My school bus driver always told me,"People nowadays seem blind. " He used to say lack the ability to admire the beauty of the simple things like
flowers or a smiles. I must say, I never forgot his words. thats why every time I traveled to my school the path was different. Traveling to my school, since it was on Bogota's outskirts, was like driving in Garcia Marquez's Hundred Years of Solitude. The unpaved street mixed with the peasant infrastructure gave the landscape a quaint feeling. However what gave the scenery much of its magic, like in Garcia's tales, was the little public school on the corner of the road; better known as "El salitre.”
Children from "El Salitre" love to go to my school’s activities. These activities are
mainly organized by the interested seniors. My interest in these activities lead me
to that one experience that shaped and changed my life.The beginning of this experience started on a late hot October day of my senior year. when my friends and I started planning Halloween for the community and our schoolmates.
As a Halloween freak, I was in total ecstasy and started throwing out millions of ideas. After we discussed the ideas for a while we were able to choose a theme. We all elected my idea, "Animal Kingdom," which made me get more excited about the event. That day I got up earlier and become the Lioness of our show. When the costume was completed,
along with my frien’s costumes, it created an amazed sensation in the crowd.It all become a tropical jungle, you could see the monkeys screaming across the place,the zebras running through the veld, and of course the lion growling loud to the animal
kingdom. Amazed by our striking colors, all this kids had their eyes wide open making
every second a bigger smile while we walked throughout the people. The radiant sun of
that days mixed with the Colombian tropic weather produced in all of them a gigantic
energy that made them part of the parade. The veld was then covered up by a
magnificent folkloric din of laughing and giggles.
The joy didn't end there. As a matter of fact we decided to create a haunted house in
the Art and Theater room. As follows to make it as scarier as I could, I offer myself to
buy the decoration. I've always enjoyed doing handcraft hence I got as focus as I could
on this. I bought all sorts of spooky stuff. I spend my night painting the graves and
building up the skeletons so that on Sunday, with the help of my friends, I could go back
to school to build up the haunted house. At the end the haunted house turned to be
perfect the graves gave that raw smell all over the place and the skeletons where really
helpful, they took their places and came into character.We certainly didn't regret a moment of our hard work. As foolish as it may sound when I saw all those kids fighting to be the first in line. I felt for the first time in my life that I had
finally done something perfect.
Time has passed by and I have realized that the words my bus driver once told me have
stayed with me all along the way, becoming part of my wisdom. There is no doubt Iíve
seen blind people who care less about beautiful things. Nevertheless kids from "El
Salitre" aren't blind they have the ability to enjoy even the more smallest things, as it is
a dance or paint on a mirror. Nowadays I look back with sorrow to those good
memories, just as Jose Aureliano Buendia remembered Macondo in a Hundred years of
solitude. One day that unpaved road will disappear from the memories of everybody
and nobody will ever know all those happy memories those kids brought me. Just as
Garcia's town Macondo disappeared from the earth facet.
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