69. "Hitchhiking"
- L Rshaw
- Dec 12, 2019
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 22, 2022
“In the end…We only regret the chances we didn’t take, the relationships we were afraid to have, and the decisions we waited too long to make.”
--- Lewis Carroll (English writer; 1832 - 1898)
This is not a blog post endorsing hitchhiking. The story contained therein can only be considered hitchhiking by the loosest definition of the word. Nevertheless, the things in life that you never imagined would ever happen and then do often make for good stories and lasting memories.
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My new companion, Elder Fortaleza, showed me around the Riveras area as best he could in those first few days but with the area being so large, I easily got turned around and struggled to differentiate one dirt street from another. Those days mostly consisted of me following him around like a dog, not so much teaching me how getting around; mind you that we didn't have a car and had to walk everywhere. I met about four or five of the people Elder Fortaleza already had lined up to teach from his time with his previous companion, Elder Matheny, and that was about all we did for those first couple of days.
It may have been our second day together. We had to head to the chapel for a Ward Council Meeting (where leaders of organizations within the ward meet to discuss any needs and to propose solutions together; see "Church Organization") and we were running behind schedule.
We were speed walking as fast as we could, and we'd just crossed the last of the canal bridges. When I asked how much further we had to go, Elder Fortaleza assured me we still had our work cut out for us (turns out we were exactly a mile away from the chapel). So far we'd walked about half the distance to the chapel, one mile, at full walking speed. Considering that the average person walks at about 3 miles per hour and taking into account we couldn't walk in a straight path through the neighborhood, we're talking about approximately a 40-minute walk from where we started to where we needed to be. Just then, a wagon pulled by a single mule passed by us on our left. This was the garbage cart.
Now, despite spending all day every day on the streets for two years in four different cities in Mexico, I don't have any recollection of seeing any actual garbage trucks. However, there must have been! When I search on the internet, there is a clear presence of garbage trucks. The garbage cart was a supplemental service I suppose. But these animal-drawn vehicles present a number of concerns which include issues of traffic safety, but namely the poor treatment of the beast of burden. It's primarily for these reasons that these "carretoneros de basura" are generally frowned upon by the majority of the locals.
While on the issue of garbage disposal, I lament to say that the vast majority of the streets anywhere I went were littered with garbage to some degree, and that includes the rural rocky wild brush that we'd bushwhack through every now and then. In some places, I remind you that people would occasionally burn their garbage and it'd smell exactly like you'd imagine it to be. But with all that said, environmental awareness is an issue that extends far beyond the borders of Northern Mexico. We all need to do better.
In Reynosa, although I'm sure they're present in other places, men who were sometimes accompanied by their sons picked up the garbage and carried it away in their animal-drawn vehicle. In Spanish, they're called "Carretoneros de Basura". In the back of this "pick-up truck", the trash bags, bottles, and planks of scrap wood piled up, separate from and largely out of the driver’s view. There are no rearview mirrors on a wagon.
Just as this garbage cart is passing Elder Fortaleza and me, a few noisy garbage bags topple onto the ground. We race to throw them back on before the cart can take off. The driver and his son thank us, and we all keep going on our way...In the same direction! Just then, Elder Fortaleza has an idea and jogs to catch up with the slow cart and asks if we could catch a ride. The driver didn’t hesitate to accept our request which was a surprise to me.
Now, personally, I don't endorse hitchhiking, there are safer ways to travel, but I'll admit that we weren't the only missionaries to get a ride from point A to point B every now and then; I was never one to take that chance. There are people in the world that get around by doing that, and I usually wouldn't recommend getting into a vehicle with someone you don't know, but to each his own I suppose. Let it again be known that I absolve myself of anybody else's decision to hitchhike.
We immediately hopped onto the front bench alongside this man with the reins in his hands and his son. As you'd expect of two missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, we invited the man and his son to learn about the restored gospel. The challenges and consequent excuses emerged as we talked. The man didn’t live in our area and worked two jobs. He was insistent that he didn’t have time for missionaries to visit, even though I believe he just wasn't interested (See "Sí, Dios Quiere"), but he was glad to help us get to where we needed to go.
We rode up to the front of the chapel and sprinted in, making our meeting exactly on time. Maybe we didn’t travel any faster by wagon than by we would have by foot but we saved ourselves a lot of strenuous leg work and I'd take that any day. Sometimes you just have to get creative if you want a solution to a problem! If you want help with something, you have nothing to lose asking and everything to gain. Ask, and ye shall receive.
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