinitely, hopefully until the end of my days. Anyway, just to quickly recap on where we’re at so far on this literary journey, yesterday I was explaining a bit about the circumstances which brought me from Vancouver, BC back to my birth country of Honduras, where I’m currently writing from. I didn’t have space to finish my story yesterday, so let me get back to it. Growing up in Vancouver, where my parents moved in 2004, I started hanging out with a lot of crazy kids. Many aspects of Canadian culture were very different from what we were accustomed to as a Latino family. Adapting to this new experience and all it entailed was hard on my parents, especially during the first few years, but to me everything seemed wonderful as I lived in a childish state of pure ignorance towards my family’s situation. After arriving in Vancouver at the age of 10 and starting to attend elementary school (grade 4) I started making friends quick, having already learned a significant amount of English at a bilingual elementary school in Honduras. I was a naïve kid, excited about my freedom and independence, about being a teenager in a new country, a safer country with more opportunities for fun and adventure. My parents, having always been very overprotective, now began to loosen up a bit, feeling like Canadian culture was somewhat more sane than that of Honduras. Having always taught my brothers and I about God and morality, and having been great examples of ideal people themselves, my folks never imagined that their firstborn son would end up caught up in some of the things I ended up getting involved in. Today I would feel a deep regret about all of the suffering I caused them, except that I know now that everything is meant to be (although things are only meant to be so that I can learn something from them in order to positively impact the present, and by extension the future). At the age of 13, around 2007/08 was really when it all started. I was always a friendly kid, and was open to friendships with anyone. I met Mike in grade 8, he was my best friend all throughout that year and throughout the summer that followed it. Grade 8 in BC is the start of high school, so that year I got to know more kids than ever before, due to the fact that all grade sevens from all elementary schools in the area were now in classes together, all at the same school. I’ve always been kind of a weirdo, and the kids I started hanging out with the most were the craziest ones, a lot of them being introduced to me by Mike, who was a really troubled child. We started problems everywhere we went. Alcohol and other drugs made it all real fun and allowed me to ignore the reality of what I was turning my life into, as it was all a fun and crazy mess with no time left for reflection. I was living on auto-pilot. I’ll touch more upon this period of my life in later posts, but for now we can skip the details of some of the craziest things that happened during those years. Let’s just say for now that many dark years of of lying went by, me lying, mom crying, dad yelling, school and police accusing, me denying. Fights, school suspensions and eventual expulsion, shoplifting, and many more constant problems I was always involved in. After about 9 years of this my parents were getting extremely tired of it, and since I was now about 19 years old I was getting tired of the constant conflict as well. It had always annoyed me, and I had wanted to move out of my parents house for as long as I could remember but I never had enough money to do so since I always spent it all. Now that I was almost 20 I knew it was time, I had to move away no matter what. By this point, I had already calmed down a bit since the days when I was hanging out with Mike, and really the only drug I was still using constantly was weed, as I still am up till today (more on why in future posts). My parents could never accept this though, and I could never come home and simply be at peace since I would always have to hear a lecture about a habit which I was not going to stop after having already blazed for about 7 years straight at that point, and which I had already decided was an essential part of my lifestyle. I flew to Honduras as soon as I could, and came to live at my grandparents’ home, in a spare room they had. Since 15 years old I had always worked, since I liked having my own money so that I could buy exactly what I wanted whenever I needed it, and the same was going to be true in Honduras. I was really into working out in those days, so I signed up for a monthly gym membership. The gym mentor was an old crazy Honduran who had lived in the US a while back and told me stories about having fought in some old war, I can’t remember which. Anyway, after a few conversations he told me that here in San Pedro Sula, most English speakers work in call centers, as they pay workers good money for simply talking on the phone, doing customer service, sales, or collections work. There was a popular call center, Collective Solution, right across the street from the gym. I told him I would apply, and I did and was hired that same day, as good English is really the most basic requirement they look for. About a month after starting to work there, I think in August of 2014, I met the beautiful lady who became my wife a few years later. The call center is divided into different “campaigns”. Basically, each campaign is a third party representing a specific client, some American company that has agents working overseas (in order to pay them less). I was hired for a collections campaign, to collect on past due accounts for the Fresno Credit Bureau. A few steps from me was a campaign for H20 Wireless, a cell phone company, and in one of the spare moments of boredom in between calls my attention was caught by a soft, emphatic voice, saying to the customer on the other end of the line, “Hello, my name is Marie, how can I help you today?” I turned around to notice a mysterious girl with a hoodie on her head sitting in the corner…
~ Rebel Spirit ~
rebel eye 