Ralph Again

Well, it has been three months now since I have made my last blog posting. Much has happened in my life and around the world. Many of our friends, brothers, and sisters across the Dominican border were killed in Hurricanes Hannah, Gustav, and Ike. dlkskdf Zimbabwe or Africa, the Dow has plummeted 4,000 points. I have since returned to the land of eternal sunshine, a calm sea breeze, and more ridiculous wealth and consumption than Jesus would have thought possible. The good news is all of the hurt, suffering, and wrongs of the world are about to change since Barack Obama was named our President elect at the end of yesterday’s polls (I hope you can note the sarcasm in my voice even though I did vote for him).

Since my last entry I have been home to get a taste of Montana for a week, spent a wonderful month with my girlfriend before she took off to Costa Rica, and been juggling 17 tough units, intramural volleyball, men’s soccer league, microfinance club, an internship, surfing, cycling, cooking (I’m in my first apartment!), doing a long-distance relationship, and investing time into the lives of the wonderful people around me. To say I haven’t had time to write a blog entry wouldn’t be an understatement, but really just a poor excuse. Not having time to do something is a choice. It’s my fault this has taken so long, but now I would like share something from my time in the Dominican that has been on my heart and mind for a long time.
Earlier in the summer I wrote about an encounter that I had with a homeless man named Ralph. A man who had served in the US Army for years, had a family, been to rock bottom with many addictions, and finally found himself on the streets of Puerto Plata shouldering the humiliation of begging for survival. The thing about Ralph is that he is a very intelligent man, but has been cast aside by society where the walls to climb back seem to grow continually higher. Add a continuing struggle with alcohol to the mix and it is easy to see why he is where he is.

As the summer progressed I had many more encounters with Ralph. Several days after our first long conversation I purchased Ralph a bottle of Shampoo and a bar of deodorant. A bit of an offensive gift right? As he held the brown bag in his hands his eyes lit up when I told him of it’s contents. He looked me in the eyes and sincerely told me how much that meant to him. We sat together on a bench in the park that he frequented every evening at 6:30pm after a long day of begging. I shared with him my idea for him to begin a language tutoring business. I offered to print him materials or be a contact point if he needed. He really liked the idea.

Over the next weeks I would see Ralph occasionally, usually in the habitual locations that had become his life. To be completely honest, I feared running into him sometimes. If I did, it meant taking a large chunk of time out of my precious day to sit and chat with him. Sometimes at the end of our conversations he would ask me if I had anything that I could give him. My usual response was my friendship. I was rooted in my decision to not give Ralph any money, which can often be a quick guilt reliever for the benefactor. I had concluded that is not what he needed. While my thoughts on this was probably correct, it didn’t help the guilt and uneasiness that continually nagged at me as I walked away from a hungry friend, especially when I knew that all it would take was a trip to the ATM, swiping a plastic card, and ridding the hunger from his belly for a day or two. A couple of times I brought him a cup of coffee when he’d asked and another time brought him some rice and chicken from lunch.

The weeks past and I saw Ralph one day, he had on a new pair of pants, had shaved, and cleaned up quite well. He beamed when he saw me, telling me that he had quit begging. He also said that he had been sober for four days. His proud, haggard smile reminded me of a young child who has just simultaneously lost both of his front teeth and couldn’t be any happier. A couple, whom I believe were working with Catholic Relief services, had begun to help Ralph as well. They had given him a book for recovering from alcoholism. He pridefully opened the pages and showed me the underlined sentences as well as the exercises that he had written out in small spiral notebook. He shared things about his personality that he had realized that he must first overcome before escaping this addiction and moving on in life. He was a proud man and I was proud of him.

The night before I left I went to the park where he spent much of his time, hoping to say a final goodbye as I had promised. There, I found Ralph working with a young man on his English in exchange for a plate of food. While he had never chosen to try out my recommended career in language tutoring, this scene was great to see. He greeted me with a huge smile filled with bright, white front teeth and we spoke for sometime. On my last day in Puerto Plata he had finally gotten the long awaited dentures from a local pastor. I was touched by his words as he thanked me, more than anything, just for my friendship. He told me that on days when I didn’t come by or he didn’t get a chance to do a lesson with the young man he often tutored, going home to sleep in his abandoned hotel was a terribly difficult and lonely task. I don’t say this to toot my own horn, as I spent far less time with him than I really should have, but it was such an eye opening experience for me. Ralph’s words captured the need for every human heart to love and feel loved by others. Even if that is taking 10 minutes out of your day to have a conversation with them and show them that you believe they are something more than a street urchin, that they are a child of God just as we all are, and that we are united through our love for him and one another by his sacrifice and love for us. Ralph told me of his love for God that night (something we hadn’t spoke much of before). It was really a pretty neat moment to have three individuals from different walks of life united, a humbled rich white do-gooder (we’ll generalize my summer internship a bit), a proud homeless war veteran, and a poor Dominican boy sitting at a park bench together. After saying our goodbyes I got up to leave.

I began to walk away and Ralph timidly asked, “Can I have your shirt?” He said it as if he were half-joking, maybe to cover any embarrassment he felt from the request.

“You want it?” I replied.

“Well…. I don’t want you to have to go home without a shirt on!” Lucky for Ralph I had my sweaty wrinkled T from the gym in my bag. I happily pulled of my shirt and gave it to a beaming Ralph and as I began to walk away pulling my soggy work-out shirt over my shoulders I heard him say to the Dominican boy, “Tu ves? El saco la camiseta de su espalda para mi” You see that? He took the shirt off of his back, for me.